Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I came across this post at Blogging Pro. It is about this other guy - Darren Rowse - who is looking for a good (and available) domain name for his new project.

Instead of spending hours upon hours (or was it after doing so?), Darren started a contest for the best domain name suggestion. The prize is $100 USD. He claims that only after 8 hours, with majority of his readership being a sleep (time zone issue), he received a whole bunch of suggestions that will be difficult to choose from.

It struck me as a very efficient way of finding a domain name. If you’ve ever looked for one, you know what I mean. For those of you who haven’t - it involves numerous itterations across the dictionary, thesaurus, and some sort of “check domain availability” tool. Often there is also a good mix of scripts that generate suggestions. The procedure can go on for hours, days, and even weeks. That is, of course, unless you don’t get enlightened, which also happens, albeit rarely.

Many people enjoy looking for domain names. Just for the sport of it. Give them a subject and they’ll occupy themselves for a good half of their corporate time. Throw in a few bucks and you’ve got yourself the best place ticket for a bloody battle.

In this particular example, the prize is $100 USD. It’s a nice number, though people would certainly participate for less. If you are still doubtful, try it. And consider for a moment, what is a $100 USD. In terms of your time.

Olga was watching one of those cheap sci-fi space movies on TV. It took me only about twenty seconds of looking at before I started joking about it - immitating voices, using quotes from other movies, and doing all sorts of other fooling around.

When I satisfied myself with all the mind crap that I could produce, I took a two minute break by thinking seriously about space stuff. The choice of topic this time was - other races.

In just under two minutes I managed to come up with a three gender choice - Triorids. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well, in this race, they would have your regular Male and Female, and they would also have a Catalyzer.

The thing is that a Triorid Male cannot have sex with Triorid Female. Their genitals just doesn’t match. So they need a Catalyzer. It’s like a converter. It connects to both Male and Female and helps them to have proper sex.

There are good and bad things about Catalyzers. The good thing is that they are more normalized. If you think of Males as plus, and Females as minuses (you can safely reverse, if that’ll change your attitude), than you Catalyzes would be about zero - somewhere in between. They also help a mating couple to stay together by finding compromises in conflicts and complimenting both other sides all the time.

The bad thing is that Catalyzers have the character, soul, and spirit of their own. They live their own lives. In turms of sex, that means that if Male Triorid wants to have sex, he has to convince not only a Female, but a Catalyzer too. Even if both Male and Female want to have sex, they still have to make Catalyzer agree.

I’m writing this idea down, because it occupied the whole two minutes of my two minute break, but I liked it enough to want to think it over next time.

Now I am back to my usual crap of impersonating cheap movie characters and using qutoes from other films…

I’ve got an idea for an application. If you have nothing to do or looking for an idea to practice your mad programming skills, feel free to use this one.

Flickr is an excellent source of images. Better even, all images are tagged and most are available in different sizes. It would be very nice to have a tool that could use Flickr images as desktop backgrounds (wallpapers). Ideally, I would just specify the tags that I am interested in, such as sports, nature, or landscape, and this tool would get the list of images from Flickr that are available in the resolution that I am using. Images could be random or sorted by some criteria, such as posted date or number of comments. If there would be a preview and an easy way to change to the next image (maybe even automatically based on time period) I’d be totally happy.

I don’t see myself programming this anytime soon as I don’t care much for desktop candy. But if one was available there is a chance that I would use it. I also know of a few people who would simply love something like this.

This is one of those things that make me love and feel proud for open source software - innovation. I came across this new way of software development here. In reads like this:

As of today my new hobby is to run up to a developer and say “Hey, I have an icon that I need a program for!”

Beat that you miserable top-to-bottom emptyheads!

The question of salaries is, I think, one of the most important in the business world. How much should an employee get paid? How much is too much? How much is too low?

The other day I was thinking about ways of finding the ideal salary amount. This is close to impossible, of course. But I managed to find a nice measurement for the managers to compare. If employee, by accident, will one day destroy the boss’s car, which supposedly is not insured against accidents like this, than employee’s salary should be high enough to provide a realistic payback period.

Thus, the more expensive boss’s car gets, the more employees should be rewarded for their work. Nice and fair, isn’t it?