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From the mouths of babes

One of neighbors is named Betty. The children address her as Mrs. Betty. Recently Evan started calling her Mrs. Betsy. I would correct him placing emphasis on the second T.

Evan, 4 years old: "Mrs. Bet see."
Me: "Say Bet-T"

This Betsy-Betty back and forth has gone on for weeks. So Evan has taken to really adding pause and emphasis to the second part of her name "Mrs. Bet TEA." Today I understand why.

Evan: "Noah won’t take me to Mrs. Bet Tea’s house."
Noah, 13 years old: "Evan, it’s Bet SEE."
Me: "No Noah. It’s Betty. Bet TEA."
Noah: "Oh."

The boys leave to visit with our neighbor and I chuckle having one more mystery in my life solved. They promptly return.

Evan: "Noah still won’t take me to Mrs. Bet TEA’s house."
Noah: "Mrs. Bet SEE isn’t home."

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Becoming a Google Adwords Professional

In 2000 or 2001, I was working with a company that needed an advertisement campaign manager. I stayed awake for fours days straight drinking gallons of coffee and taking only power naps to write an ad campaign manager from scratch using ColdFusion and MS SQL. This was before the days of keywords so instead ads were organized by categories. Each ad could be categorized and subcategorized. Campaigns could be scheduled for date ranges with multiple ads meeting IAB industry standards and the particular place on the page could be dynamically specified. Personally, I was pretty proud of the end product and impressed with how it turned out for being built so rapidly.

The experience of writing an ad campaign manager helped me appreciate the complexity of such an endeavor but nothing prepared me for the awe inspiring product that is Google Adwords! Prior to yesterday, I thought Google Adwords was just the name Google used for selling ads that appeared on sites of publishers using Google’s Adsense and in search results. Google’s Adwords is such a complex product that they offer a certification exam for people wanting to become Google Advertising Professionals. I spent yesterday reading, reading, and reading, and watching video after video after video to learn as much about running efficient campaigns as possible. There is definitely an art to writing an effective Adwords campaign and not wasting money.

I was going to give an overview of what I learned yesterday but I have so much more to learn and Les Jones has does an excellent job already. Read Les Jones’ post My quick advice on getting the most from Google Adwords.

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Summer is officially over

I had my first carpool to school today. School officially starts on Monday with a half day. But today the high schooler had class pictures. She and her best friend are on the outs because of a boy. Isn’t that always the reason? So it appears that I’ll be driving to the high school everyday. (Actually a friend of ours works at the school and has offered to do some carpooling.) Today was a dry run.

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WordPress 2.8.3 broken! Upgrade to 2.8.4 immediately!

In case you missed it, WordPress 2.8.3 has a programming error which allows anyone to reset your administrative password and takeover your WordPress blog. With administrative access, the hacker could destroy your content, lock you out, and repurpose your website for wrong doing, spamming, pornography, slander, or whatever they want. Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 immediately! Learn more at darknet.org.uk.

This vulnerability could be prevented by securing the /wp-admin directory.

BlogSecurity has recommended before that the /wp-admin/* directory should be password protected or restricted to IP address. This would mitigate this problem. See our advisory here for details. [Source, BlogSecurity, WordPress <= 2.8.3 Reset Admin Password Vulnerability]

See details of the exploit at milw0rm.