Acceleration conversion added

I've just added acceleration conversion to convert-me.com. There are not too many units there, but some of them are pretty interesting. For example, I did not know there was a unit named after Galileo Galilei. I also added to the conversion car performance units: seconds to go from 0 to so many mph.

Let's see if the new conversion will be popular. So far the most popular measurements are weight, volume, length and area.

Congratulations to Eugene

My friend Eugene who lives in the United States with his family for over 6 years yesterday got his green card. My congratulations! Now it'll be much easier for him to live there, in particular moving from one place to another and traveling abroad.

Three of my friends who I knew since we were in school are now living abroad. Eugene lives in the U.S., Vova went to Israel, Alexis is in Belgium. It's a pity they are so long away and we can't see each other and get some beer together. But it's so good the world became so small these days and it's so easy to use e-mail or ICQ for an instant communication with someone on the other side of the globe.

Going to Prague

Our decision to go to Prague came just out of the blue. First of all our close friends Khorobrykhs told us they were going to visit Prague for a week in the middle of February. They asked if we wanted to join them and we refused. We though winter was not a good time to go to Europe.

A week later I got a message from my old friend Vova living in Israel. He wrote he and his wife Natasha were going to Prague to celebrate Natasha's birthday there. So they asked if we wanted to go to Prague too and celebrate all our birthdays together. It needs to be said three of us have our birthdays very close. My wife Ann's birthday is on Februalry 7th, then goes mine on February 9th, then Natasha's on February 10th.

The idea to celebrate all our birthdays together was too good to be refused without thinking. Besides we did not have a chance to see Vova and Natasha for over 3 years. So we though we'd give it a try.

That's how it all happened. Then we called our travel agent, learned that we only had one day to make a decision or we would not have enough time to get Czech visas. Without much time for thinking the decision came fast. We should go.

So yesterday I already paid the money and gave our passports to the agent. We'll be in Prague from 7th to 11th of February. And yes, Khorobrykhs will be there too! They'll come 2 days later then we and stay a little longer. Still we all will have 3 days in Prague together and I am very much excited about it.

I do hope the weather is going to be fine.

mithqal unit from Baha'i Faith

A new exotic unit has been added today to weight conversion page. It is called mithqal and it was suggested by our site visitor. The unit is mentioned in Baha'i Faith texts.

I thought this unit deserves inclusion into our conversion page and put it just below Biblical units.

Paris, je t'aime

We watched this movie "Paris, je t'aime" and loved it. I can't remember when I last time liked a film so much. It was wonderful. All 18 short stories were different, but they all were very interesting and full of emotions.

You know how people usually behave in a cinema. As soon as the last scene is over the screen starts to show the credits, people get up and go out of the theater. This time it was different. Everyone sat there in silence until they turned the light on. I think everyone was impressed.

And now when we are going to take our second chance in studying French, this movie was just in time. I felt that I miss only a little bit of vocabulary and practice to be able to understand what was going on without the subtitles. This gives me another strong reason to start studying French again. And maybe this time we'll manage to go further than before.

Weight to Volume Conversion

That was probably one of the most popular questions on conversion forum. People wanted to know how to convert grams to milliliters, pounds to gallons, etc. It was pretty hard to explain the simple fact the conversion depends on the substance being converted, particularly on its density.

Now we finally made it. The new conversion page is called "Weight to Volume Conversion" and supports over 400 materials. The densities data was taken from SImetric.co.uk web site with a kind permission of Roger Walker.

Of course it should be noted that density of a particular material can vary greatly depending on its conditions (size of fractions, amount of admixtures, humidity, etc.). Thus weight/volume conversion which is based on an approximate density can only provide approximate results. However I believe it's still better than nothing.

By the way, any suggestion of additional substances for the new weight to volume conversion are more than welcome. Especially if you can provide the corresponding density.

Alphabetical List of Units

The list of units has been in out plans for ages. Finally it's ready and I'm excited about it. The list appeared to be very long, I was a bit surprised.

In fact a long list of units is not a convenient tool at all. We need to make a unit search badly. But having the list is still much better than nothing for those who know the unit and have no idea what kind of measure it belongs to.

Hope the search will be there too some day.

Units Conversion Gadget

I noticed Google gadgets some time ago and immediately thought about creating one for instant units conversion. I even put a note about it to my "to do" list. However at first glance the task seemed to be too difficult so I postponed it until the New Year holidays.

Finally the holidays came and I got enough time to dig into the task. I was surprised to learn that gadget creation was not at all that hard. Well, it took much time actually, but I was ready for something worse.

Finally today the conversion gadget is ready. You can see it in action on this page. This gadget can be added to Google personalized homepage, Google desktop (if you use one) and to any website or blog. Adding the gadget is as simple as clicking the button. For Google homepage and desktop that's all. For your site or blog there is one more step: copying a short code snippet and pasting it into the right place of the web page. Pretty easy, isn't it?

To add the gadget click the appropriate button:

You can read more about this units conversion gadget on www.convert-me.com.

Everyone Respects Christmas and New Year

Do you know what real loneliness is? It is when you open you mailbox and there is nothing there. Not even a SPAM.

I guess convert-me.com should have been filling lonely lately. Not only the number of daily visitors dropped 5 times, but even the spammers ceased their activity on the forum. I was even a bit anxious for them. Fortunately (well, unfortunately), the holidays are over and everything is back. Both the good guys our visitors and the bad guys spammers.

Today I had to spend about an hour cleaning up numerous post with links to adult sites from our conversion forum. There are so many adult sites around. Looks like competition in their industry is very high.

I am now considering an option of prohibiting to include any http links in the posts to any forum user who registered recently (say, less than a week ago). This should make life of spammers harder yet. Unfortunately it'll affect legitimate users too if they want to post a link to some conversion resource. I'm not sure yet whether to implement this restriction or not. Any suggestions are welcome.