Year: 2006

Bloglines went down. Again. They claim it to be for only half an hour. I don’t know. For me it felt like eternity, as this was my news reading half hour.

I don’t buy the power outage. It happenned way too often to them. By now, the most retarded person would have figured out how to avoid such situations. And Bloglines staff is way above retarded. There some pretty smart people over there.

Anyway. It’s when my mind is left with nothing to poke at for such long periods of time, I get all sorts of stupid ideas. This time, I questioned the benefits of online RSS aggregator. I figured that if my computer is up, I want to read some blogs. And so, I should use an offline RSS aggregator.

Akregator is pretty good. It’s fast, intuitive, and works nicely with the rest of the KDE. It also imported my latest backup of Bloglines subscriptions (OPML) without any problems. Reorganizing is easier and faster with Akregator, because it’s a local application, and because it supports nested folders for feeds. Next version even boasts support for tags. We’ll see.

I’ll use it for the time being. Maybe I’ll go back to Bloglines. Maybe I’ll find something else. Or maybe I’ll stay with Akregator.

P.S.: Just so that you know, since I bought my notebook, it became my primary computer and I rarely use any other. Although I still dream of synhronization.

The irony of life – when one person has something that another doesn’t, they have difficulties understanding each other. Not always, but prett often. A person who just had lunch won’t fully dig into what a hungry person is saying. Rich people can’t care less for what comes out of poor people’s mouthes. People in shape don’t hear fat people. I can go on for ever.

One particular example of such misunderstanding occurs between parents and those who never had kids. No matter what people who had children say, those who hadn’t wouldn’t understand them. They might try, but it’ll still be far from what was meant.

My mother used to say “When you’ll have kids, you’d know…”. I was like “Yeah, right…”. Now that I have a son – I suddenly started to understand what she was saying. Not all of it, of course, but I am walking down that path.

Why am I writing this? Because I just came across something someone somewhere far far away posted in her blog. Now I totally understand what she is saying. But just a couple of years ago I’d be like “Oh, c’mon… not again!”.

P.S.: Just to make something clear – having kids does not automatically means understanding all parents. No. But it’s a minimum requirement. You can’t go around it.

I’ve been promising that if I get Cyprus citizenship, I’ll learn Greek. It’s about time I start acting up on that promise…

I will be participating in the Greek course that our company organized for its employees. Starting next Tuesday, I’ll have one and a half hour lectures twice a week. The teacher, I’ve heard, has good reputation and a lot of experience in teaching Greek to foreigners.

I’ll keep you posted on how this will go. Or you’ll notice yourself – Greek alphabet looks very much like Russian cyrillics. And I am not going to post anything in Russian here. So, if you see something you can’t read – it means the courses is doing very good and I learn Greek faster than I can start a new blog (trust me, I’m fast with starting new blogs).

Any pointers to language learning techniques, Greek language textbooks, and other tips, are, as always, very welcome.

This is a quick one – happy birthday, grandpa! We are coming to see you pretty soon. All three of us. Until then take care. It was nice talking to you on phone today. I should call you more often. But then again, I always say so. Anyway, cheers!