Kate prepared a mind blending surprise for me today. When I got back from my streetball game a shiny new black iPod Nano 8Gb was sitting in its stylish leather jacket on my table. Ahhhhh. I love you my dear. She is full of surprises, isn’t she?

The screen of my first iPod Nano 1Gb was crashed half a year ago. I was walking out the house holding it in my jeans pocket and metal railings of the outside staircase served just right to make an iPod Shuffle out of my old nano friend. It played like that for a day or two, but then battery problems became obvious. Eventually it ended up on the book shelf. A sad story. Well, anyway…

The kind is dead. Long live the king!

We all make new year resolutions, and what’s tricky about it is that adding an item to the list often means becoming unhappier. How is that?

Well, the moment you start building the list you start hand-cuffing yourself. Every moment later you will be checking with your list to see if whatever you do at this very moment helps your goals or is it an awful “waste of time”. Even if it is a better thing to do, you will be sorry as it doesn’t help your own plans. Sticking to the plan is good, being flexible is better.

Enjoy the moment, be yourself!

Here’s some great inspirational read for you, entering this new 2008 year — 12 Ways to be More Free in 2007 by Pamela Slim. Yes, it’s a guide for the leaving year, but I reviewed it just now and can feel how right she is.

So enjoy your read, make the coming year better, and make it suite you best!

Whole last week we spent under the warm sun of Egypt: swam in the Red Sea, traveled a lot, socialized. What I would like to show you is our little photo-report — a Egypt set on Flickr. Almost every image is accompanied with the comment — a story, a history note or just an observation.

Kate and I hope you’ll like this little fraction of the journey and share our joy. Leave comments, ask questions, do amends to history notes.

Everyone is welcome!

P.S. Sheriff, Aladin, Amir, and Ibrahim — you, guys, are the best. We enjoyed your trips and greatly appreciate your help with tea issues. Hope to see you some day again! ;)

Flick Set

This question pops up every now and then, and every time I spend time mulling it over. The apparent reason that I come up with is that I use the blog as my personal notebook. Every time I find something interesting and non-trivial I confront a dilemma: to put it in my desktop jots keeper, or quickly put together a blog post.

Recently I decided to try something new with my blog and started publishing almost ever single finding that helped me or someone I personally know. The bad interpreter thing, rails exception handler, whatever else deserving a word goes directly to the pages of this site. No matter how small the finding is, if I feel the need to take a note, it wins the elections.

An added bonus of this approach is that I’m building a searchable database of tips and tricks that I personally can get back to no matter where I am.

Certainly, nothing new… Just to shed some light on what’s going on.

I can’t get an idea of what’s going on there with Skypecasts. Can somebody enlighten me? I have recently got a headset and decided to have some fun with public chat rooms in Skype, but what I saw didn’t please me at all. There are four to six rooms running at any given moment with almost all of them having no participants. I mean half of these rooms never responded to my call, and the other half had a host user only, which isn’t fun, is it?

Some time in the evening yesterday I finally managed to connect to a group of English learners (they appear to be the only active users of Skypcast these days if I get it right), but after five minutes of me sitting there some weird talkative aussie broke in and scared all the participants off by making fun of them and asking stupid questions. I like one part though… Here’s the short script:

• aussie: … yeah, that’s my name “… Dandy”. You know that Crocodile Dandy? I’m his brother. I wrestle crocodiles.
• one Canadian: well, that’s cool. I wrestle polar bears.

The point is made. Am I missing something or this appears to be a dead branch and isn’t worth monitoring?