Last year, I took some of the money I made from running this website and bought myself a dslr camera off of Amazon. It was the most money I had ever spent on anything for myself1. I couldn’t really say why I decided to buy a camera out of the blue, but I think I have a better grasp on the reasons now. First of all, I’ve always been sort of interested in photography and optics. I just liked taking pictures of stuff, even if it was with my pinhole cell phone camera or the webcam on my laptop. I knew a lot more about optical physics and lenses than most kids my age too. In college, I posted a lot of photos of architecture at Berkeley and things I saw at department stores on my status update blog. And before… more →

Whew. It’s actually been a long time since I wrote anything on this blog. The last two posts I published were actually from other places, and I just posted them here because I thought they would fit. There are a couple of reasons why I haven’t written anything on RogerHub for a while: Ever since my site started tons of traffic, I’ve been more careful about what I publish on my home page, which receives around 5% of that traffic as collateral damage. Who knew that college actually keeps you busy? I’ve created my new programming blog, and it’s so much easier to write about computer things. Once in a while, I look back on the history of posts on this blog. It started with really terrible software reviews, and then I started writing about the less-personal aspects of my life with a lot of… more →

There has been some pretty shocking stuff happening in the realm of online advertising recently. By recently, I mean anywhere from just this week to a year and a half ago. Let’s revisit some of them: A brief recap of this year in advertising We saw the introduction of the Do Not Track HTTP Header, which at the time of writing hasn’t yet moved from its initial draft state. The draft proposes a new header, sent with every request, that would enable a user to opt-out of all Internet tracking. If adopted, it would greatly hinder the effectiveness of targeted ads. Not long after the draft was announced, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 10 would send the DNT header by default as part of their privacy-oriented image. This led to a two week ad-tracking arms race between IE 10 and various websites and… more →