Taking a small dip into their enormous, $24 billion dollar bag of money, Google Inc. helped assure another year of advertisement-free service for online reference tool Wikipedia. A gift of $2 million from the world’s most profitable Internet company has helped push Wikimedia Foundation – a non-profit group – past their revenue target of $10.6 million.

The popular online encyclopedia has more than 14 million entries in 270 languages. The information pages are written and edited by an estimated 100,000 contributors, all of them unpaid. Wikimedia Foundation does maintain a paid staff of around 30 people, and that cost, along with operational budgets, makes up the majority of their expenses. Most of its funding comes through private donations.

Over 240,000 individuals have donated to Wikipedia this year, most in small sums. Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar contributed an additional $2 million six months ago through an investment arm.

Wikipedia is often criticized for inaccuracies on their information pages, due to the nature of the service. Any reader can enter and edit information on nearly any of the pages, leading to frequent mistakes and intentional defacing. “We face a number of challenges in our service model, but we believe in the free nature of the Internet,” said an unidentified Wikipedia spokesperson. “Besides, Mark Garlick likes boys and bon jovi rules bon jovi rules bon jovi rules.”

Google founder Sergey Brin proclaimed Wikipedia as “one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet.” The philanthropic donation will cost Google nearly 0.0083% of the cash they had available at the end of December 2009.

(via The Associated Press)

The Super Bowl is a large and multi-faceted event that will almost certainly be the largest viewing audience for a single television program this year.  While it is ostensibly the NFL’s championship game, the other items surrounding it bring in the larger audience, including the pre-game ceremonies, the celebrity singing the national anthem (this year: Carrie Underwood), the halftime micro-concert (this year: The Who), and, of course, the commercials.  Advertising for the Super Bowl is always a hot topic, and a common denominator to bring non-sports fans to the viewing party.  As a case in point, at my family event we have two determined non-sports fans in attendance who ignore the game as best they can, and tune in when the commercials start.

For the 2010 game, the estimated cost was $3.01 million per 30 second spot for advertisers.  Tech companies are among the best positioned and least affected by the global recession (although no market is truly recession-proof this time around), so I was anticipating quite a few tech companies to spend money.  The Super Bowl and its unbelievable global stage is a world-class opportunity for large companies to make a splash.  In a related note, it was reported that advertising took up 48 minutes of the Super Bowl broadcast, which was a new record.

With that in mind, here are the tech (or somewhat tech) commercials and some thoughts on them:

The Boostmobile Shuffle — The first real tech commercial of the Super Bowl was a spoof of the original Super Bowl Shuffle, which was performed a quarter of a century ago by the 1985 Chicago Bears.  The Shuffle has not exactly aged well, so I have no idea why Boostmobile thought it had cultural currency with today’s audience, besides some sort of kitsch factor.  While I loved the original Super bowl Shuffle, I was also 9 years old at the time and still eating my boogers.  It is interesting what 25 years of amassed debt will do to a person’s willingness to sell out, although I don’t think that original team had much personal shame to begin with.  This is not a strong beginning for tech ads; I had a hard time not typing the words “utterly horrifying.” Continue reading “Review: Tech Commercials from the Super Bowl” →

Based on the available evidence, it seems that I like to blog about once a year. I cannot claim greater frequency. After all, it was around this time in 2008 that I last posted something, so if that theory is correct, it is now time to dust off the old Deep Forest Outpost and kick around a few thoughts.

The sad truth, though, is that I have a growing collection of unfinished posts that either outlived their usefulness/timeliness, or in which I lost interest because they were not that interesting to begin with. It surprises me that I do not blog more often, because I am always fascinated by my own observations and I never fail to laugh at my own jokes. I am an ideal audience for myself.

I hope this post manages to make it all the way to the internet this time, because I do want to get back to a more regular blog schedule. I spent some time earlier this year writing most of a sizable recap of our family vacation to Walt Disney World, but that took place about nine months ago, and so the statute-of-limitations has probably run out. More recently I have been working on an extensive chronicle of my recent trip to Africa as a representative of ZAGG. While I still plan on posting that soon, in multiple parts, I wanted to get something into the digital ether before it really did go past a year between postings for me.

So I decided to repeat an idea I used about a year and a half ago, and post one of my current music playlists with some notes about each of the songs. I hope to get to the end of this before any of my standard distractions (watching television, working on my book, surfing the internet, gaming, etc.) break in. I do hope it is interesting to someone besides me; but believe me, I already love it. Continue reading “Why I Am A Fan of Gordon Lightfoot, and Other Playlist Revelations” →

WARNING: SPORTS NERD POST (links to rebuttals from BYU fans are at the bottom)

With the annual rivalry battle between the University of Utah and Brigham Young University just days away, I thought it would be a perfect time to post a collection of evidence why Utah is more fun to follow than BYU.  My initial idea was to write this a few weeks ago, so fellow bloggers who are BYU fans could post replies. Unfortunately, delays-upon-delays meant that now I only have a few days before the game, which leaves a very small window for a BYU response.  If no one is able to, then I suppose Utah wins by default.  I mean, they would win anyway, but nobody likes to see a forfeit from the other team.

The big problem I encountered when compiling this list is that I enjoy watching BYU football, as well.  I have followed Utah all of my sports life, which began back when it was less of a rivalry and more of a yearly massacre at the hands of the Cougars.  After the tables began to balance and my sports fan tastes matured a bit (so to speak – people rarely use the terms “sports fan” and “mature” in the same sentence) I curiously found myself both watching and enjoying BYU football.  In fact, I even considered myself a legitimate fan of both teams for a while, which was a difficult balancing act, and could not be sustained for long.

Now I am firmly entrenched in the Utah camp, and although I looked over the fence for a while, I realize now that I never really left.  Remnants of my dual identity remain, and although I may draw ridicule from other fans for trying to follow two rival teams, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Cougars.  Sometimes it’s a very small spot, but it is there.

With that out of the way, allow me to move on to the primary arguments:

Continue reading “A Few Reasons Why I Would Rather be a Utah Fan…” →

Our original intent for this blog makeover was to have it double as a sort of travelogue for our various adventures, but things haven’t quite worked out that way yet.  I imagine we will try to address that shortcoming soon, perhaps as a potential New Year’s Resolution (which, at the rate of our posting, could very well be the next entry after this), but the result of our laxity is there are now a lot of things I want to write about.  This tends to be an early indication of a blog-disaster for me, because of my tendency to be a bit bombastic.

For example, not long ago I set out to post a few thoughts and opinions following the conclusion of the 2008 Summer Olympics.  I started by outlining my 20 favorite things about the games, followed by my 10 least favorite.  Then, I made a third section of events which I would like to see more in the future, followed by those I felt were over-indulged.

I didn’t think the project was overly ambitious in the beginning, but I began to reconsider after I found myself 5,000 words into it and only halfway through the first outlined section.  I could have pressed on and finished it, but who would ever take the time to read something like that?  It sits in my files waiting for further enlightenment, which will almost certainly never come.

Continue reading “An Overdue Update” →

Our posts to this blog are seasonally sporadic, by which I mean they are sporadic in the summer, winter, spring and fall. We are trying to be more frequent in our efforts, but we are also both busy enough that it is assigned a much lower priority than we may otherwise like. Besides, it’s not like anyone we know relies on this blog as a source of news about us. I was going to use this post as an opportunity to write about the new Batman movie, but an event in our lives has trumped all else, and it’s only proper for me to describe that, instead.

The story actually starts in 2005 when Sasha, our pet dog (and child substitute), tore the anterior cruciate ligament on her left rear leg as she was running in from the backyard. I watched it happen: she stepped in a gopher hole, let out a little yip, and came hobbling toward me on three legs; her ears were back in pain and worry. That misstep led to a visit to the vet, followed by X-rays, surgery, hiding antibiotics in treats, and weeks of recovery. We spent more than a few worried hours, laughed a bit, cried a bit (figuratively speaking – I don’t remember shedding actual tears, and it’s safe to say that if I didn’t, The Wandering Moose didn’t either), and lightened our bank account. It felt like a long and frustrating experience, although ultimately everything worked out fine and Sasha made a complete recovery. She even grew back all the fur on her hindquarters after a year or so, which was nice because they shaved her entire leg and hip for the surgery, leaving a bare turkey-leg shaped patch of skin. T.W. Moose had been very pessimistic about total regrowth ever happening, but it did.

Continue reading “The Story of Poor Sasha” →

I would like to apologize in advance for this post, which is very long. I hope to trim down the word count in future trip reports, or perhaps break it up into days, but I am leaving this one as is – in spite of certain warnings I have received about nobody wanting to read long posts. Thank you, and again, I’m sorry.

One of the primary reasons The Wandering Moose and I brought this blog back to life was to post trip reports of our vacations. We are big fans of travel, although in our current financial situation that means we are big fans of watching the Travel Channel. I would love to go with T.W. Moose on a historic and cultural tour of northern Europe, or take a multi-month Camera Safari through as much of Africa as possible (See our last post for a more detailed breakdown). However, we are still on a young, married couple’s mac-and-cheese budget, so instead we plan scenic road trips through Central Utah on our way to visit her dad (don’t laugh – it’s a blast and we have done it three years running now). This is why two of our current favorite places are within a reasonable distance to our home in Kearns, Utah; and relatively low-cost.

The two destinations in question are Yellowstone National Park and Disneyland. I am not sure which of the two is my very favorite, although I have pondered the question often. At the moment I would say Yellowstone is at the top of my list, although it is close. I cannot even begin to guess for T.W. Moose (her favorite may be Hawaii, actually), but I know she is also a fan of both.

Continue reading “Trip Report: Yellowstone National Park – June 5-8, 2008” →

The Wandering Moose and I have decided to try a new idea in posting to the DFO. We have noted that some of our favorite conversations take place in e-mail we send each other, and thought that could be a possible medium for interesting, post-able discussion. To that end, we are going to pick a subject and send some thoughts back and forth during the day, and then set it up here once we decide to be done. I hope this will turn out to be fun and thought-provoking, but it stands a good chance of being boring for anyone but the two of us. With that note of disclaimer, here is our first post.

T.L.Bear – Hello, my dear! I hope everything is going well with you, and that you are having a good day at work. I almost started this with “Hello, my deer” because the moose is a member of the deer family, and because I like lame jokes. But instead I will just tell you about how I almost did that, which probably isn’t the best idea either. So, I will just move on.

Continue reading “E-mail Post: Favorite Vacation Destinations” →