Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

• I favorited a YouTube video — Parisian Love http://youtu.be/nnsSUqgkDwU?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — Cyanide & Happiness – The Man Who Could Sit Anywhere http://youtu.be/4tpCRBgs-LE?a #

• I favorited a YouTube video — RMR: A Message From Transport Canada http://youtu.be/yZfbTlYpKYo?a #

For reasons that I totally don’t understand, many companies choose Skype as a standard communication application.  I’d understood such a decision if they were using voice or video calls.  But they don’t.  Chat only.  And pretty much everyone knows how horrible Skype is for chats.  It’s slow, often losing offline messages, its history management is horrible, etc, etc, etc.  But today’s post is not about that.

It’s about parallel universes.  And how Skype is the master of them.  Consider my example from this morning.   I came to work, logged in to Skype, saw who is online and started chatting with one of the co-workers.  In the meantime, a guy next to me was doing exactly the same thing – came in, logged in to Skype, saw who is online, and started chatting with another co-worker.  But the interesting bit was that we couldn’t see each other online.  If we tried to send messages or files to each other, they’d fail complaining that the other party is offline.  The same was true for those co-workers with who we were chatting, they couldn’t see the other half of the office, which was online, chatting, and couldn’t see the first half of the office.

Is there any other explanation except that Skype managed to create at least two separate, parallel universes and signed in half of our office into one universe, and the second half of the office into another universe?  I can’t think of one…

• A chase sequence from an Indian movie. Un-freaking-believable! http://kino.oper.ru/news/read.php?t=1051605846 #
• I favorited a YouTube video — Mark Malkoff Gets Carried in New York City http://youtu.be/Gi4ClspNrNs?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 4: Magnets (and 'Why?' questions…) http://youtu.be/wMFPe-DwULM?a #
• First-Person Tetris. Awesome, but makes me dizzy. http://icio.us/1n3i2w #

I’ve posted here about Free Hugs campaign some time ago.  Today I came across an experiment with a smaller goal, but of the same sociality (if there is even such a word).  Mark Malkoff gets a free ride across Manhattan island on the backs of total strangers, proving once again that this world is full of good, fun, strong and crazy people.

Google Calendar team recently ran a survey, asking users what is it that they like and dislike about the product and how to make it better.  Of course, I submitted my opinions, but, as always, better thoughts come after the action has been already taken.  Here is my two items wishlist for Google Calendar.

1. [Update: not true anymore, see comments] SMS notifications for additional calendars.  Google Calendar only supports SMS notifications for your primary calendar.  But if you want to have a separate calendar for work and personal life, then you’ll have to choose which of these will send you messages to the phone.
2. Related events.  Quite often I get into a situation where I need two related entries in the calendar.  For example, I might have a birthday party event and shopping for presents, or a beer session at the pub and table reservation.  Having just one event and a tonne of reminders for it doesn’t really work.  Having two events however makes it more difficult to manage them.  If the party was rescheduled, I’ll need to update my calendar to reflect the change, but I’ll also need to find and update the related event.  It would be so much more convenient if I could just relate one event to another and when I move one (a couple of days later, for example), the related event would reschedule itself as well.

What are the features that you want to see Google Calendar?

• Dropping 80 GB of mp3s from my laptop. Running out of space all the time, and never listen to music. I have them backed up elsewhere anyway. #
• I favorited a YouTube video — 熊ＶＳ猫(Bear vs Cat) http://youtu.be/_pgNxgIxazU?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — very funny jewish wedding english subtitle (la boda) http://youtu.be/7NF3OWNJgYw?a #

• Dropping 80 GB of mp3s from my laptop. Running out of space all the time, and never listen to music. I have them backed up elsewhere anyway. #
• I favorited a YouTube video — 熊ＶＳ猫(Bear vs Cat) http://youtu.be/_pgNxgIxazU?a #
• I favorited a YouTube video — very funny jewish wedding english subtitle (la boda) http://youtu.be/7NF3OWNJgYw?a #

Git is on the rise right now, especially in the Open Source Software development circles.  Some even went as far as predict the death of Subversion.  As much as I appreciate git (here is a link for you, if you don’t) and what it is doing for the Open Source Software, I have to agree with Brandon Savage:

Corporate America needs a centralized version control system. Subversion still offers this: Subversion centralizes the repository and simply checks out a working copy (versus Git, which gives you a complete repository). Corporate America still needs to have cannonical version numbers, and the ability to see the progress of a product over time as a single line – not a bunch of branches and independent repositories.

And this is true not only for the corporate America.

There’s been a lot of shouting recently about how dead the email is.  Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, and what not – all were named killers of email.  What a load of crap, I think.

Firstly, those who think that X can kill email, are probably misusing email themselves.  Email is awesome for email.  For other ways to communicate you already have chats, forums, mailing lists, blogs, social networks, and so on and so forth.

Secondly … nevermind.  What I really wanted to say was that today I hit to edgy cases in my email usage.  Both of them in one day – that’s rather weird.  First, I noticed that my 7.5 GB Gmail storage is at 91% utilization.  That’s a lot of email.  Worried that I might run out one of these days, I cleaned up and reorganized some of the archives, dropping disk space utilization to 64%.  Second (again, I know), if you think that I am just another pack rat and I store tonnes of useless stuff, you’re probably right.  But, right or wrong, today I was asked to find some emails from 2010, 2009, and 2008.  As early as I could get on that specific discussion.  Not every day that I get request like that, but I was rather glad that I could satisfy it.

Thirdly (yes, I decided to continue), there is this really silly corporate world.  In there, people still uses faxes.  They still use emails.  And they just started getting used to Skype.  So it will take them a really long time to get off the email.

So, for all those of you who think that email is about to die, get off the pipe.  There is a huge world out there, and you should go out and experience it.  Over and out.