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.
Next meeting of Road Safety and Advanced Driving Society (RoADS) has been scheduled for 19:00 on October 20th, 2005. The meeting will take place in The Haven Coffee Bar, Pafos. You can find the map and more information about the location here.
I am very interested in getting there, but with my schedule for October 20th I am not sure I will be able to. I’ll keep my fingers crossed though and maybe I will get lucky.
I was taking one semi-funny semi-serious online test about Internet addiction. I went through all the questions and was about to press the submit button. There was a text under the button saying that after I press it, I will get the results of the test in the text area below. I pressed it. And the browser crashed.
At first I though it was a joke. Than I realized that it wasn’t. Than I started thinking of what I should do. If I went back and did the test again, I would knew without it that I was addicted. If I didn’t go back, I wouldn’t know if I am.
Finally, I decided that I am somewhat addicted and that I shouldn’t take the test anymore. In fact, I should probably take less online tests as most of them are as inaccurate as horoscopes printed in newspapers. Yeah. Amen to that.
I have done a few minor changes about the Google Ads that I run on this site.
Firstly, I have added another vertical ad on all pages. It appears below the search field and makes the sidebar look not as lonely as it used to when scrolled further down.
Secondly, I have changed the color scheme of all ads to match the new colors of the site. Luckily, I didn’t have to mess around with CSS and hexadecimal numbers myself. Google Adsense has a theme that closely matches the colors that I wanted – Steely Gaze.
Thirdly, I have separated all ads into three channels – sidebar, comments-above, and comments-below. This will allow me to get better reports from Google. From now on I will see which ads are more effective and also will be able to play around with different color schemes and ad formats.
I hope that all these ads are not too annoying and that you’ll be clicking on those that really match the content of posts. I am less than $10 USD short for my second paycheck from Google and I hope to get it before Christmas.
I was surprised to find out that I actually have a real holiday today. I wasn’t working the night before and I am not going to the office tonight. Neither I am needed there over the day. I even didn’t have to wake up early to go for a walk with Maxim as it was Olga’s turn.
I almost forgot how it feels, you know. With all this time at my hands I wasn’t sure how to properly spend it. And I spent most of the day thinking about it. It’s almost 9 o’clock in the evening and I haven’t done anything yet (except upgraded mysql and forgot to restart the service, bringing the site down for a few hours and not noticing it – thanks Sanjay).
Well, maybe that’s how one is supposed to spend a holiday – doing absolutely nothing. If that’s so, than I succeded to have a really good day.
P.S.: Unfortunately I finished my ice cream bowl yesterday. It would be so good to have some ice cream on a day off. Too lazy to go out and buy one today though…
My Linux Weekly News expires in a couple of days. I’ve been supporting the publication for the last two or three years and I still find it to be a great source of good journalism. But I realized that I haven’t been using it that much in a last year. Sometimes it were weeks between my visits to LWN. It just doesn’t matter that much to me anymore. And I think this is a good reason to stop renewing my account.
With all those extra money I feel like I have to find a new place to spend them. The problem is that I don’t use that many web services anymore.
Most of the stuff I do on the web is connected to my site in this or that way. So I was considering donating to WordPress at first. But they say that time is the best thing I can give to them, not money. And I do promote WordPress as much as I can both on this website and when I talk to people.
Than I thought about Gallery. But I figured that I am not that happy with it yet and I’ve only just started using it. I am not sure yet that I will stay with it for a long time.
By this time, I was practically out of alternatives. And than it hit me – Flickr. I don’t use it much yet, but it bugs me all the time. Flickr is an excellent service and I want to find the way to use it. And maybe I will. Currently, I am just backing up some of the most important images there, but I think it’s that monthly bandwidth limitation that stops me from working with it seriously.
Another point that made me consider Flickr more than anything else is that by paying them money, I won’t be just donating. I will get a FlickrPro account that will increase the monthly bandwidth limit from 20 MBytes to 2 GBytes and provide me with a bunch of other useful functionality.
I haven’t yet made my mind though. I am still thinking about it. If you have any suggestions on which other services or product I might be interested in, let me know.