Year: 2006

For the last couple of weeks I felt this terrible urge of having my own P.O.Box. I don’t have much use for it, but I want one anyway.

Today I decided that it’s time to do something about it. So I went to the closest post office and told them what I want. I was prepared for all sorts of replies – from “Fill in this form” to “It’s August – the time of vacations. Please come back in September.” After living for so many years in this country such preparations happen automatically.

But I wasn’t ready for the response that I received. I bet I had a really stupid face there for a couple of seconds. The woman behind the desk said: “We currently don’t have any available boxes for rent. And we won’t have any this year. Please come back in March. Or in April.” That sounded like a lot even for Cyprus.

I’ll be checking other nearby post offices. If nothing else, I’ll share the P.O.Box with a friend of mine, who already has on.

After reading this:

Instead of only teaching journalism as a profession, they should think of journalism as a basic requirement for a good education. It’s a skill they should be teaching everyone who gets a bachelor’s degree, from now on.

I remembered my own thinking about new skillset. While I haven’t gone as far as microjournalism (they did microeconomics too, remember?), I have a couple of my own suggestions.

1. Touch-typing. Seriously, are there any good careers left these days that don’t require a few hours per day in front of the computer? How far can kids go in life without this skill? I know that many of them teach themselves. But they do so with reading and counting too…
2. Introduction to databases. I’m not talking about a full-blown database course, but rather something very simple based on it. Introduction to databases was probably the most important course in my college curriculum. It taught me so much about data and ways of organizing it (tables, keys, normalization). Way too many people learn this things through trial and error method during their whole lifespan. It should be given to them before all the data.
3. Introduction to photography. This one is less important then the above too, but I’d make it the among the first candidates for the first available slot of time. Digital cameras are everyone these days. And most people have absolutely no clue about color theory, composition, etc. Again, I am not talking about something advanced here. Simple things. A bit of colors. The Rule of Thirds. Maybe a Golden Mean. That would improve the content on the web and everwhere else (where else?) as much, if not more, as that microjournalism course.

Which other courses – from the Computer Science department or any other – as an absolute requirement these days?

Via shershnev.net I came across the “10 Ways to Make Your Digital Photos Last Forever“. This is again, one of those lists, that tells you everything you already now, but in slightly different words. I’ve a read a lot of lists like this in my time (a year or two ago). And I still occasionally check them out.

I’ve also gained some experience of my own. Because of that I don’t always agree to what is said in those lists. Also, times change and some things that were true five years ago, are not true any more.

So, below is the list of original items with my comments, for what it’s worth. Click on the link to read the full post – I’m trying not to annoy the hell out of people who scroll through the main page…

Continue reading 10 ways NOT to get burried in your digital photos

I cam across an interesting discussion on multilingual blogging via this BloggingPro post. The question is: what’s the best way to do it?

I’ve thought about it more than once. I’ve even had to make this decision more than once. You see, my native language is Russian. My written Russian is horrible, but I still prefer it in certain situations. My English, I hear, is almost good. And being from Computer Science background, I prefer English for all my technical communications. English language is the father of all technical terms. Or at least those that I care about. There’s also another benefit to English for me – for the last ten years I’ve lived in Cyprus. English is like an official language here – everyone speak it. Oh, and one day I hope I’ll learn enough Greek to use it for blogging too.

So, what’s the best way to go about it? Everyone decides for themselve.

I personally leaned for separation. For this blog I use English only. As I do for some other blogs. And for some other blogs I use Russian, but exclusively as well. Usually, I blog about different things in different languages. But at those times that I use different languages to talk about the same thing, I still write it differently. It’s not a translation. It’s a totally other story. Because language is not the only thing which is different between people. The whole cultural part is. Russian-speaking people communicate differently from English-speaking people. As do Spanish-speaking people. And French-speaking people. And multilingual people. And everyone else…

So, I say – if you have to go with two or more languages for you company’s blog or just because you want to – separate them. Have a blog for each language. You’ll have more freedom this way. And your audience will be less fragmented. And more focused. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it?

One of the things that annoyes the hell out of me while blogging is a missing name. Scrolling through the feeds, following the links, I often end up reading an interesting post at someone’s blog. I read it, I think about it, I want to blog about it. Naturally, I might want to provide a quote from the original post and a link back to full post, so that readers of my blog know what I am talking about and have a way to go and read the full post at the original location, if they feel so inclined.

And it’s when I am trying to be civilized that I often have a problem. It’s either an anonymous blog, or it just doesn’t have a name, or there’s no hint of how to address the author of the post.

As an opposite example consider my blog. It might be a bit too much, but I prefer too much to too little. The title of the blog is “Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov”. It’s up there on the header image and it’s also in the title of the browser window. And every post has an author’s name attached to it. That’s just in case I’ll allow someone else blog here or will some day write a way too smart Perl script that’ll post instead of me. Anyone quoting from this blog has enough information to write “Leonid Mamchenkov said…”.

But what do you do when you want to quote from a blog that doesn’t have any title and has not information who the author is. Sometimes it’s just empty. At other times it’s so general that it’s useless. For example: John’s blog. Which John? There are at least a couple of millions of them in the world. Or even worse: sexy baby’s diary. Right. Like we haven’t seen any sexy babies before.

So, for the sake of quoting sanity, I beg you to make it dead clear who is the author of the text. Either put it in the title, or sign with the author name, or have it somewhere on the sidebar saying “Quote this text as XYZ Cave” or something.

Thank you.