Technology

Smile with “Рождеством Христовым”

A couple of days ago DailyPost suggest the following topic for a blog post: Share something that makes you smile. I wanted to share something, but so many things make me smile that it’s hard to choose. Today though I came across something that made me smile, and even laugh. It’ll take me a bit to explain, so please bear with me. And if you choose not to, here is an entertaining and short explanation of “bear with me” versus “bare with me”.

Anyway, here we go with the facts:

It’s just after the midnight on January 7th.
Russia, as well as some other countries, celebrate Christmas on January 7th, and not on December 25th. Wikipedia explains why.
“Merry Christmas” in Russian is “С Рождеством Христовым”.

So, what we have right now is a lot of Russian-speaking people sending “С Рождеством Христовым” via any means possible to a lot of other people. One of those means is Twitter. One of many Twitter features is Trending Topics (aka TT). This is an automatically generated list of most common phrases used across Twitter in some recent period of time (like an hour or two). And as so many other automated features, this one has its side effects.

Firstly, it seems that it doesn’t much care for the language or alphabet. It grabs any frequently used phrase in any language or any alphabet, puts it in the list of trending topics, and shows it to any user, no matter what his location or preferred language is.

Secondly, it seems that it tries to minimize the phrase by removing very short words. Like those consisting of only one or two characters.

So what we have by now is “Рождеством Христовым”, and not “С Рождеством Христовым”. And that phrase is a number one trending topic, shown to all Twitter users everywhere. Here is a screenshot.

Here starts the fun. Most people who see this, have no idea what is it all about. Many of those, who are trying to find out get confused by incorrect spelling and by the fact that Christmas is over already for most of the world. That I find funny.

But that’s not all. Since the phrase went up to trending topics, it got a lot of special attention. Humor. Some people started spreading rumors. For example, that “Рождеством Христовым” is the name of the new Russian nuclear bomb. Some others started using the phrase in famous quotes. For example, “I love the smell OF Рождеством Христовым in the morning!” (original quote talks about napalm and is from the movie “Apocalypse Now”). That I find hilarious. You can have a look yourself at everything that has been tweeted with this phrase.

And even that is not all. Twitter has been known for having hard times during activity spikes. Today is just one of such spikes. So Twitter is unstable, falling over the edge. And when it does so, it shows the famous Fail Whale.

This is cute and worth a smile, but there is still more to the story. The meaning of Fail Whale varies between people. Mashable once published an interview with the designer of the image. While I know the background of this image, I can’t help a different association. The one that Denis Lebel mentioned in the comment to that interview – the story of the Sperm Whale from Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Universe.

It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a Sperm Whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet and since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity.

Innocent “Merry Christmas” wishes, weird Cyrillic letters shown to the whole world, rumors of nuclear war from Russian, word play with famous quotes, Twitter outages, and flying whales – I find the mix hilarious. I hope you do too.

P.S.: To all those of you celebrating – Merry Christmas and С Рождеством Христовым.

Blog a day, or blog a week

New Year is the perfect time to raise hopeless hopes. Like any given Monday, or the first day of any month, it’s the time to start something that you hope to finish. People promise they will start (or stop) doing all sorts of things – quit smoking, start exercising, stop procrastinating, and so and so forth. This is non-sense of course, but that’s just what we, humans, do.

So in the spirit of a new era start, WordPress.com issued a challenge for 2011 – blog more. To help you complete the challenge, they created a separate website – DailyPost. This one will be updated daily with ideas and other bits of inspiration. All you need to do is post a single blog entry every day throughout 2011. If that sounds like too much, they have a lighter variation – a post a week. You don’t have to follow their subjects – post whatever you want. Just write something either daily or weekly. And to help others find and follow your stuff, tag your posts with postaday2011 or postaweek2011. That’s all.

I’ve done similar challenges before. Not necessarily they were centralized or aligned with someone else, but I did put myself to such a task before. And not only in blogging. For example, I’ve learned most that I know about photography in just a couple of months. It was when I followed someone advice to make a photograph every day. It didn’t matter what I was making a photograph of. Just that I made one. Of course, there were days when I didn’t have the camera around, or was too busy, or too lazy. But I was pretty close to a daily picture (see POTD – Picture Of The Day tag archives).And it did magic to my skills. And so did a blogging challenge.

Someone said somewhere that creativity requires fluency. In order to be creative, you have to be fluent. If you want to be creative in photography, your camera and equipment shouldn’t stay in your way. If you want to speak or write better, you shouldn’t need a dictionary for every other word. If you want to do experimental dancing, you should have good control of your body. And so on and so forth. But there is only one way to get better at something. It’s do that something. The more, the better.

So, if blogging sounds interesting to you, you should blog more. And it’s much easier to do it when you are not alone. Now is the time.

I’ve been quite busy last year. And I blogged much less than in previous years. I wanted to do more. And now I think I will. I will follow up with the challenge. Will you?

Foundation – new podcast by Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose, who you probably know as the founder of Digg and co-host of the popular podcast Diggnation, has started a new podcast – Foundation. In this one, he interviews famous and not so much founders of web services, entrepreneurs, and other creative people. The show is free. It’s also ad-free, but there is some sort of subscription for those who want to get it one week earlier. The first episode is out and it’s a half an hour interview with Jack Dorsey – inventor of Twitter and co-founder of Square. Watch it at Revision3 and subscribe.

Blogging milestone : 5,000+ posts

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you post number 5,005. I nearly missed it altogether, so please excuse a not exactly a round number. And now, before you throw things at me, let me highlight some disclaimer points:

I’ve written more than 5,000 blog posts in my life. But quite a few of them went down, disappeared, or are blocked behind corporate firewalls. Today’s celebration is only about my personal blog.
Not all of these blog posts were written by hand. Some are aggregates from Twitter, Delicious, or some other third-party service that I used. But I count them anyway, because they compensate for those lost posts, and because the spirit of sharing even via a third-party is too similar to blogging. I found something worth sharing, I shared it, and it ended up on my blog in one form or the other.
Most of these posts are utter crap that nobody will ever read or use. But I still celebrate them, because I took the effort to write them, and because they were important to me at some point in time.
On top of that, I celebrate all these posts that survived over multiple blog software migrations, hosting changes, restructuring and reorganizations. While they are a huge mess that many of you would be glad to throw away, they constantly remind me of all those transformations that I went through. And if nothing else, they provide me with an extra leverage in any data organization argument. After all, thousands of posts and comments over 10 years of blogging should count for some experience.

Let the celebrations begin!

Good news from PrimeTel

Yes, I know, I am biased when I talk about PrimeTel, since I used to work there and still have a lot of friends there. But even with that, how can one not be happy about great news that came in via SMS today:

Your Internet speed will double as of 1/1/2011 with no additional charge. Happy New Year from PrimeTel!

I am getting 4.5 – 5.5 Mbps on my 4 Mbps PrimeTel subscription. With this new upgrade it seems I’ll be getting somewhere around 10 Mbps. Excellent present – thank you PrimeTel!

Updated: You might also want to read this article in Cyprus Mail.