I got to thinking about the structure of storage on hard drives: bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and so on,

How does that compare to time? Specifically seconds, comparing them to bytes. How long is a kilosecond, a megasecond, a gigasecond…? you get the idea. Each jump is achieved by multiplying it by 1024 (not one thousand).

My rough calculations:

One kilosecond (1,024 seconds) works out to 17 minutes and 4 seconds (17:04)

One megasecond (1,048,576 seconds) is 12 days, 3 hours, 16 minutes, and 15 seconds (12:03:16:15)

(In the calculations below I’m figuring that a year is roughly 365.25 days. Your mileage may vary.)

One gigasecond (1,073,741,824 seconds) is 85 years, 22 days, 14 hours, 21 minutes and 22 seconds. (85:22:14:21:22).

And one terasecond (1,099,581,627,776 seconds) is 34,843 years, 233 days, 10 hours, 21 minutes and 2 seconds (more or less).

I leave it to you to figure out exactly how long a petasecond is, but it’s going to be somewhere close to 35,679,232 years.

Well, those figures don’t jive with what they’ve calculated here: Time Measurement but I think they are using 1000, not 1024 as the multiplier.

Which seems like cheating.

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After living on a ranch in the middle of nowhere for 17 years, in the “banana belt” of warm southern Oregon, where all the daffodils comply with some genetic directive to always bloom on Valentines day, it is mildly distressing that the daffodils in our yard here near Seattle have different inherent programming. These flowers all bloom around now–three weeks “late.”

I am somewhat envious of my neighbor (only two houses away) who must have planted some version of daffodils that bloom early, because HER daffodils bloom in sync with the ones down in Oregon.

To the best of my knowledge, there’s no Biblical injuction saying, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s flowers.”

In any event, I’m glad to see these in my yard.

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Today we’re enjoying about six inches of snow on the ground here in the Seattle area. The dog and I walk a mile every morning, and this morning was no exception; we saw people sledding down the driveways, shoveling out paths through the snow to their mailboxes, and driving three miles an hour down our gentle hills in their all-wheel-drive cars.

So far, we have survived the Corona pandemic without losing anyone we know to it. We’re hoping the lockdowns will go away soon.

We are trying to do what Walt Disney was famous for saying: “Keep moving forward.”

Our Church is open again (with many restrictions in place), so we are doing a course there, learning to do pastoral counseling.

Meantime we also are working on several websites at once, as usual.

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I write this during the lockdown in place in Washington State, in the midst of the CV-19 pandemic pandemonium.

My wife and I are not watching the news because the raw facts are upsetting enough, without being twisted by hyperventilating, data-distorting, lying, and agenda-driven newscasters. I dislike and distrust the slanted, biased nature of modern “news” and long for the days of Walter Cronkite, who seemed fair and actually presented both sides of a story. In other words, a newsman with integrity.

Instead, we are monitoring various websites for actual statistical data:

• Washington State Dept of Health
• Johns Hopkins
• Covid Trends

We are fortunate in that we are in good health, our family is also, and we are working away from our home office on various projects lined up before the economy was shut down. We are not among the millions of suddenly jobless people without a source of income. Since we have worked from home for decades, that’s nothing new. Going to the store as infrequently as possible, while wearing masks and gloves and staying at least six feet away from others–that’s new and somewhat disturbing.

The next few weeks will be something else…

The church I attend is closed by order of the Governor, along with all other “non-essential” activities. Well, I have some strong disagreement with that categorization. My religion is essential to me.

I am, among many other things, a minister and very active in my church. Our parishioners gain strength from each other and the agreements and activities we share.

While I see the wisdom in social distancing and wearing gloves and masks and not congregating in big groups, legally forcing the closure of an activity that COULD be safely done, just because YOU consider it non-essential, seems intolerant and misguided, as well as heavy-handed. That’s not what happened in Texas, and it’s not what had to happen here.

We are hoping that we can get all get back to some semblance of normal in early May, after the curves have flattened, and before the economy flat-lines too!

This photo shows how the DMV is still able to issue renewal tags for cars, through closed doors. First pay online, then pick them up through the slit between the doors. This photo was from a couple of weeks ago, before masks and gloves became mandatory daily wear.

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Our server migration project — getting dozens of websites off an old server, was completed in August. Ten troublesome websites (running outdated PHP and old xCarts and such) were put onto an intermediate server, a virtual machine running an old version of CentOS. We’ve been updating those sites one at a time. Two have already been updated and moved to our modern Ubuntu 18 server box. The rest will be moving over as the code for them is re-written and updated.

I realized we’ve been hosting some of the same websites for 20 years! We’ve updated them several times over the years, but still…. that’s a long relationship!

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I host about 40 websites; mostly my marketing clients who want a leg up on great hosting without paying exorbitant rates. Our old server box is getting too “long in the tooth” and needs to be replaced. So on top of everything else in my very busy schedule, I now need to move 40 websites from one operating system (WHM/cPanel on Red Hat) over to Plesk on a Ubuntu 18 box. Fortunately the server I lease from Pixelgate.net comes with very knowledgeable and caring technical support. They certainly make it less difficult and provide instruction as well as correctly setting up the machine.

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On my 4k monitor, the default fonts that come up on Netbeans are so small as to be truly microscopic, as in one needs an actual microscope (or at least a magnifying glass) to read them. Netbeans (when you can read it!) is very useful for website development, so this is not a trivial issue.

Here’s a sample:

See those three tiny tabs in the line above “Website-2018”? You’ll have to look closely to recognize that they are even there…. Yeah, I can’t read them either.

Searching Google for various solutions turns up a range of out-of-date solutions for older versions of Netbeans, and some that might work on other operating systems than Windows 10. Such as editing the netbeans.conf file. Tried that, no joy. Tried every other thing I could find in several hours of Google searches and experimentation with the proffered “solutions”.

The thing that finally worked to adjust font sizes in Netbeans running on Windows 10 Pro was changing the call for the actual program netbeans64.exe when it loaded:

0. If Netbeans is running, shut down Netbeans.

1. Make sure you have an icon in your System Tray for Netbeans.

2. Right click on the Netbeans icon in the system tray (usually at bottom of home desktop screen) to get a popup menu

3. Right click on the “Netbeans 8.2” option in that popup menu to get to Properties

4. Click on “Properties”

5. Within Properties, edit the “Target:” field to be something like the following:

"C:\Program Files\NetBeans 8.2\bin\netbeans64.exe" --fontsize 50

6. Click “Apply” and “OK”

7. Start up Netbeans by clicking the Netbeans icon in the System Tray.

From now on, your default Netbean fonts will be about 15 points, like this. There, that’s better!

I believe the –fontsize attribute of 50 equates to 50 pixels, but it may be something else. You can adjust that number to whatever font size is most comfortable for you by making that value a larger or smaller integer.

You’re welcome.

Now if anyone knows how to make the icons bigger….

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Will Critchlow of Distilled.net and Larry Kim of Wordstream recently collaborated on a podcast called 10 SEO Experiments That Will Blow Your Mind. It’s an hour of information that’s well worth watching if you’re tasked with SEO or management of Google AdWords accounts.

I pulled out my takeaways from the video and started sending some of those to my clients via email, but soon realized it would be easier to refer them to this post.

What their experiments proved, and my SEO takeaways. I learned an extraordinary amount from their generous presentation!

• In a title tag, “Ford cars & Ford vehicles” does not equal “Ford cars”. If a page is ranking well, it’s very hard to write better Title Tags than it already has.
  Takeaway: Google is not that good yet at recognizing that synonyms mean the same thing. Leave well enough alone.
  Takeaway: On the other hand, some title tag changes can work overnight to improve rankings.
  I can confirm this from personal experience.
• Adding structured data results in a fast and strong uplift.
  Takeaway: Add structured data (microformats) — it will help rankings.
• Using Javascript to show content? In their test, they disabled JavaScript and no products showed. When they had JavaScript enabled, you saw it correctly in Google’s fetch & render page. Tested removing the reliance on JS – split tested it – with JS disabled, things were worse. Data apparently goes through multiple pipelines within Google’s crawling process. Not every page gets JS fully rendered, so JS content is not always seen by Google. Google is stingy with its rendering time
  Takeaway: Be careful with requiring JavaScript to render important pages; Google does not see/index everything written using JavaScript.
• Removing “SEO Text” – (extra text added at bottom of pages, list of cities, etc., solely for SEO purposes) Sometimes it does help rankings when one removes the SEO text, where low-quality text removed equals better rankings. But they did the same thing on a different site and had it drop.
  Takeaway: Removing crappy “SEO text” is a crap-shoot – you’d think it would help, but it often hurts.
• Does the click-through rate impact your rankings?
  Takeaway: Just beat the average clickthrough rate by 3% in any spot in the rankings, and your page will get a boost in its ranking.
• Rearrange the words in the title and see what happens to your click-through rate (CTR). CTR improvement is very valuable.
  
  Takeaway: How to change clickthrough rate without changing position? Tweak the order of the words.
• Does dwell-time (aka “time on page”) impact rankings? Google does measure time on page. Are they using that info to jigger the search results?
  Takeaway: If you have a high bounce rate, your page won’t stay in the top results. If you have a low bounce rate, it will rise. Improve your content to improve your rankings!
• What prompts Google to pick your content for its “featured snippet”? A third of the time, the snippet comes NOT from the first page. How does Google choose? Having snippable content and a good click-through rate is important to their selection.
  Takeaway: An unusually long “time on page” will sometimes make the “featured snippet” come from that page, regardless of its ranking.
• Is there any relationship between social signals and ranking? Google doesn’t count the shares, but the search listings that have lots of links, also get lots of shares when on Facebook.
  Takeaway: There is correlation but no causation between Number of Facebook shares of a page and how a page ranks.
• Is there any relationship between clickthrough rates and conversion rates?
  Takeaway: The higher the clickthrough rate, the higher the conversion rate will be. The “excitement” carries through.
• How does “time on page” impact SEO rankings? Google does eliminate pages with low time-on-site.
  Takeaway: Increase your clickthrough rate. Increase your time on page. Don’t mess with things that are already ranking well – trying to get higher will likely have negative impact.
  Takeaway: Use one of 9 specific emotions to get people to click: Laughter, amusement, curiosity, awe, anger, fear, joy, empathy, sadness (see 41:14 on video)
  

  Takeaway: Write headline copy from one of 4 specific person types: Bearer of Bad News | The Hero/Villain | The Comedian | The Feel Good Friend.
  

  Takeaway: Use this title Template commonly employed when making viral articles: (See chart at 41:42)
  

  Takeaway: Test a LOT of things. You need to test 10 Different headlines for the same ad.

  Takeaway: Familiarity increases CTR. Connect to prospects earlier in the pipeline. Write about stuff and get it out there to prospects BEFORE you try to stuff them into your pipeline.

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Sometimes my daily email from StumbleUpon really delivers. Today was one of those days! This website is a collection of wonderful phrases and words, for which there is no exact equivalent in English. Those of us for whom English is our native tongue are poorer for not having these words and phrases available to us.

If you’ll do as I do and simply shove aside completely and ignore the psycho-babble with which the pages are laced, there are some fantastic and eye-opening things to be learned here from other cultures.

Reflect for a moment, upon the beauty of the Huron world view captured in their word, “orenda”, meaning “the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate.”

Or how about this word, “desenrascanço”, from Portuguese, meaning “to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation.” I’m formally adopting that word, because it perfectly describes how my wife and I were able to gracefully leave the ranch we lived on for nearly 20 years with our integrity intact, after the other ranch owners decided to take the ranch in a direction we could not support.

The website contains many, many words from other languages worth studying to become familiar with the concepts they have refined and encapsulated, most of which are at least partly missing from English.

To end with an upbeat, there’s “mbuki-mvuki”, a Bantu verb which means “to shed clothes to dance uninhibited.”

And the next time some punster dazzles you with irresponsible word play, label him/her a “pihentagyú”, the Hungarian word literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”. It describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions. If that doesn’t stop them in their tracks, nothing will!

Now that this post is finished I’ve achieved a modest amount of “yuan bei” (from Chinese) – “a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment.”

Here’s wishing you much mbuki-mvuki and yuan bei….

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I don’t usually read C.S. Lewis. I could never get into the whole Narnia universe; to me it seemed a silly premise and to mainly be a vehicle for him to proselytize his religion. It was clear he truly believed, and I respect that and his right to put whatever analogies to Christianity he wanted into his books. I just wasn’t buying what he was selling.

That said, occasionally Lewis expressed some actual truth so clearly that it still resonates with people today. Here is one such quote:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

That quote is usually paired up with this one from G.K. Chesterton (whose writings I’ve never explored.)

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”

And that summarizes my views on the Nanny state, on regulations that prohibit things that might be self-damaging, “for our own good.”

I believe that as adults, we ought to prefer freedom over comfort and safety. I believe adult humans ought to prefer taking individual responsibility for themselves over having someone else be responsible for them.

A slave is separated from control of his own life and the fruits of his labor, and that control is transferred to someone or something else, whether legally or illegally, whether an individual or a group. And the rationale for doing so doesn’t matter in the least. Slavery is the condition where others are completely responsible for one’s welfare, where one has no responsibility for one’s own actions because one is constantly, routinely being told what to do.

Slavery is never something one should choose for oneself. It is so degrading! But many people do.

That’s the viewpoint I’ve had since I was an infant; as a child I was constantly in revolt against the physical constraints and realities of childhood. My poor parents! My Pentecostal father simply could not cope and sent me away, in the end defeated by a 9-year old agnostic who refused to be beaten into his father’s beliefs. My mother could barely cope with my rebellion, although I think she had some understanding of it.

Personally, I could not wait to grow up and become an adult because I detested being the ward of, or being dependent upon, my parents or anyone else for that matter. I would have been on my own by ten years old except that I couldn’t find a paying job at that age; I couldn’t locate anyone who would hire me so I could support myself. I was ready and willing and able to work. The child labor laws were the bane of my existence until I learned to ignore them and lie about my age and claim to be an “emancipated minor” to get a job, once I grew tall enough to be believed.

In previous centuries I would have begged my parents to be apprenticed to a printer (a “printer’s devil”), or taught to be a blacksmith, or a cabin boy on a ship or a runner, or amanuensis, or secretary or scribe, but no! Thanks to laws put in place “for my own good” by “well-meaning people” I was cut off from the means to support myself and become and be independent at a young age. I have no illusions about how idyllic such apprenticeships or jobs were for children; often they were hell, and abuse was rampant. But such was not the rule, it was the exception.

Family lore has it that one of my own great grandfathers was a cabin boy in the British Navy from the age of eight. After enduring three years of sexual abuse and constant bullying, he jumped ship, supposedly diving off and swimming to shore in Galveston as his ship sailed out of the harbor.

On the other hand, at 12 years old he was a happy young man, a chuck wagon cook on cattle drives across Texas, earning his own dollar a day, plus beans and bacon, in wages one hundred percent of which he received and could spend as he saw fit. None of it was “withheld” from him for his old age. None of it was required to pay for insurance someone else thought he might need. Sales and property taxes? Sure. But he could decide whether or not to buy property and he could decide to spring for a new buckboard (taxed) or make it himself.

Supposedly he married a one-armed Indian gal, settled down and had fourteen kids. And if he didn’t find the happiness he sought, at least he chose his path himself from the time he was able to do so.

Did he live a hard life? Absolutely. But it was completely HIS life. He was a free man, at twelve years old.

I doubt he would recognize the country he helped settle.

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