Tag: thoughts

How busy is your desktop?

Accidentally, I stumbled upon a thought provoking post with the following words:

If you’re really using your computer, your desktop should almost never be visible. Your screen should be covered with information, with whatever data you’re working on. I can’t imagine why you’d willingly stare at a static background image– or even a background image covered with a sea of icons. Unless you consider your computer a really expensive digital picture frame, I suppose.

Well said!

I haven’t thought much about this before, but suddenly I realized that I can strongly relate to the above statement.  My desktop is never visible.  And it was always a bit awkward for me to pick a background image (I know use slide show, which cycles through all images in my Pictures/ directory) or a set of icons (I have a few in the corners of my desktop, but I never click on them, cause I never see them) to place on my desktop.

I’m going to set it to a solid color right now.  And I’m going to remove the useless icons too.

What about your desktop?  Does it look something like this?

Odnoklassniki.ru – Russian classmates

I’m always amazed and shaken when ugly things work. I know they often do, but every time it happens, it’s like the first time for me.

There are many examples around, MySpace.com being the most well known. The idea behind it is nice – to provide a place for youngsters to communicate and share pictures and music. But the way it is implemented is truly ugly. Yet, MySpace.com is one of the top visited web sites on the Web.

Odnoklassniki.ru is another example of this. (Odnoklassniki is a Russian word for “classmates”.) Again, the idea was pretty good – create a way for people to find their classmates and all friends easily. 10, 15, 20 years later names and faces tend to fade out and we don’t remember them all that good anymore. So, those of us who want to get re-connected with friends from the old days have some troubles locating those. With Odnoklassniki.ru it becomes pretty easy – pick the region, area, and school or college where you studied, specify the years during which your were there, and you’ll be shown other people who are registered on the web site, who studied at the same place during approximately the same years. Names and pictures are there, and those help a lot.

The way the whole thing is setup is terrible though. First of all, the web site is horribly slow. Always. I’ve been registered there since forever, and I was checking it out once in a while – always slow. Secondly, it tries to be everything – a contact manager, a search engine, people directory, photo sharing and rating service, messenger, forum, and so on. Needless to say, it sucks badly at most of these. There is not a single function that works properly.

But, the main thing is that it works. The web site is very popular in Russia and lots of people register there every day. I myself managed to find and connect with people who I lost and forgotten a long time ago.

When I think about how these things work, this quote comes to mind (from Pirates of Silicon Valley movie):

Steve Jobs: We’re better than you are! We have better stuff.
Bill Gates: You don’t get it, Steve. That doesn’t matter!

The 20% rule

Sidenote: it seems this is the third post for today, and the third one that is somehow related to Google. This is not intentional.

It’s a wide known fact that Google allows (or, depending on how you look at it, forces) its employees to  work 20% of the time on the side projects.  What kind of projects?  What do they actually do?  Where this time goes?  Here is an idea from the hilarious article at Cracked.com:

Google engineers are given “20 percent time” in which they are free to pursue their own personal projects. This incentive has produced such efforts as Gmail, Google News, and 20% more employee masturbation.

Some more about technology

This thought has been so caught so many times in my head that by now I’m not even sure if I posted about it or not. But just in case I didn’t, here it goes…

The technological progress is enters our lives from many sides and in many forms. Sometimes, it is very noticeable, like, for example, in the case with all that hype about iPod or iPhone or what’s the lates gadget from Apple is called these days… But sometimes, it’s totally silent and natural and it seems like it was there for ages. Although it wasn’t.

This thought comes to me often when I am about to drink tea. No fire, no towels, no pots or kettles. Press the button and a small plastic bucket will provide with plenty of hot water in a couple of minutes. Pour some in the cup and drop the tea bag in. Done. Oh, wait, it’s too hot. Open the fridge, take a couple of ice cubes and drop them in the cup too. Now it’s just right.

Think about it. How natural that is now. I know at least a dozen people who do this on a regular if not daily basis. But even less than 50 years ago, fridges weren’t coming with ice makers. In fact, they were making ice that nobody wanted and had to unfreeze their fridges once in a while. And nobody I knew was even thinking about making ice themselves or using it for tea. Perhaps it was different in other areas of the world, but something tells me it wasn’t very different. And tea bags too weren’t the preferred way of making tea. And water was boiled using gas cookers. And so and so forth. But now, not it feels like it was always available.

There are plenty of other examples. Mobile phones, for example. They still look odd when used by older people, but in general they are a part of everyday life of everybody I know. That wasn’t so even ten years ago. Cars, digital television, Internet. What else?

More thoughts on reorganization

Spring is here and, as always, it makes me think of reorganizing this blog a bit. Don’t worry, I’m not going to break it hard this time. I am happy with the software so far.

Instead, I will break the site into several more. I tried it before and, although not all parts worked very well, I’m glad I did. Reorganizations help me stay focused.

The reason for reorganization is that this blog once again turned into a little bit of everything. I write about everything – from technology to parenting – here and also do a whole bunch of pictures. That’s not very good. Looking closely at people who come here, I can’t find anyone who reads all of my posts. Some people read those, and others – read these, but noone reads everything, and that’s not right.

So, I am thinking about:

  • Creating a separate blog for my parenting posts. It will most probably be in Russian, and it will have all pictures of Maxim, Olga, me, and the rest of the family, when appropriate. Hopefully, Olga will join me in writing posts there. Maxim is getting more active and creative, and it’s a shame to leave all the fun that we are having out of the world history. The choice of Russian language, I think, is more appropriate here, as both Olga and I can describe things better in it, rather than in English.
  • Creating a separate blog for my movie reviews. Those are very well structured bits of data, and they are very specific too. These will continue in Engish and will use the same form. I am also considering the use of microformat to increase the audience, and to, hopefully, make a little bit of money via Google Ads.
  • Creating a separate blog for technology related posts, but this will be done (if it will be done) at a much later stage. There are too many things to worry about as things are.

As I mentioned, this is not the first time that I move things out of this blog. I did so before. Here are a couple of examples to remind you about:

  • XA-XA-XA – a separate blog for the Russian jokes. This one works pretty good. Postings are regular, resources are plenty, and my enthusiasm about it is pretty high. The audience is growing too.
  • Cyprus Scout – a separate blog for my Cyprus related posts. This one doesn’t do as well, as I originally hoped. My interests have shifted to other domains, and the audience wasn’t pushy enough for me to work more on it. I am planning to give a last try though, with call for editors. If one or more people will be contributing to it, I’ll be coming back occasionally to add my cents.
  • My LiveJournal – a place where I speak Russian. Rarely, and with no particular topic or direction. But I still feel pretty good about having it.

Anyway, I am still thinking about doing all these. My mind is not made up yet (although it’s heading there) and you can still influence my decisions. What do you think about all this?