by Jonny | Nov 23, 2011 | Updates
I would usually post how my Mandarin-Chinese studies are going, but I’ll be honest and say it isn’t going too well. Although I am improving overall, I’m not improving as fast as I would like. I guess you could kind of say I’m struggling a little to grasp this language, however today and yesterday I went to my local 24 hour McDonald’s and just got my head down and studied. No distractions, plenty of coffee and plenty of practise pronouncing, writing and lots of memorising. Although I got weird stares from others inside McDonald’s and people looking at what I was doing, it kind of motivated me in some weird way. It kind of told me “people are looking, I don’t want to look stupid” when in-fact to them I probably was just a crazy fool studying my basic knowledge of their own language. I studied from 12 at night to 3:00am in the morning.
Then I called it quits, went back home and had a shower. I did eat a large Big Mac meal just to get me through the night and I had 2 coffee’s; not really a healthy combination, but it helped me study and focus. However previously I played football from 7pm to around 8:10pm and that kind of wore me down, but I knew I had to get down to business considering I have an oral test coming up later today. (Right now for me it is 3:31am) I start class at 8am. But I think I’m going to throw up tomorrow, I drank way too much coffee. Which is why I am still awake now. In fact I am not going to go to sleep today even though I have a busy day ahead. I’m going to watch some Mandarin tutorials on YouTube just to purely understand the grammar structure and to learn a little more. – Rather than waste it on sleep. (Although I realise I should sleep, but I’m too worried; another unhealthy combination)
In fact I’m so worried, I memorized a sentence to say to the teacher tomorrow. Essentially the sentence is: “No bad feelings, but I feel very nervous right now”. I’m worried I won’t be able to answer all the questions and that would really hurt my confidence, especially when I’m trying the best I can.
I also have some personal issues which is making me worry even further. I just wish I didn’t have to worry so much… but that’s me. I worry too much about everything. My friends, education, life, every detail… I worry about everything and I worry too much about every single individual ‘fucking’ thing. (It drives me crazy) I think in the end I’m going to go crazy. I think people are already seeing the crazy side come out. But it really isn’t funny. God damnit, I cannot control my ADHD sometimes and I go over the top. Then I get cynical of myself, thinking that others hate me while others adore me. I understand you cannot win everyone, but it seems the friends I have always been close to are distancing themselves. I have plenty of good friends, but I don’t want to lose anyone really. But my life is just all over the place at the moment. So if you are my friend and you are reading this, please understand my position. I’m a mess right now. Even though it may seem I am fine inside… there is an acronym I can use right now… it is FUBAR. (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair) – It is how I feel right now, although I do believe I can repair myself in the end.
by Jonny | Nov 20, 2011 | Updates
I remember seeing one of the best films I had ever watched. The film was made when I was born however it is still good today. The film is called “Life Stinks“. The movie is about how a millionaire bets to his business rival how he can live on the streets without any money or housing. Essentially he goes from being a really rich guy to just suddenly living in the streets with nothing but his clothes. The guy somehow gets tricked and the rival he placed the bet against him doubles back on him, colluding with the rich guys lawyer and managing to get a court order suggesting the guy is insane. Thus loses control of his company and eventually loses everything. – (Without his knowledge)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHETduhUoLs
Wouldn’t it be awesome be rich? Buy anything you want? Instead we live like homeless people, however a few classes up, but we are just nobodies in this world. We live for others to become rich really. While we stay down below, not moving and just standing still it feels like. I am happy with a nice simple life, although being a rich bazzionlaire is something I wouldn’t turn down. I could practically do what I want, be what I want and not care one bit about what others think. Essentially people feel as if they haven’t “made it” yet or are never going to make it through life ‘satisfied’. I feel like this right now, I feel I won’t ever be satisfied because I always selfishly expect more.
by Jonny | Nov 16, 2011 | Updates
The best argument for an atheist when he makes the following statement:
"God doesn't exist."
… and a religious person replies:
"Can you prove he doesn't exist?"
You say:
The onus is not on me to prove whether he exists or not. It is you that has to provide the evidence for the existence for such entity since you claim it exists. I do not claim it exists, I purely dismiss having any knowledge of claimed higher being in the case of a human-made idea of such an entity. I merely state the fact that it doesn't exist on the same basis a wooden donkey isn't floating around in space right now talking to other aliens.
If I say there is a military type-war taking place in Switzerland, I made the claim, so I have to prove that. If no news agencies are reporting that or if no one is talking about it, then no one is going to believe me, right? But because there are so many religious people around, people will believe religion, supported by the fact that there are so many others that also believe that religion. However the Muslim religion is the largest in the world, yet if you were brought up in a Christian country, you aren't likely to become Muslim though very likely to become Christian. That is how the religions we see today have grown to what they have now become.
Yet, if I said, "There isn't a war taking place in Switzerland", that is more believable. It is more logical and considering the news haven't reported of the war taking place or there aren't others talking about it, It is totally more believable. My point is that it can actually work both ways. So while the majority of the worlds population supposedly believe in a higher deity or "God", just because the majority claim it to be true, doesn't mean it is. But this all turns to one point, if you have evidence that there is a war taking place and that you have evidence of such a thing taking place (Citing sources that the evidence is totally credible), then it is more believable. However religion relies on one thing only and that is a huge amount of faith and belief in something which equates to the same as believing a 't-shirt' created everything. Arguments set out by those who debate atheists, sound totally outlandish to those who do not believe.
However by the same token, because of how rapidly religion has grown through the past, through hate, love, the joining together of a group and the teaching of younger people who then spread that teaching to their children and so forth, religion has grown excessively with people believing mindlessly. – They haven't been taught anything else and to believe otherwise would be totally absurd in their minds. I can understand this considering I had the same upbringing. Though if you know me, I had a 6 month gap period where I stepped away from all that and looked at it more objectively. Otherwise I would probably be praising good old 'Jesus' right now.
Although I wish for there to be an after life or heaven where I'll be able to see those who died and make new friends, it doesn't make it real. I really wish I could have more evidence, my life would be more endearing knowing that there is something out there waiting for me. But I cannot believe in something which cannot be proven. I stick to my principals on this issue as I know others can easily be influenced by fear of dying and going to hell by not believing.
I can offer a story of when I was younger. — I went to a Christian school and at the moment of my last year at the school, I was the only person in my class who was atheist or I just didn't believe. I don't like to label myself as agnostic considering that I don't agree with the term. Although I cannot prove the existence of 'God', doesn't mean I have to. I just don't believe that such an entity exists. I was very open about this and I asked my R.E. teacher where I would go to after I'd die considering I didn't believe in God. He replied with "Hell". That is what I don't like about religion. Now if there were no such thing as hell, I wouldn't mind religion so much, but because it induces fear in the sense "You don't believe? Well guess what, you are going to Hell!"
That makes more people want to become part of some religion just so they "might" be right. For me, I stuck to my principles in this case, something like that wouldn't deter me. Unless of course 'God' indeed touch me like so many people say, I would probably have the same belief, however 'God' has never touched me throughout the years I was exposed to Christiniaty at a young age and up until I was a teenager. I am sure if 'God' as those who claim him to be almighty and all-powerful; if he did indeed touch me, I would be Christian right now. Therefore I cannot relate to those who say "'God' touched me". I wouldn't call them a liar, but at times 'misguided', 'confused' or any other amount of reasons that one could come up with fit perfectly.
Atheist
Purely atheist to me means: I don't believe that God exists. Simple. Just in the same way, I don't believe that father Christmas exists or the tooth fairy.
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 9, 2011 | Updates
by Jonny | Nov 8, 2011 | Updates
Today there was a pagerank update, which happened to be pretty awesome, although this blog didn’t see any pagerank update and stayed at pagerank 1. Though to be honest I haven’t exactly advertised or done any marketing on this website so in the end in comes down to doing advertising and getting back link backs which is where you incur higher pagerank.
My armored vehicle website got a great update from pagerank 3 to pagerank 4. I’ll be honest and say that I thought the pagerank would stay the same however it seems it increased. Notably I am trying to rank higher for the keyword term “armored vehicles“, which is failing at the moment, however I haven’t placed full momentum on that yet. However pagerank really has nothing to do with SERPs. I’d rather have a higher SERP ranking or higher visitor count on my armored vehicle website rather than high pagerank. To be honest I look at pagerank and see it as an encourgement for your website and it is Google telling you to keep going in my opinion.
Though I somewhat feel perplexed by the fact that my YouTube page somehow got pagerank 5, yet I haven’t advertised that one bit, however somehow it has recieved a high pagerank for whatever reason. Yet really my military website should rank higher if things are to make any sense. Although I guess that YouTube being one of the largest websites on the internet is the reason for the high pagerank on my YouTube profile page. 🙂