Year: 2006

The art of asking

There is nice and short list of tips on hot to ask questions at LifeHacker. If you are new to the Internet, or if you are old and noone seem to ever answer your questions, go read that little article.

If it’s obvious that you haven’t put any elbow grease into researching your question yourself, folks are a lot less likely to help you – especially on mailing lists. Make sure you do a good faith run through the user guide and search the web before you waste other people’s bandwidth on an issue you can solve yourself.

There are times when web search won’t help because you don’t know the right terms that others have used to describe the concept. In those cases, say up front, “My Google skills failed me” or “I searched a few different combinations of foo and bar, with no success” or “I called customer service and they couldn’t help either.”

Show that you at least tried.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-08-18

Kiko is on sale

Kiko is one of those web-based calendars that were released recently in whole bunches. It features all the modern technologies one could think of – RSS feeds, AJAX interface, Email/SMS/IM reminders, and more. I myself haven’t tried it thought. I’ve been playing with AirSet and 30boxes, and found my peace with Google Calendar. But I’ve heard some good words about Kiko too.

It turned out thought that it didn’t work out as a commercial idea. The development got a bit sidetracked and slowed down, and then it had to compete with Google Calendar, which additionally to being a monster of its own, has an integration with Google’s other service – GMail.

So, Kiko is up for sale – here’s an Ebay auction. Here are the lessons that one of the project leaders, Justin Kan, has learned with the project. And here are the thoughts of project’s investor, Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame.