Category — navel-gazing

Here is a pretty word cloud based on the content of all anaulin.org entries to date. Click on image for bigger version.

Made with Wordle

My most-played artists, according to my Last.fm profile:

I had no idea I played Enigma so much. I am blaming it all on Party Shuffle.

Some of you might be interested in having a look at my web clippings tumbleblog; you might even want to subscribe to the RSS feed.

It does exactly what it says on the label: it is a collection of “clippings” (i.e. quotes, videos, photos or links) that I found on the web and that I wanted to make a note of. Note that it has somewhat more frequent posts than this blog.

For a while I used Google Reader’s Shared Items functionality for this task, but I found it suboptimal in at least the following ways:

1. I can’t highlight the part of the post I find noteworthy.
2. I can’t “share” things that weren’t in my feeds.
3. The URL to my Google Reader shared items is so awful that I don’t dare link to it.

Headlines from the web clippings appear now in the sidebar of this blog.

Oh, and one last thing: the Tumblr user experience rocks! Truly a pleasure to use, a rare thing on the modern web, sadly.

I succumbed to the hype, and decided to try out one of the ‘presence blogging’ services in earnest. I chose Jaiku, since they are prettier, younger, and don’t have some of the horrible backgrounds Twitter has. Don’t know yet how exactly will I use this new medium, or if I will use it much at all, but let’s try. I’m curious.

Feeds for my bookmarks, photos and listened music are being pulled into my Jaiku stream. And I’ll post some random crap every now and then. So follow me if you are curious and you have a Jaiku account. And if you don’t have a Jaiku account, I happen to have 6 invites left, so ask below.

Oh, and I added a Jaiku badge to the blog’s sidebar. Because you can’t have too much crap on your sidebar.

Executive summary: if you were a subscriber of On jobs, work and careers, please unsubscribe from http://anaulin.org/on_jobs_work_and_careers/feed and subscribe to http://anaulin.org/wordpress/feed instead.

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You’ve possibly noticed already, but just in case you didn’t: following readers’ comments and my own preference, I’ve merged the blog on jobs and careers with this one. It sounds like most people anyway subscribed to both feeds, so this should save everybody some hassle.

All the entries from the other blog appear now here. The feed for the old blog is now redirected to the feed for this blog, which will carry all entries. Eventually, the URL for the old feed will start returning 404s.

So if you were subscribed to http://anaulin.org/on_jobs_work_and_careers/feed, please point your feed reader to http://anaulin.org/wordpress/feed instead. Thank you for your understanding.

[And yes, I broke all the links from the previous blog. I don't think anybody was linking to those, and Googlebot will recrawl the new URLs soon enough, so no worries.]

Dear readers,

As you might know (or not), a while ago I started a little side blog, On jobs, work and careers. After a few amazingly brilliant posts (if you don’t believe me, just go have a look!), it got neglected in favor of this older but comfier blog.

I just asked the readers over there what should I do with it. So I thought it would be only fair if I asked you guys as well: what to do about the young and feeble creature? Should I merge it with this blog (maybe the readers of both blogs are all the same people, and it annoys the hell out of you to have to follow two separate feed for the crap of just one little person)? Should I let The Other Blog die unattended? Or what is your genius suggestion?

Discuss.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

If you’re one of those readers that are paying attention (of which, admittedly, I probably don’t have many, but still…), you might have noticed that I haven’t been writing much around here. I’ve been writing a bit more on the other blog, though.

Since I don’t like to leave things to rot unattended and unfinalized, I want to ask you, my gentle reader, what should I do about this blog On jobs, work and careers.

Below is my list of proposed paths forward; please state your preference in the comments. If I don’t get at least three votes, I will declare this blog dead.

1. Migrate all the entries from this blog to the other blog. Post all subsequent related posts there.
2. Keep this blog separate and post more frequently. If this is your preferred option, please suggests post titles or topics that you would like to see addressed here. You can also list your preferred posting frequency, if you so wish.
3. Other: do you have a better proposal?

Thank you very much in advance.

Given that lately I seem to feel an urge to blog about work and career, I’ve gone ahead and created a separate blog to mace it easy for those interested in this particular topic to follow those posts.

The new blog is called On jobs, work and careers (very original title, isn’t it?), and is hosted right on this site, at http://anaulin.org/on_jobs_work_and_careers/. If you are interested in those topics, go subscribe!

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Hello there.

You might be wondering what the heck is this blog about. Well, the title says it all: it is about jobs, work and careers. Mostly in a computer-y context, but not necessarily.

Now that you know what this blog is about, you might be wondering who am I to write about these topics. Well, the answer is quite simple: I am just a professional in the IT industry with a particular interest in these topics. In my current job I am often asked to review resumes and interview candidates, so I need a place to rant about that, too. I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic; I just have some thoughts I’d like to share.

In the past I wrote some articles about work and careers on my personal blog.

David, aka Mikus, has written a note on the predominance of Windows and IE among the platforms and browsers used by the readers of his blog (according to his server stats). Apparently only 32% of David’s readers use Firefox/Mozilla, and just 3% of them use Linux.

Here are the statistics for the traffic on anaulin.org:

So 44.17% of my readers use a browser that identifies itself as Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape (41.12%, 2.54% and 0.51%, respectively). And 10.15% use Linux. Surprising; I expected that my Mom’s use of Windows+IE would seriously skew the statistics.

I don’t know if my readership sample is more representative than David’s but, clearly, our blogs are visited by very different types of computer users. We could probably draw some interesting conclusions about the content in a blog just by looking at the platform and browser statistic for that site. For example, I would expect The Daily WTF to have an even heavier skew towards the Linux+Firefox crowd than my blog.

I wonder what are the stats for Slashdot. I bet these days it is mostly Windows+IE users visiting them…

I just changed the theme for a modified version of White As Milk. I started working on this new look a while ago, but then lack of time (or, someone could say, inability to focus on thing at a time) made me abandon it. We’ll see if this time around I can take it to some state that I am satisfied with.

Let me know what you think. More stuff on the sidebar? Less stuff? One of my ideas was to leave only one post on the front page, and then just list the previous posts below. Is that a good idea? Don’t know. Will continue thinking.

And yes, I will write about at least on of the gazillion things on my list soon. I promise.

Tired of the problems I was having with my previous hosting company, I have moved this site to another provider. I will try to take the opportunity to do some remodelling and cleaning up. For you, gentle reader, this means risk of falling bits during the next few days. Wear your helmet! I apologize for the inconvenience.

I am happy to announce that I am back in Europe. Which is nice. Imagine, I was walking earlier on this street that was full of other people walking in all directions.

Hopefully my return to the Proper Timezone means that I will be able to lead a more ‘orderly’ life and that, in turn, will make it possible for me to blog more often. So stay tuned, I might even produce another post this week! If I do, I promise to try and even put some content in it.

If you are smart (which I am not sure is likely, given that you are wasting your time reading my crap…), you might have deduced from my previous post that I am actually alive and well. You might have also inferred that I have not abandoned this site (yet).

The last couple of weeks have been a bit weird, and I have not had much time to sit quietly at my own laptop and contribute some to the distributed cacophony this blogosphere thing is. I am afraid that the weeks to come won’t be any better, so I apologize in advance for the highly irregular posting that will happen in the near future. Hopefully it will stabilize soon again.

The reason for the weirdness is this new job I got. I was finishing up stuff at university one day, and the next day I took a plan to San Francisco, but got stuck in Paris, and eventually arrived almost 36 hours later to Mountain View. And 12 hours later I woke up, got my shit together and headed off to new hire orientation at Google. Odd.

I wonder how the hell do I manage to make my life more and more strange all the time. Fun.

Via Alt1040 I see that Jakob Nielsen has published his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 . Here is a summary:

1. Legibility problems: small fonts, low contrast.
2. Non-standard links: not underlined links, no difference between visited and not visited links, JavaScript, links opening in new windows.
3. Flash.
4. Content that’s not written for the Web: not short and ’scannable’ enough.
5. Bad search.
6. Browser incompatibility.
7. Cumbersome forms.
8. No contact information.
9. Frozen layouts with fixed page widths.
10. Inadequate photo enlargement.

Let’s see how does this blog do against this list.

1. The fonts look big enough to me, but they could be perhaps a bit bigger. The contrast is ok.
2. My links are not underlined, and I don’t differentiate between visited and not visited links.
3. There is no Flash here.
4. Hopefully the posts are short and readable enough. I am constantly working on this.
5. The Search box is the one that comes with Wordpress seems to work ok. No one is using it, though, according to my logs.
6. I tested this site with IE and Firefox. Hopefully it looks ok in Safari and other browsers as well.
7. No forms to fill here.
8. My e-mail and some info about me can be found in the About me page.
9. All the column widths are fixed.
10. There are no photo enlargement options.

It seems that I should work a bit on the CSS and make the links more usable, and perhaps enlarge the font. Changing the layout to liquid will be more complicated, because of the large header image. Perhaps I should skip the header image altogether.

As posting here is being, er, let’s say irregular, due to excessive workload, I suggest that while you await another fine post from me, you go and check some fine posts from other people.

For example, you can go and have a look at some interesting flash animations suggested by Bryan.

Or you can go and read Kathy’s thought-provoking post about how dignity is deadly.

If you want to improve your blog, you can read the tips on How to make a good blog archive pointed by Lifehacker.

You can also reflect on the Web 2.0 concept with help of the mindmap from Business2Blog.

And if you are, like, *totally* bored, you can help me to find a cool hostname. I need that for my new job.

I know it’s been a long time with no news. But now that holidays are over, cyberspace-littering in this corner of the net will resume. For the moment being, I have made some (temporary) changes in the template and sidebar.

While I concoct a post with some actual content, you can have a lok at my clipblog (feed).

Stay tuned for more news!

Just a quick note to point out that I have slightly modified the sidebar links from my ‘clipblog’. Now the links point directly to the referenced items, instead of the Bloglines ‘preview’ URL. It took some scraping of the HTML+Javascript from Bloglines’ preview pages, but it seems to work ok now.

Just a quick note to say that I am trying out a small hack to integrate links from my Bloglines ‘clipblog’ into the sidebar of this page. The clipblog contains quick links to interesting feed items that I come across during my everyday news reading.

As you might have guessed already, I read my feeds with Bloglines. I use liberally the ‘Clip/Blog This’ functionality, too. If you find my ‘feed juice’ interesting, you can suscribe directly to the clipblog rss feed.

Anyway, this hack of mine is still in alpha, so please let me know if you see anything funky, or if you have any suggestions for improvement. I will play around with it some more days, tidy up the code and then I will explain more in detail what it does. If you are wondering why I didn’t use one of the existing clipblog hacks/plugins, it is just that they don’t do exactly what I wanted (or I couldn’t find one that did what I wanted). But I will talk more about this later.

Summarizing: ‘feed juice’ in sidebar in alpha-testing. Please let me know what you think.

This blog became one year old 12 days ago and I didn’t notice.

For some reason, I thought the first post came at the end of June. I was wrong, the first post at this site was published on June 5th, 2004. It was nothing fancy, a short post, just a quote about reasearch and ideas.

But hey, I am still experimenting with this. Just give the toddler time to mature.

Happy birthday to my blog!

This morning I returned from a short trip to Germany, and now I have to try and catch up with the 3.058 unread feed items in my RSS reader. Luckily I use a really cool reader that lets me search, flag, store, and send items to my ‘reading list’.

I hope your feed reader is prepared, because here comes my overdue-post avalanche!

My parents are very very sweet ::blushes::

A week ago anaulin.org moved to the new Wordpress 1.5. I also took the opportunity to change the look of the page. The new template is an adaptation of the Wordpress default Kubrik template. I am still not done with the changes, though. For instance, the menu bar is missing and will come back some time soon. And some minor tweaks to the stylesheet can be expected, too.

It would be nice if you let me know what do you think about the new look, and if there is something that you think should be changed.

Canary Wharf

A couple of weeks ago I spent a weekend in London, which is one of my favourite cities. The photos from the trip are now available at my Flickr account, here.

My annoyance with broken Pivot trackbacks and some other issues finally took over. And I installed Wordpress and automanually migrated my posts. Welcome to ana’s new home!

But beware, as everything is still in boxes and you might inadvertently trip over one of them. If you want to say a last adieu to the old blog, please free to do so.

Much remains to be done here. For once, all the comments are missing. The dates on all the posts are wrong (except on two of them, see if you can tell which). Also the layout has to be changed, too. This girly-pinky is quite nice, but temporary; this is the time for everyone to complain about the old look & feel!

Hopefully the home-warming party can be celebrated soon. I suggest you all start looking for plants and other home-warming presents to give me.