A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to Twitter, registered, but then… I don’t get the idea. To me, saving every minute and organizing my entire life to make more room for personal stuff, this is an ordinary waste of time. I guess, I’m too practical for this and share the opinion of David Peralty up to the last word. However, I know thousands of teenagers would love it from first sight if they knew it was there. They always look for some chat boards, forums, and IMs to kill time.

Check out this post from Blogging Pro:

I just joined Twitter about an hour or two ago (my twitter), and my second impression is that it’s slow moving. I can get a whole blog post or two done before Twitter updates a preference or posts a message. My first impression, before I even signed up was “this is rediculous!”

I really don’t get Twitter. To me, it is like updating my instant messenger status information on Google Talk and whatnot, something I forget to do regularly, leaving my friends to wonder, “why has David been sleeping for four days now?”

(from: Twitter: Useful or Not?)

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I was wondering what’s the real place The Technology occupies in our life. Try looking for “eclipse” in a search engine of your choice, and the first thing comes neither “solar eclipse” nor “mind eclipse”. It’s Eclipse IDE, which is of a specific interest only to a technically inclined fraction of the civilization. The fact it comes ahead of everything else pushes towards an interesting conclusion: people around the planet are interested in “natural” eclipses less than techies in their project. And this fact unavoidably wraps up into something really puzzling when it comes to techie-non-techie interactions.

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It has been an incredibly nice day today — warm and calm. As usual, I was sitting before the window and enjoyed it so much I can hardly put it all in words. Right now the sun is quickly hiding behind the horizon and the towering skies explode with color in a hundred layered shades: glowing pinks, deep purples, pure creams — the whole spectrum on a scale you even cannot imagine. Ten minutes is all that’s left before it disappears, but what a beautiful aftertaste of confidence and piece stays. The day is rushing to its end, another is coming…

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Yesterday I bought a breathtaking DVD game — Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy — which appeared to be too heavy for my laptop. Unfortunately, even though my desktop PC has the cutting-edge video card and tons of memory it is relatively old and has no DVD drive. At first I tried creating a disk image and mounting it as a virtual drive, but the attempt spectacularly failed because of StarForce copy-protection system. It just refused to recognize the disk even though the key perfectly matched. Eventually I was able to find the solution (credits go to Kate for her sensible suggestion) — mounting the remote DVD drive.

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The second plugin for Wordpress — Post Tools — has just been deployed. It’s a very concise collection of methods for convenient fetching posts assigned to categories. For example, I use them to fetch three random quotations for the BlogBridge site front page. Other potential usage is selecting top N posts from a news or announcements category.

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I’ve just created a section for Wordpress plugins I build. Hopefully you will find something interesting there for your own blog or blog-based site. Most of my creations are running for the benefit of the BlogBridge official site and prove to work well under high pressure. I decided to release the Random Screens plugin first. It’s named this way because initially it was intended to pick up a screenshot of the BlogBridge application from the collection at random and show its thumbnail on a page at a specified place. The thumbnail would then be linked to a bigger image. Every time you refresh a page, a different picture jumps out. Very simple and nice. Have a look, maybe it’s what you always missed.

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So you plan on moving from MovableType to Wordpress for one or another reason. The Wordpress has an excellent Import function which lets you move all posts and comments from your MT to its database. The real problem is that the URLs of the posts won’t look the same. If you leave it this way, you will lose all the references to your posts. Here’s my complete recipe — the detailed step-by-step guide.

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Installed another anti-virus today, the fourth. The behavior of my poor Windows box has come out of control lately. At first, it was quite subtle, and the computer obeyed my orders. Reluctantly though, but still my actions meant something. Suddenly things started to worsen dramatically. Soon I ended up with the couple of nice blue screens, followed by minor data losses.

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Three years ago, when I was working for a company, we were obliged to build the daily timesheet reports. No one really analyzed them, but the management thought it was a good idea to control productivity of the staff. Should mention it didn’t work? It took less than a day to the staff to learn playing the tricks with their reports to make them look genuinely productive. What was the point in them if no one was interested in the outcome?

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… in ignorance. In his “not a better aggregator” series (1, 2, 3) Pito raises an important point. It’s not the aggregator that makes your reading better; it’s something that helps you discover the relevant quality material in first place. He knows what he says. We are working on the BlogBridge project together and face the unprecedented information overload. You wouldn’t believe what number of new sites, blogs and e-mail users emerge each day. It’s horrifying.

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