Barge of Cocoa Beach nearly washes ashore (again)

     Paul Speese

Saturday around noon I was riding to Port Canaveral on my bike and noticed emergency vehicles and fire engines parked just by the beach blocking the the pedestrian on ramps.  There was clearly some type of emergency underway.  I pedalled a few more blocks and found a street that was not blocked by emergency vehicles and walked my bike down to the beach.  What I saw was amazing.  A huge barge, 200- 300 feet in length had broken loose from its anchor or whatever they use to to moor it when not in use.  You can generally see it several miles out to see for the last 6 months or so where there is some kind of dredging process for cruise ships and other large ships coming in and out of Port Canaveral.  The Coast Guard or Civil Authorities must have ordered a Tug Boat to try and rescue the barge and at what seemed like the last few minutes before it was going to crash on the beach the Tug Boat appeared to secure a cable and pull the boat away from the impending beaching.  There were thousands of people on this stretch of the beach at the South end of Port Canaveral and North end of Cocoa Beach, it would have been quite a scene to evacuate all of those people once the decision was made that they could not stop it from coming ashore.  Anyway, congrats to the tug boat operator and whomever else facilitated the capture and turnaround.  Check out the picture below.  

P.S.  The reason I said again is that this barge washed completely ashore back in February or March of this year.  How does this happen?  

Riding the beach in Cocoa Beach

I have been riding my bicycle routinely since I started living in Cocoa Beach in August of 2012.  One of the things you will discover immediately in Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral is how dangerous it is to ride your bike along Route A1A.  There are several reasons, some obvious some not so much.  The first and foremost is not so obvious, the sidewalks are generous and in general well maintained but not clearly marked as heavily traveled paths and often obscured by bushes, trees and general vegetation.  As a car driver it can be difficult to discern that you are blocking walkers and bikers in many cases.  The second reason is more obvious, the average age of Cocoa Beach residents is 55.7 years old according to the 2010 Census.  That means more than half the residents are over the age of 70 and frankly their driving skills are terrible.  Add the third factor of a large influx of tourists who are unfamiliar with the area and in some kind of insane hurry to go everywhere and many of them intoxicated or on drugs and you get an unhealthy mix of danger for walkers and cyclists.

So, enough said, biking can be dangerous along A1A.  The best bike route on the island is Ridgewood Drive  which runs parallel to Route A1A from Route 520 for approximately 5 miles.  The speed limit is 25 MPH and there are generous hike/bike lanes and drivers are generally very conscious or walkers, runners and bikers, not to mention a number of skateboarders.  The problem is getting there, I have to travel for about 2 miles to get to that road along the dangerous and unattractive A1A section.

One day I had a brainstorm, could I ride on the beach and avoid the noisy and dangerous section of my ride.  I was in Cape Canaveral and just turned up one of the streets and walked my bike from the ramp to the hard pan portion of the beach.  I was glad to see a couple other bikers so I gave it a shot.  As long as I stayed on the hardpan near where the waves would roll in I was able to ride smoothly.

My first ride was very successful, I made it all the way to RT 520 and jumped back on the road.  This past weekend I went much further, all the way to Patrick Air Force Base.  Check out the attached video.  When the beach is firm, it is similar in speed to riding on the road.

Video is here


Paul Speese

Glass Bank Irony-truth is funnier than fiction

I was riding my bike the other day and as I was riding behind the eyesore in Cocoa Beach known as the Glass Bank and saw a derelict boat parked in the parking lot.  My eye went to the name of the boat and I nearly fell off my bike as I burst out laughing.  Take a look. If you can't read it, the name of the boat is "Side by Side".  The derelict boat side by side with the derelict bank building-perfect Cocoa Beach story.

NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft 747 back at Patrick Air Force Base

I was driving to swim early last Friday morning when I was surprised to see the NASA 747 parked at Patrick Air Force Base.  During the summer of 2012, the specially modified 747 was a frequent site at Patrick AFB during the time when the last Shuttles were being ferried to their final resting spots in museums.  Since that time I had read in news reports that both the 747's were going to be retired to air museums in California and Texas.  Since that time I have seen one or both of them at Patrick AFB on several occasions in addition to last week.  Maybe there is a new mission and they decided not to park them in the air museums.  One observation is how vulnerable to terrorist or any type of attack these planes are when parked at Patrick.  This photo was taken from my bike just off the A1A road that runs past the base.

Patrick AFB doesn't have much flight activity on a regular basis.  There are some Florida Air National Guard troop carriers stationed there and a couple of old P3's as well.  Every couple of weeks, some old Fighter Jets show up on the weekends, I will try and get a shot of them next time I see them.

Paul Speese

Update on Nike Fuel Band

I have been using my Nike Fuel Band every day for more than 1 year until this week.  I traveled home to Pennsylvania for Spring Break and forgot my USB cable so for the first time in the year I am not wearing it because the battery is dead.  I really miss it, but it did remind me to post some observations of my first year of usage.  I am on my second Fuel Band as the first one crapped out after about 7 months.  To be fair, it still worked fine with the exception of the button.  It kind of got stuck in the down position.  Nike was pretty good about replacing it, we went through the usual debugging process but they pretty quickly understood the problem and I had a new unit within a week.  Since that time it has worked great and the battery life on the new one is improved by a day or two.

I suspect Nike continues to iterate and improve the accelerometer algorithm which interprets motion.  I don't have exact figures to quote you but I have noticed recently that biking with the Fuel Band on my wrist is equivalent to putting it on my shoe.  I will do a test on the same route  with the same level of effort and report back but my sense is that Nike has adjusted the algorithms to recognize cycling and report more accurately.  

Another random observation is that the average Nike Fuel band owner has lost interest in exercise or isn't wearing the band.  I generally earn 4000 Nike Fuel Points per day and generally meet my 3000 point goal 6 of 7 days in week.  In my 50-59 age group the average points per day is less than half of mine and on average they only meet their goal 1 day per week.  Pretty pathetic.  I still wish the Nike Fuel Band was waterproof for swimming laps.  My exercise on swim days is significantly under reported.

All in all I am very happy with the Fuel Band, I would like to see some incorporation of Heart Rate and Waterproof on future versions.

Paul Speese

SEO and Conversion

                                                                       Paul Speese

SEO-It is now all about conversion.  So over the last 4-5 months we have written blogs, assembled FAQ's, continually added new content to the website, created Keyword and search term lists over and over.  After all of that work and time invested we are somewhere on the continuum of what I would call success.  We have reached a level where the majority of our keywords and search terms put us on page 1 of Google.  We are less successful on exact match part numbers, which is frustrating but my sense from watching the activity very closely is that most people search part number families, part number roots, or the overall specification.  So, without fooling myself I think we are in a good place at this point.  So, we get anywhere from 20-40 people a day searching for something relevant to what we sell and they land on one of our pages.  Now what happens?  Do they fill out a quote request?  Do they send an email?  Do they pick up the phone and call?
The answer is no, or more accurately not often enough.  We get a small fraction of visitors actually contacting us, at least that we are aware.  This week we had 3 companies search the exact same part number, an unusual part number that we happen to stock in volume.  All 3 companies hit our website multiple times within 24 hours, did they call us?  Did they send a quote? Did they reach out and ask the obvious technical questions?  NO, NO, NO.  Interestingly, what did happen is that we got an order for the part from a small US based company that had never heard of us.  They must have received information from one of the 3 large companies to buy from us.  You could say that was successful conversion, but our goal is not just a sale but customer acquisition as well.  The 3 European companies searching the part were all in our sweet spot and selling to a proxy here in the US doesn't provide the inroads we desire.
So, again the question arises.  If only a small fraction of the companies who land on our site convert that search to action of some meaningful type, if only to tell us who they are, email address or name, then is this all a waste of time?  We sat around Friday brainstorming on how to increase conversions.  Do we need more and better content?  Maybe.  Do we need to offer free freight?  Maybe.  Do we need to offer discounts for new customers?  Maybe.  I think we will try all three of those ideas over the next couple months and see if that improves our conversion rate.  I would welcome any suggestions.

Paul Speese

Brave new world of SEO

Paul Speese-COO

Part of my responsibilities in my latest assignment are to create a new web site and to generate as much new business from it as possible.  The best way for me to accomplish that objective is to have the largest number of Keywords important to the client land on page 1 of Google, Bing and other leading search engines.  I am about 2 weeks from launching the new web site and I can tell you that I have spent a lot of time and effort to understand the dynamics of Google's search algorithm and through hit and miss tactics we appear to have some success.  There are 3 important elements in successful SEO that I have learned.  The first is to have the content that you want found prominently displayed and searchable in both dynamic and static pages on the web site.  The second is to use Blogging to reinforce the most important content.  The third is to continually update and add new content to both the web site and Blogs.  Using these simple but time consuming tactics we are now on page 1 of Google search results for approximately 75% of our top 200 keywords.  Not bad for 4-5 months worth of work.  We are also on page 1 for approximately 65% of about 45,000 part numbers that are important to the client's core business.

The next challenge is conversion.  We are getting approximately 35 hits per day on the site.  Almost all of them are relevant to the business, we get approximately 5 per week to reach through and contact us for  a quote or other questions.  How do we increase that conversion rate?  That is the key question and will be the subject of my follow up post.

Paul Speese