Month: November 2004

Ford Motor Company

When I first saw this in Michael’s blog I didn’t beleive my eyes. Ford Motor Company owning Volvo, Lincoln, Jaguar, Mercury, Land Rover, Mazda, and Aston Martin seemed like way too much.

Well, Ford’s website has some information about brands. But I went Googling for more information. It looks like it is true.

I have to do something about my jaw, because it ends up on the floor way too often recently.

A couple of new categories and less pictures

I have introduced two new categories:

  • Blogging – this will hold all posts about blogging, blog software, RSS, RDF, Atom, syndication, aggregators, etc.
  • Humor – this will be feeled with all the jokes and links to funny pictures that I put in random categories until now.

I will also be posting less pictures in the “Picture of the day” project. Winter is coming to Cyprus and that means that we will have a lot of rains and other wet nuances. Water and photography equipment don’t mix too well. That kind of limits what I can do outside. Inside is very well photographed by me already and is not so interesting anyway. In any case, I will try to get pictures as soon as possible. It’s just will be slightly less than daily.

Shark Tale

I’ve just got disappointed by “Shark Tale“. Despite all the hype around it, it turned out to be pretty boring and badly drawn animation. It had no realism like “Finding Nemo” did. Fish here were walking on two leg-like fins, used another two hand-like fins to do stuff, and had ugly faces on top of their bodies. These all loked nothing like fish. For some reason also, I don’t get it why they moved half the time vertically and half the time horizontally. Oh, and there was no water at all. I mean there was not a second with an ocean surface, and there was only a few bubles to make you beleive some liquid was involved in the environment.

First half of the movie I was thinking that I didn’t like it because I’ve already seen “Finding Nemo”, which is way better. But than I realized that it is not the reason. The real reason is that this movie sucked.

Bad animation on top of the beaten usual story is something that has no entertainment. Ok, there were a couple of jokes that made me smile, but they were by far not enough for the hour and a half. That’s a pity, it could have been funnier.

5 out of 10.

Open Text Summarizer

I stumbled upon an interesting tool – Open Text Summarizer. It is a small utility which reads provided text, analyzes it, decides what is important and gives it out either in text, or in HTML as highlighted text. Surprisingly, it works pretty well. I have tried it on a couple of blog items and articles. And good news are that this tool is a part of Fedora distribution. Check it out.

Run it as /usr/bin/ots somefile.txt. If you don’t have it installed, than apt-get install ots.

In fact, it is so good that I might incorporate it into my email client for all incoming English languaged messages. Leaving just 5% of the original message, highlights just a single sentence with all the essence of the letter. /usr/bin/ots -r 5 email.txt for that.

When Your Co-Worker is Away

Most of the modern offices are using cubicles instead of full blown office for their employees. Cubicles do provide much less defense from the collegues’ intrusion. When someone with cubicle office has to leave for a business trip or vacation, there is no means he can protect his cubicle. And this is what can happen to it while unattended.

P.S.: The site is a bit slow due to recent popularity boost, so give it a minute or two.