Category Archives: Communication

Its Been a While

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Wow, its amazing much one can do if one sits down and just concentrates on a single task.  Yesterday proved a rather productive day, in terms of writing correspondences.  Also I managed to get a fair bit of writing and coding done too.  I apologize for everyone who expected me to answer back sooner.  Some days just become busy for no reason.  Some days you put off everything, wishing that somehow procrastination will make the problem go away.  Some days you can finally go forth, wince, and tackle that pile of work that just stacked up.  Tackling yesterday’s pile of put off correspondences was not pleasant.  It was not because I had write anything less than pleasant or controversial.  It just felt that way since I let things slide for the past couple of days.

Anyways, I’m still working to reconnect with people.  I’m still trying to churn out writing that I should of done ages ago.  But now I’m actually seeing some hope that I can get to cracking on one of the big projects.

I have reconnected with Siobhan who I haven’t talked to in ages.  I did sorely miss talking to her.  I’m keeping in touch with old friends, university acquaintances and ex-co-workers.   Or at least trying to.  The hardest people to keep in touch are the ones who I need to communicate in Polish or Italian.  Language can be quite a hurtle, if you don’t feel 100% fluent in it.  But things have to be done, and I’m taking pains to do so.

Mental Shards: Ninjas, Stacks and Menus

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I’m a huge fan of checking out RSS planets, especially with the technologies I love to use.  Now I use Google Reader to aggregate and handle these hundreds of stories.  Every so often, a story grabs my attention and gets me thinking.  I’ve starred hundreds, only to never look for them again.  I found that even thought I can e-mail myself these stories, they get lost in the giant abyss known as my e-mail.  So for fun, I’ll post the blogs that caught my attention in a new section on my blog: Mental Shards.  (Yes, you guessed it… it is a play on the name of my upcoming novel.)

Lydia Pintscher writes about dealing with people who communicate in various forms and degrees.  I’d probably fall into the communication ninjas group.  In fact at one point thanks to my Internet tablet, anyone could reach out and touch me over instant messenger.  This became terribly distracting, and even thought I could the same with my cellphone… I’d rather not.  Well actually in theory if I acclimatized people to the concept of on MSN, but may not respond in an instant we’d be good.  Still it is a good reminder, that not everyone feels compelled to feel embedded into the Internet cloud at all times.

Oops… I forget which KDE developer mentioned the Stack Overflow site.  This looks like an excellent resource for developers, especially when dealing with open source technology.

Richard Dale, another KDE contributer writes about the GCDS talk about Moblin.  Here’s a thought: menus are useless.  I’m a bit reluctant to agree.  Most menus are huge and a pain to navigate around.  I’d prefer a flexible tool/toolbar system.  Maybe not quite a ribbons design though.  I am a strong believer in keeping UIs simple, clear and pleasant to use.  However menus seem a necessary evil, for large complex applications.  However the argument, on why do we need large complex menu-driven applications rather than smart intelligent, flexible ones those hold much merit.

Congrats to Celeste Lyn Paul for winning the KDE Akademy Award for Best Non-technical Contribution.  Her work and writing inspires me to one day get into usability, user interface design and (human-computer interaction) HCI myself.  Once things settle down in my life, I plan on looking into doing a Masters in HCI.

And on Phoronix we have: News of a Game Going Free Culture.  Should be an interesting experiment, I wish the developers luck.