TechyDad

The Importance of Playing

December 5, 2014 TechyDad Fun, Games, Life, Video Games

"But we didn’t get time to play!!!"

Sadly, these words have been uttered often this week. Thanks to various activities, the boys have had little time for playing in the afternoon after they return home, eat dinner, and finish their homework. All too often, they’ll finish their last homework problem only to find that they have a mere ten minutes until they need to start getting ready for bed.

Obviously, play time is important for kids. It lets them relax and get creative in a manner that they find enjoyable (versus in a manner that a teacher has assigned). However, play time can be just as important for adults.

In a conversation with a friend if mine, he asked how many hours in a week I spent on social media, playing games, and other activities that did not directly put money in my bank account. When I answered, he suggested that I use those hours to take on extra freelance work instead.

While I do freelance work, I try very hard not to be a workaholic. Mainly, because I think that a life consisting of only work will quickly become a frustrating and boring life. I would rather live a life with slightly less money but one filled with family, friends, and fun.

In addition, you can easily get burnt out by working too much. When I’m faced with a frustrating task, the worst thing I can do is keep trying to tackle it for hours on end. When faced with problems like this, I’ll put the problem down and either play a quick game, take a walk, or work on something else. Doing this keeps my brain from going down the same failed path over and over again. Oftentimes, my subconscious will figure out the solution for me while I’m pursuing other interests.

Finally, there’s the "death march fallacy.". Some employers try to get their employees to work 80+ hour weeks for weeks on end to finish projects on time. (Usually in these cases, the deadline was set by managers who aren’t directly responsible for meeting said deadline.). The theory is that the employees will put in double the hours and get the work done in half as many days. The reality is that employees wind up overworked, overtired, and burnt out. The quality of their work declines fast and more time is spent fixing mistakes that they make than would have been spent with a slower development schedule. Why would I subject myself to a" freelance death march" just to earn extra money? All that would happen would be that I would be miserable, my quality of work would plummet, and my clients would be upset about the work I was doing for them.

No, my playing a game, watching TV, or reading a book doesn’t bring in money, but every activity we do doesn’t have to be monetized. A life focused solely on money sounds like a very boring and meaningless life to me.

How important is play/recreation to you? What is your favorite method of unwinding?

NOTE: The "Platformer Game" image above is by qubodup and is available from OpenClipArt.org.

The (Financial) Hits Keep Coming

December 1, 2014 TechyDad Life, Money

There are some days when being an adult really stinks. Just when you think things are calming down, life throws another "fun surprise" your way.

A couple of months ago, my car had been making bad noises. I put off getting it checked out because I knew it would be expensive to fix. Sure enough, when it for so bad that I couldn’t ignore it anymore, it turned into a couple hundred dollar repair. (Getting it fixed earlier wouldn’t have changed the price tag.)

A month later, we had to fix our chimney. Ten years after having it repointed (the quality of which we question), the bricks were crumbling and letting water into our attic. We needed the entire chimney removed and rebuilt at a cost of over a thousand dollars.

And then comes the day before Thanksgiving. While getting ready to cook dinner (after having baked a pumpkin chocolate chip cake for Thanksgiving dessert the next day), our oven died. Specifically, it made a loud pop, sent out a bright spark towards our wood cabinets (which luckily didn’t catch fire), and stopped working.

I unplugged the oven, checked the circuit breaker (which was tripped), reset the breaker, plugged the oven back in, and tried it out. The range top worked fine, but the clock and oven were completely dead. We explored repairing it but it would have cost almost as much as a new oven.

We’ve already purchased a new oven. Meanwhile, other costs loom ahead of us ready to drain the money from us the minute any money hits our bank account.

Considering that the new oven will take over a week to arrive, we’re going to need to be creative with microwave and slow cooker based recipes for dinners.

What slow cooker or microwave meals would you recommend? Remember, the meals shouldn’t require a stove or oven at all. (Vegetarian is also easier for us with kosher considerations.)

Note: The "home expense" image above is by scyg and is available via OpenClipArt.org.

Do More Posts Equal More Page Views?

November 25, 2014 TechyDad Blogging

Last week, I found myself extremely busy. Between my day job, normal life activities, and a freelance job I had taken on, I had virtually no time left for blogging. I felt bad, but except for one small "I’m still here" post, I didn’t post at all.

Over the years I’ve been blogging, my posting schedule has changed. I used to post on an erratic basis. Later on, I settled down to one post every weekday. At some point last year, though, I was feeling burnt out and decided to cut back to only three posts a week. That’s the level it has stayed at since, but some weeks still had more posts than others. Perhaps I simply felt like I had more to say and couldn’t wait for the next week. Or, maybe I was experiencing blogger’s block and couldn’t think of anything to write about.

Having a week with only one blog post led me to wonder: Do slow posting weeks equal less page views? Do more posts published mean more page views?

This was easy to test out. First, I looked at my Google Analytics for 2014. Thankfully, Google makes it easy to export your data. First, I loaded up my data for the year.

Next, I arranged it into a weekly format.

Then, I exported it as CSV (comma separated values) to import into my spreadsheet.

Next, I used a mySQL query manager to see how many posts I made every week of the year.

After obtaining these pieces of data, I figured out how many page views I experienced, on average, when I had one, two, three, or four posts in the week. (I haven’t posted five days a week this year.) This gave me this graph.

At first glance, it would appear that posting four times is ideal and leads to immense growth. Unfortunately, all of that traffic came from one period where a post of mine went viral. (Or as viral as my posts get.) The traffic that one post obtained was completely out of proportion to normal post traffic. The fact that I posted four times that week was a coincidence. I could have made that my only post that week and would have still beat out the other averages. Ignoring the four post week data, then, we see that there isn’t a big difference between a one post week and a three post week.

This fits in line with a theory I’ve had for awhile. When I was starting out, I felt the need to publish posts as often as possible. I felt that not pushing new content out constantly would mean an immediate drop in readership. Then I began to notice some websites that would update only twice a week or even less. Though I wasn’t privvy to their exact numbers, it was clear that these sites had traffic figures far outpacing my own. If readership numbers were truly tied to new content, how could a "one post a week – maybe less" posting schedule lead to more traffic?

The answer, of course, is that traffic is tied to many things. Chief among these are content quality and spreading the word. You can post five times a day, seven days a week, but if you are posting horrible content, you aren’t going to be driving a lot of traffic in. On the other hand, posting once a week can be perfectly fine if your posts are well-crafted.

As far as spreading the word goes, of course everyone knows we live in a hurricane of content. There is just too much out there for one person to ever take in. Even if I quit my job and gave up everything including essential activities such as sleeping and eating, I could never view even 1% of the new content that is created daily. Two years ago, DOMO made an infographic showing just how much data was created. They estimated that 48 hours of YouTube videos were uploaded every minute and 3,600 new photos were shared on Instagram each minute. Given that this was in 2012, these numbers have likely risen. Even at those levels, however, viewing everything is simply impossible.

Given that viewers have a flood of content to swim in, getting the word spread about your content is ideal. I know I lag behind in this. I honestly don’t have the time to spend crafting unique custom scheduled tweets or actively monitoring Twitter (much less a few other social networks) posting reminders to people about my great new post. My content spread is regulated to automated tweets via a WordPress plugin. Still, every bit has got to help.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you post every day or once a week. Take your time and craft your post so that the final result is great and draws traffic. Don’t just spit out post after post merely to increase how many posts you’ve made this week.

What steps do you take to increase your page views? Do you find your page views increasing when you post more often?

Ninja Web Development

November 20, 2014 TechyDad Blogging

I might be a bit quiet here for awhile. Don’t worry, nothing’s wrong. I just have a freelance project that is taking up my free time. So while I’m MIA deep in code, I thought I’d tease something else I’ve been working on. You see, I’ve wanted to pick up more freelance work and thought it would be a good idea to have a "Hire Me For Freelance" page. Then, I was browsing through some domain names and decided to make a whole new website for freelance work. So here is the "coming soon" page for TechyDad: Ninja Web Developer. (The .ninja domain was too good to pass up.)

I apologize for the short post and the lack of other content. Here’s hoping that next week I’ll have more time to blog. Until then… *drops a ninja smoke bomb and disappears back into the code*

NOTE: The "ninja working at desk" image is by hector gomez and is available from OpenClipArt.org.

ROBOT ON A COMET!!!

November 14, 2014 TechyDad Space, Technology

Over the past ten years, a small craft named Rosetta has been travelling through the cold, dark reaches of space. It swung past Earth three times and Mars once before it reached its destination: Comet 67P. In early August, Rosetta performed an extremely tricky feat. It entered into orbit around the comet. You might think that this shouldn’t be too hard, but comets aren’t very massive. Too much thrust one way or another and Rosetta would have gone tumbling away from the comet and into space. Two days ago, though, Rosetta topped this already incredible achievement. It detached a lander – Philae – which descended to the comet’s surface making it the first craft ever to land on a comet. (There was a mission called Deep Impact which "landed" something on a comet, but that was a chunk of copper which was purposefully impacted with the comet to examine the result.)

The landing didn’t go perfectly. Philae was supposed to touch down, deploy a harpoon to reel itself in, and then use ice drills to secure itself into place. Instead, the harpoon didn’t fire and Philae bounced. Twice. It landed on its side near a cliff.

Still, this is amazing. This comet is 317 million miles from Earth. At that distance, communication between the lander and Earth takes 28 minutes. This meant that mission control couldn’t steer the lander itself. Imagine trying to drive a car if there was a 28 minute delay between pushing on the brakes, turning the wheel, or hitting the gas and that action actually happening. This meant that the lander had to land itself without any help from anybody. This is a robot that we build landing on a comet.

This amazing feat just blows my mind. To think that not that long ago, mankind thought of comets as evil, supernatural omens. Now we have the technological capability to launch a spacecraft, fly by planets multiple times, enter into orbit with, and then land on a comet. I feel like Benny from The Lego Movie. Only instead of shouting "SPACESHIP!", I want to run around shouting "ROBOT ON A COMET!!!"

Just to close, it gets even better, "robot on a comet" has sent back photos of said comet.

Those rocks that we here on Earth are seeing are over 300 million miles away and are a window into how the solar system looked billions of years ago. Sometimes, you just have to sit back and be amazed by what we are capable of, technologically.

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