Bizarre Google Adsense Ads

I like to think that I am pretty experienced with contextual advertising by now. Every once in a while, I see a "relevant" text ad that just blows my mind though. When viewing the Kermit Watches 2girls1cup video, I noticed the following text ad on the right:

Why God?

What does Kermit the Frog have to do with the 2007 Ford Escape Hybrid SUV? What kind of ridiculous keywords is Ford's web marketing division bidding on if they are paying for clicks to a Kermit The Frog link? Really, what kind of ROI could that possibly yield?

Mind boggling really.

Update 12/30/07:

Apparently Ford has some sort of Kermit the Frog campaign going for their new hybrids. Still a questionable bid for blind Kermit the Frog keywords that have nothing to do with cars.

YouTube Down

YouTube has been reportedly down for over 30 minutes, as of 11-25-07 at 12:55pm EST, with the following error message:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

This seems to be affecting all YouTube sites including:

• UK YouTube (uk.youtube.com)
• CA YouTube (ca.youtube.com)
• YouTube Blog (youtube.com/blog)

This is not the first time YouTube has gone down for an extended period of time. It experienced over 5 hours of downtime in August of 2006, with little explanation from the company.

More details to follow as they become available.

Update:

• As of 1:20pm EST, YouTube is back up. No word yet on the cause of the outage.
• On 11/29/2007 YouTube was again inexplicably down with the same error message. If you can't take the traffic, get off the highway.
  

Use Blackberry 8800 as USB Dial Up Modem

After wanting to do this for a long time, I finally was able to get my Blackberry 8800 to work as a USB modem for my laptop. This means you can get internet on your laptop/desktop wherever you get ATT/Cingular Service. I got it to work on Vista, but the instructions below are for XP. Vista basically has the exact same setup instructions though. It was confusing at first, but below I wrote out instructions that even a CHILD could follow.

You need the following before we begin:

• Blackberry 8800 (Most likely will work with any ATT/Cingular phone)
  
• AT&T Wireless Service with unlimited data plan (unless you like paying fees)
• USB connector cable

Okay, you're ready to begin:

1. If you have not already, download and install the Blackberry Desktop Software.
2. Go to the Windows Device manager. Quickest way: Start > Run > devmgmt.msc
   
3. Click + button next to Modems, double click "Standard Modem"
4. Click the Advanced tab
5. Enter this into the empty box (no leading space): AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","wap.cingular"
   
6. Hit Okay, and close device manager.
7. Go to network connections. Quickest way: Start > Run >
   Paste in the following line and hit enter:
   explorer.exe ::{7007ACC7-3202-11D1-AAD2-00805FC1270E}
8. Click Create a new connection on the left, and follow these steps:
1. Welcome to ... Wizard --> Next
   
2. [Select] Connect to internet --> Next
3. [Select] Set up my connection manually --> Next
4. [Select] Connect using a dial-up modem
5. Type in a connection name of your choice (example: ATT dialup) --> Next
   
6. Enter this as the phone number: *99***1# --> Next
7. Enter user name (ALL CAPS): ISP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
8. Enter and confirm password (ALL CAPS): CINGULAR1 --> Next/Finish
   
9. Open the desktop manager and plug in your Blackberry via the USB cable. Make sure it detects the Blackberry as connected.
10. Go back to your network connections window (step 7), and double click the new ATT Dialup icon.
11. Your password, username, and dialup number should already be saved. Just click "Dial"

This worked for me on the first try. It will not incur extra charges to your Blackberry plan on AT&T as long as you have the unlimited data plan.

What kind of speed will you get with this? According to my bandwidth test, not much. It's still very useful to check e-mail and do light web surfing. The speed clocked in at around 78Kbps which is slightly faster than a 56k modem.. ick.

Updates:

• Thanks to Ken Hanscom for further improving these instructions, and linking back to me. I will be making a revision to my instructions per his improvements after testing.