Year: 2007

Pain and hunger

My last year’s diet was a huge surprise for my own body.  I caught it unexpected.  It never thought I could do something like this to it.  But I did.  It lost the battle then.   Though it learned the lessons…

Getting back to gym is a challenge this time.  I am getting exhausted way before I start any exercises at all.  And it’s not just lazyness. It’s physical.  My heart is jumping out, my breathing is all broken, my pressure is doing trigonometry… and stuff like that.  And any muscle activity causes pains.  Immediate and then some more of those that stick for a few days.

Additionally to that, I get hunger.  And I mean Hunger.  I’m hungry every moment of day and night.  I can finish my breakfast, and go straight for lunch and dinner.  I can have three lunches.  I can do them 10 minutes apart.  And I can make them XXL-sized.

These reactions are of course part of my body’s defense mechanism.  They want me to stop all this physical training stuff, and just eat more food, so that reserves could be made.  Winter lies ahead.  And there should be a way to get back those 20 kilos too…

Doing less this time takes more effort on my side.  But there is no way back.  I’m not going to surrender.  Because if I do it once, there will be an endless supply of reasons to do it again.

Sketchcast – useful toolbox addition

With all the tools and services blooming recently, it’s still hard to find something useful. Sure there are a million ways of sharing pictures and bookmarks, but we’ve had it for years now. Today, finally, I stumbled upon something which looks to be very useful. And I was glad to see that it is extremely easy to use too – Sketchcast.com.

Sketchcast allows one to create simple sketches – drawings with text and voice over. The tool like this has a huge variety of applications – from driving instructions and computer tutorials to flowcharting and comics. Often I do feel a need to sketch something and then share it either with general public or with certain individuals. Now I have an easy tool to do that.

Sketchcast also has a few additional features which just make it even more useful – RSS feeds, channels, and easy publishing. For the first time in a long time I have a feeling of “easy and simple” coupled with “everything I need, at least for now”. Good job done there.

Here is my channel (the link was added to the right too). You can also subscribe to my sketchcast RSS feed.

Classical music voting battle for Valery Gergiev

It’s nice to see that pop music is not the only one getting top charts, awards, and noisy promotions:

The world’s biggest classical music radio station and the world’s most influential classical music magazine have joined forces to make an already great classical music award even better 

Particularly, I’m glad to see that people can vote via a web site.

Some of my friends are voting for the conductor Valery Gergiev. If you are not familiar with his work, you can listen to some of it here.

Tagging thoughts

This post is somewhat related to my previous rant “The mess with notes“.

One of the things that I lost control of are my bookmarks.  At one point in time I decided that my bookmarks are the same as, or rather a part of, my notes.  And I started to treat them the same way.  And they ended up in the mess together with my notes.  But I was wrong.

Bookmarks can be managed rather nicely with one of the many web services out there.  I always enjoyed the way del.icio.us does that and I don’t know what got into me, that I stopped using it.  Actually, no, I know.  I stopped using del.icio.us when I messed up all my bookmarks.  No surprise there.

The thing that got terribly wrong with my bookmarks was tagging.  Tagging is still a concept that many people try to put their heads around, but a few years ago it was even worse.  I like tagging in that it does not require any strict hierarchy.  But my mistake was thinking that tagging does not require strict rules.

Without strict rules it’s very easy to end up in the mess.  In a mess that I am in right now.  For example, I started tagging RSS related pages with “aggregator”, “aggregators”, “feed”, “feeds”, “xml”, “rss”, “atom”.  That’s just too much.  And later I started worrying that I won’t find some bookmark unless I tag it with all of those.  My tags grew like mushrooms after rain.

What I should have done is tag bookmarks with as specific tags as possible.  If the page is about RSS, it should be tagged with “rss”, not with “aggregators” and “xml” and “feeds”.  “blogging” is about the worst tag ever.  It’s too generic.  It should be either “wordpress” or “writing” or “seo” or something like this.

But I’m going to fix that.  I’m removing all bundles, tags, and bookmarks from my del.icio.us account right now (gotta love Perl for things like Net::Delicioius).  They are too messed up even for me to use.  I’ll start from scratch.  And I’ll see where it’ll get me.   And this time around, I’ll try to use descriptions too.  They are much more helpful than I thought or cared for originally.