Take My Ad, Please
Don Park has a few comments on Yahoo!'s advertising service. I put in an application for eighty-twenty.net to the publisher network a while ago, and I seem to remember it being about the same as signing up for AdSense. The difference is that Google turned around my AdSense application in a day or two, while it took Yahoo! weeks to send an indistinct reply that I think said "rejected". By Don's description, I'm not missing much anyway.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
To The Last Man
I've been reading To The Last Man, Jeff Shaara's latest work of historical fiction. It's a strange book. He starts off with an anonymous soldier in the trenches of the Western Front, but then the focus switches to the air war. In a way, it's interesting - according to Shaara's telling, the air war was much more developed than I thought. I'd thought it was a few biplanes on scouting missions, but he tells of 2 & 3 seat bombers, a massive (failed) bombing raid on the Mauser munitions works, and single planes making strafing runs that would send entire battalions of infantry into a panic. So that much has been enlightening.
Still, when Shaara does touch on the ground war, it's from the perspective of the general officers, while the air war is given from the perspective of the flyers themselves. I'm not sure what to make of that take. Maybe it does lend to a more high-level feel, and maybe it's just Shaara's style - he cut his teeth on the 1st and 3rd books of the Civil War series, which was almost entirely from the perspective of generals, and his Mexican War novel was told mostly from the perspective of those same Civil War generals, who were junior officers at the time.