by Jonny | Jan 17, 2012 | Updates
The story that started out with my Mandarin wasn’t too good. I was depressed, deterred, demoralized and a huge range of bad things occurred during my first tenure of learning the language. I felt no progress and perhaps I couldn’t possibly progress. I felt stupid and generally I wanted to give up. I even made quite a few posts, especially one entitled “I have the memory of a fish when it comes to Chinese“, which depicts my attitude and how I felt when I was down in that hole.
Luckily now, I have changed immensely.
I no longer worry about having to do any tests as I score pretty high in all of them and I’m now so much more confident than before.
Today, I went back home to my parents place, my Auntie was around and she was testing my Mandarin. I had quite a few simple, however long conversations with her, she was quite impressed with my progress – as the last time I spoke to her… I was still in that aforementioned hole.
I’ve started to climb out, though not fully out, though I’m almost out. I consider my Mandarin still to be not that good, but I can now kind of hold conversations.
I still have a fear of talking to others of whom I do not know well enough, or of those who I do know well enough, but I however do not want to lose face.
Whatever the case, things are going OK when it comes to Mandarin for me, so I’m not worrying about that at the moment. All I’m worrying about is what happens next, and the great mystery which unfolds, called the future. :p
by Jonny | Dec 29, 2011 | Updates
Marcus Aurelius said it best: [hr]
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them” [hr]
by Jonny | Nov 14, 2011 | Updates
Dofollow and nofollow. These are concepts which are hard to explain to people who have never really been interested in SEO or who are starting to learn about the world of search. These two terms are highly important when it comes to working in a content marketing environment. It’s essentially the do or die in terms of obtaining something that’ll be useful or something that might not be so useful.
I’ll try to explain nofollow as simply as possible as my future role will be explaining what these different SEO initiatives are. Nofollow is essentially an instruction to search engines to tell search bots (Google bot, Yahoo Bot, Bing Bot) that surf the web that a link should not pass value.
This is what a nofollow attribute or instruction would look like in HTML format:
<a href="http://google.co.uk" alt="nofollow"> >Google.co.uk</a>
Google.co.uk
(This link is nofollow’ed)
So what does this mean exactly?
It essentially means that my blog (jargoned.com) is not passing value to Google.co.uk as I’ve included the nofollow attribute or instruction within the HTML code above. Search engines will scan this bit of code and they will read the “nofollow” value and they won’t count this link and you will not rank any higher in search results because the link has been nofollow’d.
So why?
Search engines like Google have to have ways to deal with spam and the nofollow attribute gives the option to web owners to nofollow links that have obviously been paid for and to not get penalised for accepting those paid links. Essentially Google looks at paid links as people trying to change or modify the search results unnaturally. Natural link building would usually only involve onsite content that would be of high quality and that would gain traction around the web with people linking to that content without any further assistance from the people who created that content. The nofollow attribute became mainstream when Google announced in 2005 that they would start using the nofollow attribute. They also announced that the nofollow attribute should be used for paid links and that sites could potentially be penalised if they were not nofollow’ing links that had been paid for. This is why nofollow is so crucial to content marketing, as you’d want to preferably be scoring links that are follow links and that have no “nofollow” attributes attached to them; however you don’t want to make it looks obvious in Google’s eyes that you’ve paid for certain links or that you’ve unnaturally made an action that would create a link. – Google will penalise you and this can be quite detrimental as Google have control of 89% of the search engine market.
Rant (No need to read this bit)
I frequent quite a few forums and there is one forum called Digital Point, and in 2011 the forum owner nofollow’d everyone’s forum signatures unless you paid for “Premium membership”. I’ve posted on Digital Point over 1,000 times and before they made the change I had 1,000 links on Digital Point pointing to my websites. Once they made the change I lost over 1,000 follow back links as they nofollow’d them. Whilst all the 1,000 links were from the same site, it was still unfortunate that I lost that many links to my websites’ back link profiles. However, if I recall, the argument that forum members were making were that people who were genuinely contributing with good quality posts were being negatively affected by this change in policy. In my personal opinion I can’t blame the owner of Digital Point for making that decision as people were just registering up and posting a couple times to get a signature link on Digital Point which is the largest digital marketing forum on the internet.
by Jonny | Nov 7, 2011 | Updates
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.
I don’t know why I liked this, but I guess this is how I feel with religion. While supposedly there is a god out there, which I can’t seem to fathom, which god am I supposedly supposed to go after?
There are many religions out there and according to those many religions or Christianity which I know for sure, if you don’t believe in that specific god, then apparently god will not forgive your sins and you will in hell for eternity. So does this mean the majority of the population on Earth will go to hell? Does this mean all those who believe in other religions, those who do not or those who don’t know will burn in hell?
I came very sceptical when this sort of answer is presented when apparently you are supposed to believe god is benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient. Yet if that is true he must have known mankind was going to sin, make up different religions to detract from “his” religion or as Christians like to say their “faith”. When it comes down to it, how can one remove themselves from a religion that they were brought up in it? I was brought up in a Christian family and a private Christian school, yet I became a non-believer because in the end I didn’t believe in it after breaking my leg and having time to detract from the constant bombardment of religion.
However because I was brought up in that setting, I nearly did believe if that makes any sense. At one point I knew nothing else in my life, imagine being brought up in that type of environment and not knowing anything else? Surely you are going to believe in anything, if you are brought up that way and you know nothing else. Religion for me is brainwashing in the circumstances that a person is brought up and is bombarded with religion. If you constantly bombard someone, especially from the young age with an ideology or religious text-book, in the end they will believe it. That is brainwashing.
I guess this is why in the United Kingdom every public school has to teach more than one religion; otherwise you are plainly brainwashing someone from a young age to believe one argument / ideology.
How about people who convert from one religion to another?
I can’t speak for others however I can understand the need for human beings to believe that there needs to be something more than just life on Earth; especially after death. It has been for thousands of years even throughout the Ancient-Egyptians time that there has to be an after life. It is nothing new at least. However people convert from being Muslim to Christianity and vice versa, so who is to say whether one religion is right or not. Or from an outsiders perspective such as mine, how do I pick which is the right one? What if I pick the wrong religion? That means eternity in hell. I would love to believe in an after life and perhaps even a god, I would ask many questions. However if that deity or higher power doesn’t present itself, then how am I to know?
He had the opportunity to present himself when I was studying in a Christian school. In fact when I was very young, I did believe in god… or at least I thought I did. I thought it was silly not to believe in god. But then I learned of others views, I looked at why atheists exist, why agnostic people exist and the existence of the money thousands of religions, faiths which still exist or existed in the past. I changed my views on life from that point on because I learned why these different thoughts existed. To me the most logical is being agnostic or as I like to purely call it “non-believer”. Agonistic people are not really a group like religion, agnostic people do not meet up every Sunday. Agnosticism is purely not believing in god nor disputing whether he exists or not. Some may think I am achiest with the views I’ve posted however I never discount the idea of a higher entity existing. I just feel that religion is just a text book made by man throughout the many hundreds and even thousands of years.
Essentially with Christianity, you either believe or you go to hell. Although there are alternate views on this from when I went to a Christian school, I raised many questions including the main question that I have posed in this article. So which view is the correct one? You see, this is how religion and faith may have been distorted over the years. Who is to say that what is actually in the bible is correct, when you can have so many different views which interdict those other views which are more mainstream? – Especially considering these religious text books are very old, but who created them? People did, man did… and whatever you say, god never created the bible. Who is to say that what people in the bible is even correct, or isn’t something bullcrap some mindless insane nut job decided to write?
That is my issue with religion/faiths. – With this is mind, how can anyone believe any religious text book? As that is the foundation of belief and faith? I mean I agree with the 10 commandments, I agree with morality and I agree there is good stuff in the bible. However just because the bible contains good stuff, doesn’t make the rest of it anymore correct or accurate.
This is my belief. If god is all knowing… then he’ll be able to tell whether a person has good intentions or not. I don’t believe in the bible for it was written by man. Anyone can interpret what has been written by man in countless ways. Even the people who wrote the bible, could have misinterpreted god if he surely gave mankind free-will. Who the fuck is to say they even got a message from god? God damnit! The only time I’ll believe in god or a higher power is when I see him/her/it, then I’ll know for sure and repent my sins if he/she/it wants me to. :S
by Jonny | Oct 26, 2011 | Updates
“The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned.”
– Albert Einstein
“The person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it.”
– Chinese Proverbs
“Worrying is the same thing as banging your head against the wall. It only feels good when you stop.”
– John Powers
“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
– Steve Jobs
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
– Albert Einstein
These quotes were for me perfect for my own situation. So if others happen to read these off my site, then good, these are inspirational quotes from very inspirational people who actually changed things in the world and got things done.