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Archive for November, 2006

Coincidences bother

30 Nov
  1. When I decided to become an economist, this facility start suffering an overload of students.
  2. When I decided to go to France, Frederick Institute offered me to do MSc in Nicosia
  3. When I agreed on it, Immigration law changes started causing headaches.
  4. But when I finally started to blog frequently, server went down.

Sometimes life is scary!

 

Digital and Printed media: data “Yin and Yang”

29 Nov

Yin And Yang of Data Storage

As long as we have bureaucracy we’ll need paper! Paper is our everything! I’d say that paper is the last frontier of covering your ass when someone of your colleagues is trying to rip you off. These almighty pieces of paper can do a lot of things:

  • With few attached coloured papers called “passport” you suddenly appear as a potential tax payer for the government.
  • Without a nice looking paper called “visa” you won’t escape from tax payments.
  • Without a bachelor,master or PhD paper, getting a job will become a headache for the rest of your life.

As you can see, these shiny pieces of paper mean a lot in our daily life. But the things go worse when we start talking about contracts, deals and all this business routines. No matter how spread digital media are, after all the negotiations, you’ll still need this crappy piece of paper where you have to put few signatures. People say that’s more reliable. How knows, maybe they are right, what do you think about it?

But, anyway it’s enough about negative sides of printed media, there are some good things in it, at least for me: books. I’ve been using PC for 10 years, and I still haven’t got used to reading books from the PC. I prefer paper media here:

  • It doesn’t get warmer as notebooks
  • Doesn’t depend on electricity
  • Fully mobile
  • Easier to cover your face when you want to get some nap

To describe digital media, I can say that digital type of data storage is more practical nowadays in case of handling a lot of data: remind yourself how many square meters of space are needed to fulfil the data, for example, of 100 GB hard drive.
Thus,getting a bit geeky about the topic, printed media can be represented as secondary memory, and digital media as main memory. In order to keep a fast process time, we recall secondary memory as rare as it possible. But we can’t avoid using one of them! :)

Specially written for “Digital and Printed Media” topic by CBN.

 

Is Wikipedia as valuable as Britannica?

29 Nov

“It may be the case that non-experts are more cynical about information outside of their field and the difference comes from a natural reaction to rate unfamiliar articles as being less credible.”

While Slashdotters are arguing about this slowly bringing the discussion to the point “do you like Wikipedia or not?”, we can see how popular this Wikipedia project has become, the number of languages the articles have been translated to. And it keeps on growing and improving its content and quality.
A bizzare thing is that according to some of the researches, the articles contributed to Wikipedia encyclopaedia by non-experts are more valuable in case of information mentioned in their articles.

Whether this is better or worse than traditional, expert-based encyclopedias depends on who you ask. Nature did a highly-publicized comparative study between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica last year in which they found that the two were similar in terms of accuracy.

In my opinion, an intuitive way of filtering the information by the person gives more useful data for an article then expert’s view on it. A user can easier identify what kind of data is needed by other users.

 

PMS Survival tips

29 Nov

The most popular video for today’s Technorati stats:
[video]http://youtube.com/watch?v=mCwKbUVyHLY[/video]

 

Wikipedia via BitTorrent

28 Nov

Even though, there are some people who don’t like the idea of open source encyclopedias and spreading the knowledge for free, defending their point of view by the phrase: “Every knowledge costs money”.
But due to the popularity of Wikipedia projects and its contributions, we can see that the majority of people rely on Wikipedia information, and like to use it. In most of cases, looking for some famous person via Google, the first link you get will be from Wikipedia.

Now, Wikipedia goes “offline”, you can download 2500 hand-picked educational articles stored on a CD via Bittorent .

 

Candy Dulfer as Christmas Gift

28 Nov

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65tiCfQe2TE[/video]

I can’t remember how old I was when I heart this tune first time, but surfing Youtube videos, I’ve found this video clip. I’ve decided to make myself a small Xmas present: discography of Candy Dulfer.

Maybe it’ll look madness with, but these songs are better to be kept on the cd shelf with discographies of Genesis, Sting and other singers and bands whose music won’t get old, then to be stored on a hard drive.

 

Clean up your ads

23 Nov

You can find it very useful if your Adsense generate a low income.

Adsense used to be a very clean way to make money online while doing what you like (managing your blog or website), but then, out of nowhere, Made for Adsense sites started massive advertising campaigns using our adsense accounts. When we say massive, we really mean it because Adsense is kind of turning into Wallstreet’s Stock Market, where it’s all about ROI (Return of Investment).

Click, login, generate blacklist ads and increase your AdSense income!

 

Get yourself organized

23 Nov

While the Christmas holidays are slowly appearing on the horizon and some guys already think about Xmas wish lists, institute lecturers are trying to close all the assignment and material gaps in the outlines to go on the holidays preparing for the semester exams. Unfortunately, time aspect plays a great role in this situation, because of this it’s appeared the first time I’ve started using reminders and manage timing more properly, so I won’t forget anything.

Before, I was quite amazed, why people do all this timing, since everything can be managed without external software help. I was bloody wrong, when bunches of things start overwhelming me and I could get focused on finishing at least one thing and go for another one.

  • Make visible notes
  • Notes? Remarkable? The easiest and more convenient way – stickers.For this approach, I’ve started using Google Calendar to synchronize all the things . I started to write down daily routines I need to finish up on these gaudy pieces of paper – it helped. Of course if they were attached to most visited places in my room. Yep, now the monitor looks like a Christmas tree! Duplicating have to be done during the week: taking notes for a day is great, unless you have to do anything tomorrow.

  • Manage your time properly.
  • For a person like me – easily carried away with interesting things I can find on the Web, good timing became a real headache. The simplest remedy for this decease – reminders. I mean, it’s hard to imagine a person nowadays without a cell phone – use built-in reminders and calendars. Also try to install an alarm clock on your computer, I personally use Citrus Clock : simple, and it does his thing, what else do you need?

  • Round Robin algorithm for live
  • When you emphasis on the things you couldn’t finish on time, try to complete them later, and don’t go out from the schedule. Take a small break, otherwise, by the end of the day you won’t be able to process anything, at all!

  • Be realistic when you make schedules
  • Taking in account a lot of things to do, keep in mind, that you better have breaks after changing your work. 5, 10, 15 minute breaks – you should know better then me, how long you need to get relaxed and proceed with something else.

  • Sleep factor

  • Get rid off this illusion, that you can simply don’t sleep, and you’ll catch up everything. In few days of non-sleeping, you’ll act like somnambulist: no reflections, slow reaction, in other words, dump piece of meat.

Five simple statements, which helped me a lot, how do you try to organize yourself, if you do of course :)