Daily tweets

  • I had a full 9 hour sleep. Wow. It’s the first or the second time this year… #
  • My Gmail space usage indicator stays firmly on 50%. 1433 MB out of 2857 MB. #
  • I love Gmail’s idea of growing space.If it was unlimited from the beginning, it wouldn’t be so much fun. #
  • I don’t want to read more feeds than I am already doing. Why can’t I resist the urge to subscribe then? I’m an RSS addict. #
  • With Twitter digests on my blog I can have comments (and visits) from people who don’t use Twitter. Nice. #
  • The amount of comments I get on this site once again shows why threaded comments plugin is useless for an average blog. Not enough comments. #
  • The more ways we have to communicate, the better. Even if we don’t spend enough time communicating. #
  • i see clouds.i wonder if they are somehow connected with my yesterday’s carwash. #
  • reminder to myself: blog about the librarian #
  • @atw26: I see some heavy rainy clouds over Troodos mountains from my office windows right now. #
  • Twitter now makes username into a link, if @ is prepended. Cool. #
  • Perl could have been a really ugly language and nobody would notice, if CPAN was still there. #
  • My debit card is tied to 2-day notice account. I ALWAYS forget about it. Trying to make a purchase right after money transfer… #
  • I am the first guy to ask for printout, when others say “nevermind, it was done electronically”. I don’t trust it enough to just work… #
  • Some people trust the technology because they don’t know how it works.Others – because they do. I’m among the latter ones. #
  • When I’m Twittering too much, does it look like I have nobody to talk to? :) #
  • @alex_mamchenkov: yes. not in sms or im, but on the web. #
  • @alex_mamchenkov: oh.. that was about me talking, and not about username links.. :) #

The librarian

I have this “librarian stereotype” (not sure, if it is “stereo”, but it’s a “type” alright). A thin woman in her middle ages, wearing glasses, simple summer-time dress, and always with a book. Something like that. Of course, there are people of other professions who look like this, and there are definitely librarians who look different, but that doesn’t matter for now. What matters is that the first thought that I get in my mind when I see someone looking like that is “A librarian!”.

I often see one of these “librarians” in the zoo. Every weekend Maxim and I go to the zoo, and there is this woman, who always reads a book, waiting for people who are happy to pay two pounds to have their kids photographed together with a nicely dressed pony. The animal is usually wearing pink feathers on the head, while eating grass nearby.

Today, the “librarian” was there again. As usual. Reading the book. But today she was dressed differently. She has her jeans and some sort of a short t-shirt. Nothing special. But…

When we were passing by, I noticed that she had a tattoo. It was one of those party girl tattoos on her back just above the jeans belt. Hmm… While I paused there for a second, I noticed another tattoo – some Chinese saying down on her leg…

She was reading a book, paying no attention to me. Which was good. Because I was staying there like a guy with one of his childhood stereotypes shredded into pieces.

This was no regular librarian. This was a party librarian. Or she was no librarian at all. Boy! A train of thoughts went through my mind.

And then Maxim called me to see a camel.

Daily tweets

  • Carwashing #
  • Back to the office #
  • Videos in Google search results are just awesome! #
  • Wow! I can even post to Twitter directly from my blog’s admin area. And it counts chars too. Thanks to Alex King for Twitter Tools. :) #
  • As always, if you think you’re good at something – check the Web. Don’t forget to allocate two weeks for depression before doing it though. #

Deeper integration with Twitter

I have to say that I’m spending way too much time on Twitter. I’m following other people, I’m reading random tweets, I’m checking out all those amazing tools built around the service, and I’m posting my own things. Also, every time I publish a post to this blog, a new tweet is created with the link to post and its title.

I thought, my blog is missing out on all that fun. So, today I’ve updated my Twitter Tools plugin and enabled the option for the daily digests. From now on, it should create a post once a day with all my tweets from the day before.

I haven’t tested the functionality, so I wonder how it will work out. We’ll see tonight…

Any good RSS to email service around?

I am looking for a good RSS to email web service. I’ve tried a few but none of them satisfied my appetites yet. Here is what I want:

  • Single account, but several emails. I am using Gmail’s email+keyword@gmail.com functionality for filtering things. I want some of my feeds to go to one email, and some to another email, and yet some to the third one, and so on. But I want to have an overview of what is going on, so a single account with the service is essential.
  • From/Subject editing. Most services that I’ve tried, use feed title for email’s From field, and item title for Subject field. This doesn’t work very well for me, as I am subscribed to a few feeds that will appear the same under this scheme. I should be able to specify manually both the From string and the Subject string.
  • One email per post vs. digest emails. To put it crystal clear, I don’t want digests. I want to have full control over what I save in my mail and what I delete. Digest emails pile up things that I don’t want saved.
  • Frequent updates. Many services suffer from delayed updates. Feeds should be checked every hour. Maximum tolerated delay is about three hours. If it takes any longer to notify me of news, than it’s simply not worth it. I’ll find out about the new from other sources.
  • UTF-8 support. Most of my content is in English, but I have a fair amount of feeds that bring Russia, German, and Greek stuff. I don’t want to see boxes with numbers or question marks instead of non-ASCII characters.

Bonus goes to the service which extends support for feeds from well-known web services, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, etc.

Any recommendations?