Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.
Elia Dyrdina (Slava’s wife, but I really shouldn’t mention that) is celebrating her birthday today. I wish her all the best, and, as usual, I hope that she’ll stay as childish and lighthearted as she is.
Have a good one – I’ll see you later today…
Olga was very good this year and Santa Claus gave her a camcorder for Christmas. That means that even more content will be posted to this website in the coming year. So far you had plenty of texts and loads of images with occasional audio. Video clips were rare. Now they’ll be more often. (Stay tuned for the upcoming New Year Eve filming with me performing as Santa Claus).
We’ll just need some time to study the camera and how the whole process of filming, ripping, and optimizing for web works. Any hints are more than welcome, as usual…
It appears that I’ve been living under a rock or something for the last few month. Or maybe I’m just getting old and losing the touch. I’ve been hearing about this thing called MySpace and I wasn’t paying any attention.
Today I’ve heard about it in at least four different podcasts. People were saying that MySpace is the hottest, newest, and coolest thing and that all the kids love it. Obviously, I am not the kid – because I had no idea what that was.
So, I went to check it out and registered my MySpace. I looked around. Nothing particularly interesting – it’s just a large portal with a bunch of features like user profiles, friend finder (by location, interests, etc), blogging tool, forums, a bunch of onlines games, image galleries, and so, and so forth. Basically, it’s your average portal of the last centures advanced, polished, and brought into this century.
For some reason, though, it is extremely popular. There are a lot of users and many of them login very regularly. And do a lot of stuff – blog, upload photos, chat, etc. For example, the search for people Cyprus returned an unseen ever before result of 35 users! And the search was limited to women who are between 25 and 30 years of age and have at least one picture in their profile. Not bad. Not bad at all. And there are some really nice women too.
Anyway, with this huge number of people, the value of the portal increases – no question about it. There are always people online, there are people with all sorts of interests, from all over the world – good for expanding your contact list and for killing few hours daily.
Two things that I wrote on a bad list. First one is very obvious – ads. There are so many of them and they are so heavy that browsing around isn’t much fun even with such protecting browser as Firefox. I can only feel pity for people who use MySpace with Internet Explorer. The second thing is, well, probably related to the Firefox itself. During those 15 minutes that I spent on the site, my browser had to be killed twice. It slowed down to a crawl and was abusing the system. Probably, their JavaScripts aren’t optimized for it yet.
Whatever.
After spending about 15 minutes on the site I realized most of its features and the value it has for many people. Am I one of those people? No, I don’t think so. But just in case you want to test MySpace with a real user – you can use me.
I have posted the 1,000th bookmark to my del.icio.us account today.
Here is my bookmarking evolution.
At first, I wasn’t using bookmarks at all. I didn’t have my own computer,so there was no point. And there were only a handful of sites that I was visiting, so, again, there was no point.
Later I go myself a computer and bookmarks started to multiply. They were all in one folder, and then they grew out of it, so I had to create some sort of hierarchy.
Then I got myself another computer and an office workstation. My bookmarking rate decreased since I didn’t have any means of synchronizing bookmarks between computers. I was adding bookmarks slower and not using them at all. My favourite sites were still in my memory and not computer’s.
The need for a good bookmark manager was growing though. I wrote a few scripts that synchronized my data between computers, but it was still a pain. Too often the needed machine was offline…
Then came Google. Somehow it stopped the whole bookmarking process. And I wasn’t the only one. Many many many people forgot about bookmarks altogether. Finding it again was so much faster and simplier with Google that everyone were doing just that.
With Google and the progress of the technology the Web grew fast. Lots of amazing stuff got published on the web. Finding something specific is still simple. But there are whole bunch of these things that you see once and then forget about them, until you need them long way down the road. By the time you need them, you don’t even remember what exactly they were – just some vague association. Googling for something vague doesn’t work very well. At least for me. So the need for something else was growing again. Google was good, but it wasn’t enough.
And so it came – Delicious. I was so glad to find! From the start my usage of it was pretty extensive. I was posting lots of stuff, tagging, re-tagging, importing and exporting, building statistics, and doing all sorts of crazy things. It was exactly what I needed.
And it still is.
Maxim is 10 month old. He learns to walk and to talk. Something tells me that he can start doing both of these simultanously (along the lines of “Holy Crap! Look ma, I’m walkin’ over here!”). He is still puzzled with the Christmas Tree, but he slowly gets used to it.
Instead of a proper present, he got a pair of new boots. Size 20. Infant 20 that is. He’ll probably enjoy them a great deal as they are both comfortable and taste good.
Happy birthday, Max!