Technology Front Line

21 March 2007 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

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.

Spring Whispers

20 March 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

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…

Back to life, safe and sound

19 October 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

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.

Measuring wastes

19 October 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ personal

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?

Discover or Die ...

13 October 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

… 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.

Memory Building

24 September 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ personal

Yesterday I was fixing a pipe in the kitchen, today it was the bathroom door. These days I’m feeling like a true house-husband. Taking the wooden door heavy as hell off the hinges appeared to be not a do-it-alone kind of task even though I managed to succeed. Just let the professionals do their job the next time you need to fix something like that, or at least find a good helper if you still plan on doing it yourself. I was half dead when I finished as it took several rounds to make everything look just right. Phew…

A Productivity Recipe

13 September 2006 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ personal

Couple of weeks ago I started the next round of attempts to improve my workflow and organize the day better. It had started to take way too much time to stay on top of things and something had had to be done about that. So, I began collecting feeds and read books on personal productivity and management, scanning them on a daily basis for new, more effective approaches and methods.

Good Writing, Bad Health

4 September 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

My fever was progressing slowly over the last few days and I had to spend whole weekend at home almost chained to bed. It gave me enough time to review what essential reading was still in progress and choose some books to move on. It appears this weekend was dedicated to English studies and improving of writing skills.

Getting Things Done This Autumn

2 September 2006 ⋅ 8 min read ⋅ personal

It looks, feels and smells, like autumn has finally come. It’s raining two times a blustery day and it’s cold like on Moon chilly nights. Some day this week I caught light cold and still suffering from aching throat. The heat wave had left unexpectedly, then the door bell rang, and in a fraction of a second we are welcoming the autumn in all its colorful beauty.

The World and The Universe

25 August 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

Lately I’ve been thinking about terms World and Universe, and the future. What will happen to them when we discover new worlds and settle on other planets? Today when we say “World Championship” we actually mean “Planet Championship”. It sounds severly narrow minded to treat our planet as the only place in the world, but it’s the legacy and we continue to hammer this meaning into the new citizens’ heads.

No less confusing is the term “Miss Universe” with the planetary meaning again, but this time we do something, like Planet to the power of 2. We call the same place with a stronger name to give it more importance, or alternatively assuming there’s no other race in the whole Universe could possibly compete with humans in beauty. For the record, there’s Miss Universe but there’s no Mister Universe.

We constantly put ourselves in different dumb positions and it has already become acceptable, no matter how high the position of a person on the society ladder. It’s in our nature. We see all these UFOs and signs coming from the above to ensure us that we aren’t alone, and still continue to invent terms ignoring this fact.

I’m in anticipation of the first interplanetary contact. It’ll clear things up.