A Month of Flattring

Image representing Flattr as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

I’ve been using Flattr for just over a month now.  If you haven’t heard of Flattr yet, it’s a social micropayment system – an easy way to show people you appreciate their work. There’s no form to fill out or credit card info to enter every time you want to donate a few cents – it’s as easy as the Facebook “Like” button.  In my first month using Flattr, I spent about $2.75 and made 17 cents.  Considering my income, $2.75 is a very reasonable amount for me to spend in a month supporting content.

17 cents isn’t a lot of money, but it’s a heck of a lot more than I ever made in a month with google ads, and a Flattr button is far less annoying than text ads urging you to buy lawn products or diet pills.  I like participating in a system that directly supports content creators and it’s good for my ego when people Flattr my posts (or comment, for that matter). Plus, you’ve got to wonder how boring your site is if text ads from the Discovery Institute are more appealing than your content.  Right now, I’m going to use my Flattr earnings to pay to Flattr other people’s content, but if I’m lucky, I might start making enough to help pay for hosting this blog, too!

I would say that the only downside to using Flattr right now is that it hasn’t been widely adopted yet in the US.  In my ideal world, all the musicians, authors, bloggers, and news sites I read would have Flattr buttons, but so far, most of the content I’ve Flattred I’ve found through the Flattr site.

Richer than you think

Last year I made about $14,000.  More than half of that went to rent and student loan payments.  Sometimes I feel pretty darn poor.  But I’ve never made a late payment and I’ve never gone hungry (though I don’t think I can ever eat ramen again).

As poor as I sometimes feel, my income is higher than 87% of incomes in the world (of course, my rent probably is, too). That statistic is from this interesting site via Mike’s blog.

I’m the 747,214,470 richest person on earth!


Discover how rich you are! >>

You enter your yearly income and it tells you how rich you are compared to everyone else on Earth.  The best part is that while you’re feeling comparatively rich, the site outlines a few cool projects by CARE and shows how far even a small donation goes.

Living with roommates

From Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac:

They shut off our phone service so we all had to sit down and thrash out about three months’ worth of unpaid long-distance bills.  In the middle of a spirited discussion of who had made seven consecutive calls to Santa Cruz at three in the morning, Ike got up and announced that he was moving out.  He was tired of the plumbing problems he said, and the weird messages on the answering machine, and Roscommon had come in while he was at work and torn down the Mel King campaign poster on our front balcony.  That was okay.  Ike was a shitty gardener anyway and he complained when I ran my model trains after bedtime. Tess and Laurie, the lesbian carpenters, announced that they liked the kitchen better after we’d untrashed it and cleaned it up, so why not try to keep it that way?  I pointed out that I had bought three new badminton birdies before I left for Buffalo and now they were all gone.  Should we call this place a “co-op” or a “commune”? How about calling it a “house”? Who had scrubbed the Teflon off the big frying pan?  Since Tess had weeded the garden, how many tomatoes did she get?  Whose hair predominated in the shower drain – the women’s since they had more, or the men’s, since they were losing more?  Was it okay to pour bacon grease down the drains if you ran hot water at the same time? Could bottles with metal rings on the necks be put in the recycling box? Should we buy a cord of firewood? Maple or pine?  Did we agree that the people next door were abusing their children? Physically or just psychologically? Was boric acid roach powder a bioaccumulative toxin?  Where was the bicycle-tire pump, and was it okay to take it on an overnight trip? Whose turn was it to scrub the green crap out from between the tiles in the bathroom?

Patience with the patient

You’re probably all so sick of bird pictures that you’ve stopped reading my blog, but if you’re still hanging around, I promise it’ll get better.

I’ve had a lot (A LOT) of migraines lately, which makes it hard to sit up, let alone write a real blog post.  I’m also pretty busy right now:  I’m part of several new projects at work and am applying to grad school and for funding.

As busy I am now, I tend to do more blogging right when things are due, when I’m really completely overwhelmed with work.  So, once I get busy enough, I’ll start procrastinating with some substantive posts.  Looking at my list of terrifying deadlines, you should only have to wait about a week.