Tag: people

The Nerd Handbook – quick guide to the unknown

Via Mark Fletcher’s post came across The Nerd Handbook.  This is a really nice post explaining a few things about nerds.  While details may vary from person to person, the overall picture is pretty accurate of so many people I’ve seen in the IT industry and in some science related areas (mathematics, physics).  Here are a few quotes:

A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.
The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.

Your nerd loves toys and puzzles. The joy your nerd finds in his project is one of problem solving and discovery. As each part of the project is completed, your nerd receives an adrenaline rush that we’re going to call The High. Every profession has this — the moment when you’ve moved significantly closer to done. In many jobs, it’s easy to discern when progress is being made: “Look, now we have a door”. But in nerds’ bit-based work, progress is measured mentally and invisibly in code, algorithms, efficiency, and small mental victories that don’t exist in a world of atoms.

This post is a better written piece, which is also more accurate than most of those endless lists “You are a nerd if …“.  If you know somebody really weird, working in IT or scientific research, I strongly recommend to read the article.

Movies, crying men

If you think men don’t cry, you’re out of touch with reality.  If you think men never cry in the movies, you are terrible wrong again.  Check out this article, and scroll through Digg comments to the original post.

When it comes to crying the cinema, I have to admit, I’m among the wettest people ever.  The list of movies that make me cry is long that it makes no sense in compiling it.  It’s probably easier to name movies that didn’t make me cry.  And even with those, it’s probably that I haven’t seen them enough times…

What is the future of communication?

Nikos pinged me just in time about the MicroMedia 5 minute meetup.  That’s basically a virtual meeting of a bunch of people, who each provide their own answer to one specific question.  Since the meetup is virtual, the answers should have been provided virtually as well.  And since it was all about micromedia, it was logical to expect micromedia tools to be used.  The question this time was: “What is the future of communication?“.

That’s one broad question if seen from all perspectives.  To avoid a non-stop thinking exercise, I limited myself to a version like “What is the future of communication from micro media point of view?“.  For those of you, who don’t know what micro media is all about, here is a quote from the meetup wiki:

  • Text: Microblogging tools like Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, or Text messages
  • Audio: Twitter Gram, Utterz, Audioblogger, or other
  • Images: Get creative here, can you tell a story from photos?

These tools rushed into our digital lives recently, and got a large and important place there.  The applications of these tools vary from personal notes to corporate meetings, but most people use these for communication purposes.  So, here are the questions that I got thinking about:

  • How are these tools going to change in the future?
  • Will we get some new ones?  Will the old ones stay?  How much will those that will stay change?
  • What kind of tools will people prefer and why?
  • How will these tools be utilized?
  • How will people’s lives change because of these tools?

There is a lot that I can say  answering these, but most of it will be just water with no proof or reason to it.  For me it’s mostly based on personal experiences and feelings, rather then any specific studies or statistical data or anything like that.

Before I go on, here is the short answer the meetup question that I posted to Twitter.

Twitter-type short text services with open API and mobile/SMS integration will rule the future for a long time.

Now, for the long story.

I think plain text will dominate images, video, and sound for a very long time.  That’s not going to change in any foreseeable future.  I think so because:

  • Text is way easier to produce. Most of electronic devices these days have some sort of keyboard attached.  Text can be easily produced in a number of ways – full featured keyboard, simple mobile phone like keyboard, one button keyboard with a cycle through the alphabet, mouse/joystick pointer, speech to text conversion, etc.
  • Text is way easier to search.  Modern search engines are at the point of extracting meaning (when you tell them “car”, they understand that you mean “car”, “automobile”, “vehicle” and so on. When you tell them “the sound of bass”, they understand that you are probably talking about music rather than fishing).
  • Text is much easier to consume.  Most people won’t have troubles recognizing parts of the texts without reading them through letter by letter.  Most people skip chunks of texts when reading longer pieces.  Most people won’t have any troubles reading several texts at the same time.
  • Text is more portable and accessible. Read it from the screen or print it out or even re-write it by hand.  Devices that are needed to move text around are much cheaper and simpler than those for sound and video.

Now, most people will prefer short chunks of text to long chunks of text.  I’d rather read two sentences and move on to the next news section or topic, than spend three days trying to figure out what the author is trying to say.  Most people I know will have hard times writing an article one page long on any subject at all.  All the same people will have no problem spitting out a sentence or two.  Again, on any subject at all.

Because of the above, I think that short text services will blossom.  And they already grow  pretty fast.

Which of these are better?  Those that are simpler to use.  Twitter is doing a really good job here. One large text box, one submit button, and a counter of how many characters you have left for this message.  Nothing more.  It’s difficult to make it even simpler.

But ease of use shouldn’t be only for the end user.  It should be from all sides of the service.  And again Twitter is doing a pretty good job of it.   It has a simple and straightforward API, which allows programmers to create applications for this service in just a few lines of code (a few is as in one or two lines of code).  It has an RSS feed for everything, so it’s easy to get things out of it.  It has plenty of automation – TinyURL integration, direct messages, tracking, etc.  It has SMS integration, so it’s easy to use on the move.

Stuff like that will be at the top of micro media, I think.

Of course, other technologies will move forward, as they always do.  It will be easier and easier to create and move around sounds, videos, and whatever else is there.  Devices will get smaller.  Connections will get faster.  The content will get richer.

But, as with many other things, the limiting factor won’t be in the technologies.  It will be in people.  Think about images for example.  Those were with us for thousands of years.  Yet, only a few of us can draw a semi-decent picture.  And photography is of no help here.  Millions of terrible images out there show as to how effective we are with cameras.  We see things in 3D.  Images are 2D.  The software will hardly ever do a proper conversion.  And humans will hardly spend the time learning about the topic to do it themselves.  Videos are even more complex – we can’t manage static pictures properly, and now we have a full power to work with moving images.  Sounds aren’t much different.

People are buying multi-core multi-CPU hi-end machines and use them to play minesweeper mostly.   You give them a mobile phone which can control half of the universe, and they won’t even bother about an address book in it.  I don’t think this will ever change.  Things might improve both from the people’s and technology’s sides, but the huge gap will always be there.

These are my thoughts on how this whole micro media communication will play out in the future…

Submarine sandwich paradox

Most fun of working in a real office comes not from the actual work, but from other people in the workplace. Where else can you watch over a bunch of strange people several hours at a time? They work with you, the talk on their phones, they think, they argue, they eat and drink… they live.

Those offices that allow employees to eat a their desks or in some other tight, but shared spaces, are the most fun. It is there I spotted the submarine sandwich paradox.

For those of you living in strange places, submarine sandwich is this huge sandwich usually made from a roll of French bread. Really long. We are talking half a meter or so. Usually hot, and staffed with ham, cheese, tomatoes, and things like that. If done right, it’s a delicious lunch meal. (See Submarine sandwich at Wikipedia, but ignore the picture – it’s not representative at all).

The biggest problem with submarine sandwiches is their size. Some places have half a submarine and even a quarter of a submarine sandwich on the menu. This is how large they are. You can chop it into four pieces and each of those pieces will be larger than a monthly meal of an average person living in a poor country.

Needless to say, people who order a whole submarine sandwich for the first time get very surprised with size. All of them, and I do mean all of them say the same thing when the delivery arrives: “Oh. My. God.” It’s a combination of “I ordered just a sandwich. And I got it wrong. How could I possible not manage an order of one sandwich” with “Jez.. look at the size of this thing! Is it even possible that one person can eat all of it in one sitting?” with “Help. I need somebody’s help.” That last one was exactly what came out of The Beatles when they ordered their submarines for the first time. Later on they even released an album called “Yellow Submarine”. (See The Beatles Discography at WikiPedia).

Anyway. While each and every person gets amazed by the size of the sandwich at first time, women are usually way over the top. Their minds are blown out. This is the good moment to ask for the girl’s phone number, if you can control the urge to know what she’ll do next. Women usually seem to eat less. They also try to control themselves when it comes to unhealthy food, which submarine sandwich undoubtedly is (that much food, and especially bread, can’t be good for anyone, but the place which sold you the damn thing).

And here comes the paradox. As much as people are amazed at the size of this thing, and a total and complete confidence of that no living creature, and particularly those of homo sapience type, can eat this thing entirely in one go, you can be sure that next day they’ll want another one for lunch.

Yes, you’ve heard it right. If the submarine sandwich was made and delivered properly, an average person won’t have much difficulty finishing it with a can of coke or a cup of coffee. And they’ll love it so much that they will barely wait until they can order it again the next day. It’s huge, unhealthy, heavy, and all, but they don’t care no more. It’s a new thing. It’s a pleasure. It’s forbidden, and yet so affordable (yes, submarines are cheap usually). It’s like a toy they wanted the most in their childhood and never got…

In a few days, the excitement will pass and the sober mind will take control over the body once again. They will occasionally order the submarine again, and will even enjoy it, but it will never be the same. Ever. It’s easy to see nostalgic sadness in the eyes of many who open the delivery bag with yet another submarine. They want it to be the same. But it’s not…

Cyprus road tax online. IT gone wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, Vladimir mentioned in his blog that he managed to pay road tax online. I have to agree, this is a technological breakthrough in functionality offered by Cyprus government’s websites.

While paying the tax is now possible, the website is still very confusing. It provided practically no information or instructions on what to do. Now the site looks a bit different though. Notice that ‘Here’ icon that blinks as fast as your computer can render it?

So many people wanted to do it online, and so many failed. Some of them even posted comments on Vladimir’s blog, providing their information (ID numbers and car registration numbers) in hopes that it would somehow work.

Technology gone wrong…

P.S.: As sad as it is, it’s also very funny. Hilarious even.