Year: 2006

Kids and smiles

This post in Sanjay’s blog got me started.

I love kids. I love it when kids smile. Whenever I see a kid, I smile at him. And you know what’s fun – no matter how old is the kid, no matter if that’s a boy or a girl, no matter what time of a day it is, no matter in what mood the kid was, no matter if parents are around or not, not matter if the kids knows me personally or not – the reaction is ALWAYS the same. A smile.

Adults are different. You have to catch them either in the right mood or offguard. Adults’ reactions also depend on circumstances. They think to much. Most of them at least. Why did he smiled at me? Is it a smile or is he laughing at me? What’s so funny? Etc, etc, etc… It’s just not the same.

When I smile at a kid, and the kid smiles back, it’s like we’re the only two beings in the universe and nothing else matters. It’s one of the most pure experiences that I had. Every time.

Try it. Go out on a street, walk a bit, until you see a kid, wait for the kid to see your face, and then smile kindly. That’s it. No laughing, no talking, no gestures, no toys, no “Oh, you sweet little, you…”. Just a smile. And watch him smile back. Enjoy.

Bloglines blog experiment

I wonder… how many blogs are too much? There are people out there who think that even one blog is one too many. I don’t. I think that one blog is a must and is an absolute minimum. Both for an individual and an organization.

Because I am so much interested in blogging, I allow myself to experiment a lot. And here’s my new experiment – a blog at Bloglines (complete with an RSS feed).

Why do I need another blog? Well, I don’t. It’s just that after my return to Bloglines from Google Reader land I am missing one feature – “starred” items. Bloglines has “Clippings”, which are like bookmarks that can be saved into folders, but these are different from “starred” items a bit.

While stars are much easier to use than Clippings, this is not the thing that I miss. “Starred” items can be very easily shared. And, although it can seem very unimportant, it is not so. I’ve already touched upon this in my new Bloglines blog, in this post.

In brief: blogrolls are very outdated, because they are too large, too dynamic, and too out of focus. Who’s going to scroll through my two hundred links in blogroll? I guess noone. Because even I won’t. But many of you are interested in the selected bits from my daily readings. Those are bits that form my opinion on a daily basis, and those are bits that can help you understand my thinking better. Those are “starred” items, selected pieces of worthy content from all the noise that I filtered out.

So, from now on, I’ll use my Bloglines blog to share interesting things from my daily reading. As the absolute minimum, you’ll get a link to an article with a title. But I’ll try to provide some more. Notes will be helpful for me to find those links again later.

Now, this paragraph is for Bloglines team (bloglines freedbacking). Guys, please please please, either allow for the “Blog this” link to work with third-party blogs (like WordPress installations) or add comments to the Bloglines blogs. Otherwise, who on Earth are we, bloggers, going to build the community around Bloglines?

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-07-12

My mother is getting technical

While my mother was here, I was planning to dedicate some time to fight her computer illiteracy. As always, my bad planning and her sly (sneaky?) nature left us with about 40 minutes before her plane for all the teachings.

During those few minutes I only managed the bare minimum. Firstly, I installed Skype on her computer, registered her and configured her account, and made it to autostart in Online mode all the time. I gave her a brief lecture on what it is and how to use it (just the chatting part, no VoIP). Then we moved on to GMail. She had an account there for a long time, but never used it. I just showed her how to read messages, reply to messages, and compose new ones, and our time was up. No filtering, no labels, no archives.

While I was talking, she was mostly writing. With a pan on a piece of paper. She wrote almost a full page, re-drawing the icons and putting arrows all over the place. Too bad. When I came back from the airport, I noticed this piece of paper on my living room table, exactly where she left it.

After all these, imagine how surprised and proud I am to find my mother logged in to Skype every day for hours. She is chatting with me, participating in the conferences, and doing a terrific job. She also figured out the whole GMail thing. Probably not with labels and filters yet, but she does send emails. She even figured out the attachments, which I didn’t even explain to her.

I know that user interfaces are getting more intuitive with each year, but I still have to say – Ma, I’m proud of ya! Ya doing great!