I had a discussion few days ago with a friend of mine on blogging. The topic was that as soon as something happens on the Net, thousands and sometimes even more people are writing, posting, discussing and blogging about the very same topic. A sort of information tidal wave that spreads across the cyberspace. Which was according to my friend huge waste of time and energy. Generally, he meant, from a whole community perspective, it makes no sense to write about something unless there is reasonable chance you will be saying something very unique that nobody else will likely say - otherwise it adds no value, just clutters the content by repeating and rephrasing the already said. At first it sounded reasonably sound ;-), but the longer I was thinking about it, the more I was convinced it may be quite the opposite.
Just out of morbid curiosity I did the test, here is the result :-)
Your Vocabulary Score: B-
You have a zealous love for the English language, and many find your vocabulary edifying.
Don't fret that you didn't get every word right, your vocabulary can be easily ameliorated!
How's Your Vocabulary?
From today's Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld 2007:
"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. "
Wayne Gretzky
I guess everybody is going to write about iPhone - which is OK because it is indeed very interesting gadget and it stole the show. To bad it will be 6 more months until it will be available in the US and (my best hopes) 8-9 months to have it here in Canada.
As I mentioned before, I am keeping all my bookmarks in del.icio.us account. Thanks to excellent Firefox extension and available bookmarklets, posting new URL's is very comfortable. After using the del.icio.us for some time, here is few tips how get best of it:
- use the post buttons - they are available for Firefox as well as IE
- post often and tag a lot. Tags are the only way how to search the non-public posts
- keep consistent approach to tag names. I use singular, replace the '.' with word dot (dotnet) and write all lowercase
- follow the crowd - consider using similar tags as others, it makes it easier to be part of community
- use wisdom of the crowd. Look what else did other people tagged with the same tag as you did. You will be surprised what you may discover.
I have to admit that I am suffering from severe case of installophobia. Every time I start installation program on Windows, I am very vividly imagining all the terrible things that may happen in next few minutes. Like overwriting some system DLL's with some old or wrong version which will break half dozen of other programs. Or messing up my registry so badly that I will have have to spend few days of backing up my system data and installing XP from scratch (and inevitably loose something very important in the process). The introduction of the system installer and MSI format few years ago helped a little for a while - up to the point when I wrote my first own installation program and fully understood what exactly can be done with it :-). Then it come back. I guess this may have contributed to two major shifts during last year - moving to Mac platform (which has no registry) and moving on-line (which has no install at all).
when it hangs and does not react. I am posting it so that I do not have to google it out again :-). Key is Menu + Select combination.
Here comes the detailed version (saved from Google Notebook):
Toggle the Hold switch on and off to avoid "hold trap" Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step. Tips:
It was Rod who started this by saying how great it is to replace slow typing with faster speaking and mentioning some kind of magical software package (appropriately named Dragon Naturally Speaking) which does transform your voice to written properly spelled English text with amazing accuracy. I was pretty sceptical, after seeing few years ago similar software from IBM with not-so-great accuracy, and even more recently the famous Vista speech wreckognition. Then Peter bought the software as well and had similarly good results as Rod. Now I got really interested. Both Peter and Rod and native speakers of English and I was very curious how will the software deal with my very own version of English pronunciation and fairly thick Slovak accent. So we did try it today.
Today's extension is one that most people do not know about - and still almost everybody has it installed. The explanation for both is that it is distributed with Firefox, and unless you specifically prevent it's installation, you will get it. It is DOM Inspector.
Why would you care about something like this ? Unless you make living by creating Web applications, you probably would not. But if you do, it can help you a lot !
I have got my eReader on 30th December, so after few days of playing with it, here are first impressions. I managed to read one book and played with it quite a bit, but I am still learning.
The quality of the display and "electronic paper" look and feel is great. It actually looks like paper, not like screen. The non-glossy texture surface has same visibility from every angle and it really reads like paper. I have no problem with the speed or lack of it - the page turn takes about 1-2 seconds, switching to full black and then redrawing is kind of cool when the page text "emerges" from the page. The picture is perfect, steady, does not strain the eyes, perfectly readable in sunlight. It is the best feature of the reader.
The 2006 was truly amazing year. We have accomplished so much - we have created the West end development centre, brought in and started several projects, completed phase 1 of employee conversion, started benefits program, ESOP program, redefined the company visual presence, grew the business and the company size considerably and created foundation for future growth.
Most important achievemnt is the fun factor - I am again looking forward to go to work - and again since the Montage days the synergy is coming back. Thanks so much to all of you who helped it happen.