Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-12-06
Maxim is developing his hand skills even further.
The most recent activity is finger pointing. He can’t yet separate his index finger from the rest of the feast when he points at something, but the direction of his pointing is obvious.
But the most amuzing of all is his new way of putting hands together in a pray-like manner. Combined with his outstanding kneeling skills it provides a whole lot of entertaining for me and Olga. I’ll try to catch this one on the picture for you…
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-12-05
Now this one is simply great.
I was reading through the funny IRC quotes at Bash.Org.Ru, which is a Russian analogue of Bash.org, when I came across the quote #4741.
Here is a rough translation for you:
Billing
Dear customers! For the last three days we had a technical problem and your used Internet traffic wasn’t calculated properly. We kindly ask you to calculate the approximate amount of traffic that you used during this period and pay cash accordingly in our office. With best regards, company management. http://isp.kz/
I smiled and almost went away. But before I did so, I noticed a small post-scriptum – it was a moderatorial note from bash.org.ru that confirmed that this message was actually posted to the official website of the provider.
So, I rushed to check it out and, indeed, it was still there.
I was laughing so hard that I almost woke up Olga and Maxim. I mean how stupid and naive that is – asking your customers to pay based on their own calculations? What are they counting at? Good will? Honesty? Or maybe they just have an excellent sense of humor. If so, they should have an update of some sort published shortly.
After all, those who thought tha Borat (.kz stands for Kazakhstan, as does Borat) was an exhageration are wrong. He is by far not. No.
While scrolling through Slashdot comments about KDE 3.5 release, I noticed a little bit of discussion about printing. The question was about how many people are actually printing anything these days.
That made me think a bit. I was one of the heaviest printer users back in college days. I had to do special arrangements with the sysadmin (read: slave labour) to get myself extra printing quota. I was printing probably 50 pages a day or so – everything I looked at on the web, was ending up as hard copy in a whole bunch of paper folders that I had.
There were reasons for me to print so much though. Search engines were pathetic, so finding the same thing again was close to impossible. Websites were coming and going all the time, so even if you could find the resource – there was absolutely no guarantee that it would have the content your were looking for archived anywhere. Mobile computing was a cool fantasy back than, especially inaccessible for students (pricewise). There were no services like Delicious that would allow to get your bookmarks easily from any computer connected to the web. Compact USB drives weren’t yet there, so moving files between computers wasn’t trivial. And so on and so forth.
Obviously, the best way to save information and move it around was to print it out.
During the last few years the technology progressed a lot. Especially mobile computing and networking. And web services. These take care of all my needs.
While I can still think of some computer users that would need the printing facility (accountants anyone?), I really cannot remember when was the last time I printed anything out. As a matter of fact, I gave away both of my printers (inkject and dot-matrix) that I had at home to someone else more than three years ago. For nothing. And two ot three last incarnations of my office workstation didn’t even have printing configured. So it must be about 4 or 5 years since my last printout.
What about you? Do you print anything at all? How often do you do that?