What to buy for $7?

It appeared to be a hard question if you have an American Express card with $7 balance.

Actually the creation of this blog and the website was because of this yellow (gold?) AmEx card. I got the card by mail with a "Thank you" letter from one of my partners. On the card there was a usual card number, words "Thank you" in the place where there is usually the cardholder's name and the words "American Express rewards card". From the fine print on the back of the card I found out I was presented with $25. It was nice and it was fun.

The only problem I had now was how and where to spend the given money. Not many shops in my city accept AmEx. I browsed online shops and did not find anything interesting that I could buy for $25 including shipping and handling. Finally I found out I could buy myself a domain name, so I went and bought gershtein.net and opened my web page and this blog. I spent $18 for that.

Now I still have $7 left on my card. Anyone has any suggestions how can I spend them?

How to convert foot to square foot?

This type of question is very typical on units conversion forum. People often ask how to convert linear meters to square meters, cubic yards to square yards, etc.

Related links for instant units conversion:
> length units (inch, meter, etc.)
> area units (acre, square meter, etc.)
> volume units (barrel, cubic meter, etc.)

The thing is linear something, square something and cubic something are three different measures. You can't convert between them simply because they measure different things.

Linear units (foot or meter) measure length or distance. Square units measure area. Cubic units measure capacity or volume.

Let's say you know the distance between two trees in your garden and it is 10 meters. You can't convert that to square meters because there is no such thing as "an area between the two points".

On the other hand, if you have a room that is 5 meters long and 4 meters wide, you can calculate its area. The area will be 5*4 = 20 square meters. But that's not conversion, that's a calculation, since you need to have two different length measurements to make a single area result. Similarly, to get the capacity of the room you will need three separate linear measurement: length, width and height. Knowing only one or two will not be enough. Calculations will be much more complex if your room is not rectangular.

Conversion is always direct: 12 inches always equal to 1 foot regardless of what you measure. Calculation often depends on other conditions and require extra information. A pint of water weighs 1.043 lbs, but it's only true for water. A pint of some other substance may weigh differently. Even a pint of water would not weigh the same if it were not on the Earth surface.

So the conclusion is -- many things can be calculated, but calculations can be complex and always require a lot of extra information. Conversions are simple, but only allow to convert between units that measure exactly the same things.

Are gambling ads bad or acceptable?

I do not like gambling. Do I need to disable gambling ads on my site or not? Let's assume they are completely legal.

Yesterday I received an email from a guy who wanted to place a special gambling page on my site. He wanted to have an article on gambling there with links to gambling sites. I was supposed to host that page on convert-me.com and place links to that page from other pages of the site.

After thinking about it for a while I refused the offer. A gambling page on a site that has nothing to do with gambling will probably harm search engines' rankings. Not to mention that conversion of weights and measures can be considered a good subject for school students, which makes having a gambling article not a good idea at all.

Oops. Pop-unders are partially back

Unfortunately getting rid of all pop-under ads appeared to be too costy. I took time to analyze the revenue loss after disabling the pop-unders and the result was disappointing. The revenue decreases more than twice. That's too much. I have to bring some pop-unders back.

I decided to bring back as little pop-under ads, as possible. They will not appear on the root page of the site and on all conversion pages except weight conversion. The number of pop-under ads is going to be at least 4 times less than before.

Of course, there is still a possibility for every visitor to disable all banner ads completely.

No more annoying pop-ups

Yes, I always knew pop-up windows were annoying. Even if they are pop-unders and not pop-ups (the difference is whether the new windows appears in front or below your current browser). However we've been keeping pop-under ads on convert-me.com for almost two years. There were some complains, but not too much.

Now we finally decided to get rid of these annoying ads. It's already two days as our site is free from pop-unders. Now I'm going to monitor the difference. We're definitely going to lose part of the revenue. The question is how much will we lose. We probably are going to lower number of visitors who come and immediately leave. The question is how many of those will now stay.

The effect will probably be clear in a month. I do hope it will not be extremely negative and we won't need to get pop-unders back again.

U.S. system or Imperial?

Do United States have its own measurement system (U.S. System) or is it Imperial? Imperial system was used in many countries including Great Britain before they switched to metric.

The question arise when we got a complain from Alana from Canada. She insisted the name "U.S. System" was wrong and makes of project look unprofessional. The question was not clear for me, so I went to check Wikipedia. I found the following there:

The Imperial units or the Imperial system is a collection of English units, first defined in the Weights and Measures Act of 1824, later refined (until 1959) and reduced. The units were introduced in the United Kingdom and its colonies, including Commonwealth countries (though most Commonwealth countries are now fully metricated), but excluding the then already independent United States. Systems of Imperial units are sometimes referred to as foot-pound-second, after the base units of length, mass and time.
The distinction between this imperial system and the U.S. customary units (also called standard units there) or older British/English units/systems and newer additions is often not drawn precisely. Most length units are shared among the Imperial and U.S. systems, albeit partially and temporally defined slightly differently.

So in fact it looks like the U.S. System is not quite equal to Imperial. The differences though are not always visible.

We decided to change the title to "British (Imperial) And U.S. System" to show both possible names. Hope it will make it more clear.

Thank you for your feedback, Alana.

Lets' start blogging

Well, here I am at last. Eveyone is blogging for a couple of years, I'm late. However, better late than never. I'm staring it today and we'll see if I'm able to keep updating it.