history

Friday

We have a little tradition in the office where I work now. We call the last working day of the week – Friday. It doesn’t really matter which day of the week it is really. If there are some public holidays ahead, then, even Wednesday can be a perfect Friday. Sometimes we refer to such Friday as an Early Friday.

A good example of this is today. Even though the calendar on every electronic device around me says “Thursday”, my colleagues are walking around with smiles on their faces. “It’s Friday finally”, they say. That is because tomorrow the Republic of Cyprus joins Greek in celebrations of the Ohi Day. It is a public holiday which usually also features a military parade.

Interestingly, we don’t have a similar tradition for Late Monday. Even though it would be logical to call the first working day of the week Monday, we don’t. I think that is because Mondays are special. They are tough and ugly and nobody likes them. Calling another day of the week Monday is an insult. Whereas calling another day of the week a Friday is a compliment.

With that, happy Early Friday to all of you guys!

Triangular letters of the World War II

Via this Kottke post I was reminded of the triangular letters of the World War II. That was a good historical summary. Nice of them to include the folding instructions as well. With all the advances in electronic communication channels recently, this feels like one of those historical artifacts, sliding away into the darkness of the past…

What Was Your First WordPress Version?

James Huff of Weblog Tools Collection asks the questions: what was your first WordPress version? Since I’ve been using WordPress for a few years now, my memory got hazy and I didn’t quite remember. It took me a couple of minutes to dig the truth out.

According to my archives, I’ve migrated this site from NucleusCMS to WordPress on April 9, 2005. A quick check with WordPress versions history suggests that my first WordPress version was 1.5. It was released on February 17, 2005. Version 1.5.1 was released on May 9, 2005 and I’ve upgraded to it, not migrated.

So, for six and a half years I’m using WordPress and I’ve never regretted it even once. That’s quite an achievement, I think. Huge thanks to WordPress folks. I hope that you will continue to bring us more WordPress awesomeness for years to come.

What was your first WordPress version?

Delicious is dead. Long live Delicious.

Plenty has been said in this blog about the social bookmarking service Delicious over the years. Lately, discussions of the Delicious fate were falling into the sadness. After the web service was bought by Yahoo, it was maintained and developed for a while and then began to slow down. Things got so bad in fact, that Yahoo announced that it was selling the property. That was a moment of panic for many – after all, good or bad, Delicious was a storage of vasts amount of wisdom for many people. Pretty much every user at the moment exported data and made a few backups. Most looked at the alternative services. Some started moving over. I was in that group as well, migrating all my bookmarks to Evernote.

Anyhow, Delicious was acquired by a couple of guys who are famous for their work on YouTube, back in the day. And that was a glimpse of hope. Finally, I thought, geeky techies will know what to do with it. They will know how to breath some life into the project and bring its much deserved popularity back. They will prove me moving all my stuff to Evernote wrong.

Finally, a few days ago, the new Delicious went live. Fresh look, new features – things that we all were waiting for. Or so it seemed. Upon a closer look it turned out that most of the old useful features are gone. And the new features aren’t the ones everyone was waiting for. Overall, this is a huge transformation of the service that Delicious is. Part of it is still Delicious – there are still bookmarks and tags. But part of it is something new – stacks, improved multimedia previews, missing networking, cropped tag navigation, and such. The primary focus of the service moved. Before it was primarily a storage of bookmarks. And secondly, a place to share bookmark wisdom via networking with friends, tagging, and search. Now, it’s more of a fancy multimedia collections or something of a sort.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for new and exciting technologies. But for me personally, Delicious was something completely different. And now, with this new release, the last hope of that old Delicious the memory of which I love and cherish, is gone. It’s no more. The end of an era. It’s time to move on and explore the new age. Delicious is dead. Long live Delicious.

On global food crisis

Some of these food-related historical anecdotes are fascinating:

The G8 met in Hokkaido, Japan, in July 2008 to address the global food crisis. Over an eighteen-course meal—including truffles, caviar, conger eel, Kyoto beef, and champagne—prepared by sixty chefs, the world leaders came to a consensus: “We are deeply concerned that the steep rise in global food prices coupled with availability problems in a number of developing countries is threatening global food security.”

Via Kottke.org.