Evolving Thoughts

The begging bowl

begging.jpg A few eagle eyed readers will note that I have added a “Donate” button in the sidebar, and not content with that shameless plug for grift, a “Donate” page as well in the tabs.

When I was at Seed’s Scienceblogs, I was on easy street. They paid for all the technical things, and I got blogging fees based on the 16 people who repeatedly clicked on my blog’s links, via advertising. All that largesse is now gone, and I have to pay for services, like being able to edit the CSS and have a domain name, out of my own pocket. Moreover, I pay for my blogging software, and related tools.

Now in earlier days, when I had a relatively high paying job, I absorbed all this myself, but I am now a postdoctoral researcher, and I have the care and feeding of a teenage son, so I am routinely strapped for cash (like, every fortnight). So please forgive the Workhouse Poor routine, and if you find it useful to read me, think about a donation from time to time. Even more appreciated would be an actual donation.

Any money I get over and above these needs I will donate to worthy causes, including a friend who lives even more on the breadline than I, and has major medical expenses, and yet who blogs extensively on science. If you have a charity in mind for the surplus, nominate it when you donate.

Sorry for the advertising and mundane fiscal stuff. I won’t do a televangelist schtick and routinely ask for money, I promise (although God has said that if you don’t donate $1 million by Friday, He’ll take me to my reward!).

Administrative

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We’re back!

Thanks to the generosity of three donors – Neil, James and Ben – I have enough to pay the rent on this place. Now I have to do some writing. Problem is I’m time poor, so I thought I’d write up some of my lecture notes as posts. Expect some…

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Comments (21)

  1. You reward, presumably, being to be forced to sit in the middle of the Barmy army as England reclaim the Ashes 5-0 (I know you don’t care: this is a particularly cruel god we’re dealing with).

  2. Methinks you cannot distinguish Heaven from Hell; or was that the point?

  3. The salary of a postdoc in the sciences is slightly better than that of a postdoc in the humanities*. Still, you will have to excuse me for just thinking about donating for now.

    *Yeah, yeah I know. I did read your post about the humanities being all the not-other-properly-defined-sciences.

  4. OK, a restriction. No postdoc, of any discipline, or less, should even think about donating me money, unless they are independently wealthy.

  6. “Independent” =df “No parents, guardians or partners will object”

    “Wealthy” =df “Can afford a recent model car”

  7. Independent:
    Pr(Snowflake & Thorny C) = Pr(Snowflake) Pr(Thorny C) . (more importantly, I think the hazards are multiplicative too)

    Wealthy (with slight abuse of notation):
    Snowflake = E(Snowflake)
    Thorny C = E(Thorny C)
    (on the basis that anyone wealthy is keeping their money)

  8. Ok I’ll donate, but I’d like any overage to go to homeless philosophers – you know, the Heraclitus types that reside on mountain tops or in caves, living off berries, goats milk, and vegemite, who ponder the nature of life, the universe, and everything, and who look like the guy who introduces monty python shows.

  9. What are your approximate costs for putting up this website, and how much of that are you considering to have defrayed by judicious use of that time-honored instrument, the begging bowl? I would seriously like to know.

  10. Domain and CSS costs are around $40 per year. Software around $150 per year. The rest is either book purchasing (or was, when I was at Seed) or donated to my penurious friend. There are other costs and fees that pop up from time to time.

  11. I pay about $12 US for my domain, and use a free theme for each of my blogs. Webspace comes in at $5 US per month. Somebody needs to do a little comparison shopping.

  12. I appreciate the caveat, because I fall into the “or less” category by a long shot and I am far from independently wealthy – read; I’m largely surviving by going into debt…I’ve actually considered setting up a tip jar myself, to cover mounting Amazon bills and fund getting together with the girlfriend, who lives a million miles away. I was considering setting it up to fund getting my eldest a laptop (nothing new – something to put linux on), but have suddenly been offered several (well four) computers, so I think we’ll be all set between them.

    I would suggest a “Will Humanize for Tips” type of a sign…

  13. I’m a little curious as to how your blogging software costs money – I see you are using wordpress, which is free both on the wordpress site and installed on your own server. Some proprietary wordpress themes can cost money – but most of those are also free. What blogging software are you talking about? Perhaps we can find you a way to eliminate those costs – that’s more sustainable than donations!

    I would consider donating money but I’m a grad student – money should flow in the other direction! I second the notion for “Will Humanize for $$” banner – I might just steal that idea.

  14. For the aussies here, can we avoid paypal (in USD) and pay direct to your bank account? If yes, put your BSB&account number on the donate page (or email me)

  15. From what I can tell, the Cutline theme is also free. Many hosting packages, which include annual domain registration costs, will typically run ya $5 or less per month. Throw in some affiliate and link advertising on your sidebar, sell some t-shirts and coffee cups through CafePress, and you can actually make a little money (emphasis on “little”). Besides, isn’t WordPress pretty much point and click content management software?

    Also, what do you mean by CSS costs? I’m assuming your referring to Cascading Style Sheets. There’s no cost to editing CSS code, especially if you’re using a free WordPress theme. I’m guessing this cost refers to the premium support offered by the theme designers.

    In short, you shouldn’t be paying for theme support. If you don’t have the time to learn simple HTML and CSS coding yourself (it’s remarkably easy), the free alternatives out there are endless and quite good. No one with a personal blog should be paying for site design or content management software.

  17. Or, you could go to ET1 and see what was possible there. I chose WordPress for a couple of reasons, one of which is that it is better for the sorts of things I want to do. I also have some future plans that don’t work well at Blogger.

    Also, not all my blog costs are related to my blog host; there are also some rather large costs for my ISP (in Australia, internet connections are way more expensive than in the US or UK, and less reliable). So if I want to access the sorts of things that require downloads (e.g., podcasts and vodcasts), documents, etc., that I blog on, I need to cover those costs too, and they are monthly (I just got hit with a major bill). I do not use the university’s internet because that is contrary to the terms of use I signed when I was employed. And so on.

    Jude, to edit the CSS at WordPress, you need to pay.

  18. Last time I was in Australia, I was rather surprised by the costs of internet access, and also by the fact that the connections seemed to have fairly limited covered usage, with a fairly steep price when exceeded.

    I thought it might just be in WA, but I guess it’s like that all over Australia

  19. Happy to toss some coins your way. If you run over, please retain my $ for a night out on the town with your mates, rather than donating it.

    Will your book be made available in ebook format anytime soon? I would definitely buy it if that were the case.

    1. Many thanks. I don’t know if there are plans to make it an eBook. UCP is a pretty traditional academic publisher, I think.

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