Fun with HTML
by Ron Pereira on June 5th, 2007I apologize if anyone had issues with my blog this evening. I had jacked up some HTML real good. Luckily I saved it all before hacking it up into pieces.
All should be fine now… and you may notice the nice little eBay auction ads (focused in on the Lean and Six Sigma niche) in the lower right hand side of the page. I did this all by myself… aren’t you proud?
Oh, and for every thing you buy our friend Pete over at shmula gets a free soda from his new eBay boss. Kidding. I think. I am kidding right Pete? 
Careful with that HTML… it bites you know. We are better off studying control charts anyhow.
Do we really need a “landscape irrigation trencher” on eBay?
Hi Anonymous, thanks for the comment. I never thought of it as a landscape irrigation trencher. I am working out the details with some sponsors and will likely replace the eBay ads with small company logos. Trust me I am not blogging for the money… if that were the case I would go back to the Maid Rite Sandwich shop where I made $3.35/hour… which is tons more than my blogging income! I have spent several hundred dollars on this sites design and also pay for monthly hosting. My goal is to break even with any income I get. I might recommend you subscribe to the blog via RSS (see top right hand side of the blog). This way all you will see are the posts. Thanks for the comment and for stopping by!
Soda — it’s free already!
There was an eBay ad for a trencher. I was questioning the relevance of that ad, that’s all. I don’t care if you have ads, it just seemed like a silly choice eBay made.
Ahhh! OK, I see what you mean now. I keep seeing some calipers and a $4.99 control chart eBook. I am not so sure about these ebay ads. Perhaps they need a good Lean Six Sigma guru to optimize the system. Paging Mr. shmula…
hmmm, I’m pretty sure those ads are not contextually rendered but, rather, rendered based on some random seed or by a forced key-word approach. In either case that I mention, context is not considered and the ads are not relevant.
For example, there is an area in natural language processing called “word-sense disambiguation.” In that problem space, we attempt to teach a system to understand the difference between “I fish for bass” and “I play the bass.” In both sentences, the context is different, but the word “bass” is used and is spelled the same. A system has a very difficult time understanding and digesting context.
Long story short: I don’t think those ads are contextual.