I only feel rich enough to donate £5 to the Athiest Bus Campaign, but having endured blanket Alpha Course advertising on buses when I lived in London I think it’s £5 well spent.
Haviing set a fund raising target of £5500, but having raised over £100,000 at the time of writing, I hope it’s enough to take a sustained campaign nation wide.
Last weekend I spent quite a bit of time playing Pain on the PS3, a game that awards points for the sheer abuse endured by a character you launch via a catapult into fanciful environments, such as the recently released “abusement park” add-on. Coincidentally, I also hurt my neck on the Saturday morning – trying to catch a falling bottle of shampoo in the shower and wrenching my neck in the process.
My neck didn’t hurt much at the time, and I thought I’d sooth it away by spending some quality time on my mum’s massage chair in the conservatory that night, but by the Sunday it was really sore and I was having to fend off the pain with some Anadin I found in the kitchen cupboard.
Then Monday night brought the perfect storm of escalating severity, both in neck pain and some tooth ache that crept up on me. It’s a long time since I’ve been in that kind of agony – the pain following my knee operation was a walk in the park in comparison. I got about two hours of sleep max and ended up taking my first day off on sick leave this year on Tuesday because I was so exhausted.
For about a year and a half I’ve had Google Adsense adverts up on WipEoutZone to try and generate some revenue. Not a killing, of course, just enough to help pay for the forums and hosting.
The traffic for the site ebbs and flows. If there’s a new WipEout game on the way or one just launched, then it swells and there’s an influx of new visitors. At other times the virtual tumbleweeds have been rolling down the virtual streets of what becomes a ghost town.
So, with that in mind it didn’t really bother me what the adverts made – every little helps and I was hardly going to retire on the profit. So, Google Adsense was trucking away for most of 2007, and then in early 2008 I get an email from some company who want to “put our ads on your site.”
Say wha’?