nightlight 01101101

Deliberately losing myself on the interwhiz

Okay, so sometimes I’m supposed to be doing something very specific, and I somehow get distracted by ten cool things and suddenly ten minutes has gone by and I have failed at my specific task. So to combat this, I now occasionally assign myself some time to do this on purpose. It’s actually a relief to pour a hot drink and sit down and say to myself, now I will just have unstructured interflaz whooliboo.

So a little while ago I was whoolibing and then I remembered that my friend recommended YSlow to help me better understand and assess loading times of webpages. And then as I was admiring YSlow (hmmm, a redeeming feature of Yahoo!) and I installed it, and then I wondered what else is cool with FireFox Add-ons and found FireFTP. Yup, it’s a way to turn your HTTP browser into an FTP browser. Pretty neat, but I won’t install it I don’t think. But I read the  bio of it’s creator, who seems like a really likeable nerdy fellow so then I went to his, Mime Čuvalo’s, website. Hmmm. There I discovered that he gives the proceeds from donations to FireFTP to an orphanage in Sarajevo where he takes care of children. I also found photos, doodles, poems and some very clever arty things which I assume he did himself.1

This is not a browser, by Mime

He also has some comics which are composed with an innovative, and presumably work intensive, HTML and PNG structure. I bet he did this to make the pages load super duper fast. Hey, but I checked with my new installation of YSlow and he only has received a score of 82 (a low B) because he hasn’t used a Content Delivery System (CDN), he hasn’t added “expires headers”, configured his “ETags”, minified his Javascript of CSS. But 82 is actually very good. Most of my sites don’t score that well – in fact this site (sherwinarnott.org) is only a 75. I have to figure out how to get my gzip compression zipping. I thought I did it by properly editing my .htaccess file but possibly the version of Apache my host is using hasn’t enabled the old mod_deflate. I’m not sure. But 75 is pretty good so I won’t sort that out now. Huh. Www.google.ca only gets a 64 from YSlow! That’s a D. Suddenly I’m not sure I trust this Yahoo device. My personal blog just scored higher than Google. Weird.

But the comic is funny. But not Lol funny.2 But then I discovered his page, god is a number. That’s why I’m writing this rambly post actually.

See I’ve had that page open for 3000 seconds. Here’s the screenshot:

nightlight 01101101
It was struck by the first two lines. It’s a comparison of seconds passed since the page was opened with the seconds that have passed since the universe started. At first I thought no way! There’s not enough numbers. But I checked it, and it seems right. Assuming that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, it works like this:

14,000,000,000 years x 365 days = 5,110,000,000,000

5,110,000,000,000 days x 24 hours = 112,640,000,000,000 hours

112,640,000,000,000 hours x 60 minutes = 7,358,400,000,000,000 minutes

7,358,400,000,000,000 minutes x 60 seconds = 441,504,000,000,000,000 seconds

What is super fun about http://www.nightlight.ws/01101101 is that you can watch the seconds accumulate! It’s technically not very scientific to include the individual seconds since it violates the rules of error and precision. But, nonetheless, I got a kind of gut feeling for the beginning of things. That’s fun.

There’s some other stats that are less fun. But it’s time for me to close my browser. Goodnight FireFox. Goodnight Wee Wiley Wooby.

  1. This is the first time I’m inserting a page into my blog from some elses site without downloading and uploading it to my server. Is this okay? Why don’t I know if this is okay?
  2. Lol! He actually turns this into a joke, even though it’s also true. http://www.nightlight.ws/comic/1 It’s also filled with other real life emotions.

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