This blog started out as a personal public diary to motivate me to record potentially significant moments of my life. I was always a fan of diaries, yet I suffered the typical lack of consistency in updating them after the initial furore of buying a new diary. Keeping a blog on the web was meant to keep me motivated to write more, as friend read and indirectly pushed me to write.

The motivation worked for a couple of years, especially after moving to Dublin, when I used the blog as an excuse not to call home and force its readership. I also tried to create a professional spin-off the blog in the tech section, and a special interests section in the travel section. Readership of these sections was quite poor and all attempts at resurrecting these section with new content and layouts were squashed to bits. Granted the attempts here were half baked but they still don't warrant having 0 subscribes to the RSS feed for months.

Now, after a couple of years updating this blog, motivation is withering. There are a couple of reasons for it. Primarily it's the obvious reason of being busy and distracted with other things, but there's more than this. If you're motivated in doing something then you'll find time to do it no matter how busy. The problem with the blog is that this motivation is getting lost.

I think the main reason for this is the lack of success of the blog. This is reflected in the lack of comments and the low number of RSS subscribers. Personally, comments are the most important indication of readership because they turn passive readership into interactive discussion. In this blog comments are practically non existent.

This is where facebook comes in. On facebook you interact with your friends. It's all about interaction. Also on facebook the audience, or at least the audience that matters, is much bigger. The battle between the 'personal' blog and facebook presence is a head to head battle. The two things serve for the exact same purpose. Why spend an hour writing a post on the blog which no one reads, when you can spend 2 minutes updating your status for everyone to read and get comments on. It's easier, faster and has a better outcome.

The same thing applies to twitter. Twitter takes on the blog when it comes to posting links of interest, main trains of thought, and replying to people. Publishing and consuming little snippets of information in this hyper fast environment seems to be the way forward. I was a religious blog reader till a few months ago, but now my twitter feed is enough and probably more than enough. If I want to keep in touch with friends I can check them out on facebook as they all have pages there, unlike blogs which weren't all that popular with the word-unfriendly people.

So what's happening to the blog? Frankly I don't know, but the motivation to write is vanishing like money in my pocket. If you're interested in my personal pursuits then my facebook profile is the way to go. If you like the links then join my twitter feed. Otherwise the blog will still be here but probably updates will be sparse.

This is one of the best articles I read on the web this year. Via

Some snippets:

Salon.com has an interesting article on what constitutes “visiting” a country? If you go to the Iguazu Falls and move from one side to the other, does that mean that you've been to both Brazil and Argentina? If you land in Frankfurt in transit to Malaysia, does that mean that you've been to Germany? The article (found via Vagablogging) by Patrick Smith, gives some similar examples and asks what does it mean to visit a country, and should it really matter which countries you’ve visited.

I'm all in favour of making lists of the places I’ve visited. I consider travelling as a hobby and most people keep lists of their collections. Birdwatchers have their birding records, beer fanatics have their beer logs, probably even stamp collectors have their stamp lists, so why shouldn’t a traveler have a places list? Travelling is like collecting experiences in different areas, so it’s no different from any other hobby in this regard. (I’m also a bit of a sucker for lists, and lists will be really handy when the good old Alzheimer’s starts settling in.)

Now to the main point of the question, what does it mean to visit a country? Well, for starters if you never venture beyond the airport’s perimeter that doesn’t mean you visited anywhere except the airport. By certain airport naming conventions, you might end up in a different country than the airport name. For example, Ryanair’s idea of Vienna’s airport is in Bratislava, which isn’t even in Austria.

Probably the commonest way of attributing a visit to a place is to attribute the visit to being physically in the place, and maybe visit some of the most representative sights of the place. For example a visit to Paris would mean seeing the Eiffel Tower, Louvre etc. On a deeper level, one can immerse himself in the ambience of the place, try to interact with the locals, eat their food, and learn about the culture. There are many different levels you can visit a place, but there needn’t be a clear cut judgment on what a visit should mean.

Any country is living organism, always evolving and changing. In some countries the change is more visible than others. In places where there has been war, poverty, oppressive political institutions, the change tends to be more drastic and more visible than the more gradual change happening in more stable countries. This added time attribute to a visit makes each visit unique.

As for what you’re going to write down on the list. I list cities in my “have-been-to” list. I find cities more manageable in terms of size and more representative in what you have really seen. If I visit Moscow that doesn’t mean that I’ve visited the whole 6.5million sq miles of Russia, but I can still say that I’ve been to Moscow.

I probably didn't get my gossip fix for the week so tonight I was checking out some profiles on facebook. My facebook profile browsing soon turned into picking out some ridicioulous profiles.

First of all, please, please try to be different. If your friend put up a picture of him drinking alcohol of some sort (something rather lame in the first place), you don't have to follow. All these profile photos where friends of the same person.

   

So you're looking for a relationship. Fair enough, nothing wrong with that. You've discovered facebook and think it's yet another means to get to your goal. You go through all the pain of setting up a profile, add some friends and then get to the real purpose of your facebook profile. Finding a date. (Don't deny that you use social networking sites to find dates if you're single. I know you do, better admit directly)

In facebook there's a field that helps you proclaim your aim, the looking for field. So you start with setting it to Dating. Then you try to mild it down a bit and add Friendship. Then you try not to be so fickle as aim only for dating, and add A relationship. Maybe stopping her is a good idea, but some people think they can stretch it a bit further. So they add Random Play, kinky. But the cherry on the cake is Whatever I can get. Now I know you're really desperate, and what you really deserve is a dirty midget infested camel.

The best relationship status list though was of this girl. The relationship status was In a relationship and at the same time, she was looking for: A relationship. Man, she sure was relying on the fact that her boyfriend is a total computer illiterate, and has no way to know what was happening behind his back. The cheeky bitch.

You've set your relationship status, and now want to give a sneak peek of what your potential conquest will get. You browse through your never-ending picture library, and painfully select the 3 photos that make you look like Jennifer Lopez better looking cousin. You laid your bait and now you're waiting for somebody to bite.

But hold on, your most considerate friends want to lend their hand in helping you find your prince. So what do they do. They add some pictures from their collection of you, and tag them so that people who browse your profile can see them. Problem is that these pictures aren't what you really call flattering. More likely they're the most embarrassing pictures of you getting drunk, looking horribly wasted, and weighing and extra 20 pound which you have lost by now.

 

Hint. It's time to change those bastard friends of yours.

Enough about relationship seeking. I actually managed to find a cool application for a change. It's catbook. A facebook for your cats. Think this will be better than my personal facebook page. It's more interesting that's for sure.

And, and, I found a nice picture on Karen's wall. It's called Six Degrees of Separation (Wiki article for explanation)

It's a nice warm day and the smell of fresh grass fills your nostrils as you walk towards the car to drive to work. Your neighbor's poodle dashes from across the street and starts rolling on the ground demanding attention. You start rubbing the dogs belly and playing with him until you realize that you're already 10 minutes late and better leave for work. You leave for work with a smile.

Outside it's cold and rainy. It's July and the sun seems to have taken a vacation and went to Madeira. You walk to the car and the poodle runs from across the street splashing in the puddle next to your feet. He rolls on the ground demanding attention but instead of feeling like patting it your first instinct is to kick it away and head straight to work.

Have you ever felt like the dog in this situation? One morning you're greeted with rubs and cuddles and the next morning you do exactly the same thing and get kicked? Why do we sometimes perceive things positively, and other times we perceive the same thing negatively?

I'm calling that undefined something that alters our perception of an event the bias visor. The bias visor can be mood, state of mind, level of stress, internal turmoil, internal peace, etc. I choose the visor analogy because this mental state works like a visor. It's like a screen (visor) that alters (biases) the perception of a neutral event to make it positive or negative. Neutral events are events that aren't logically positive like winning the lottery or logically negative like the death of someone.

Interactions between lovers are probably the best way to observe what I’m talking about. Have you ever been in an argument with your sweetheart and all of a sudden behaviour that she used to like starts annoying her? For example, say you've got a peculiar way to use vocabulary to describe situations. When the bias visor is in positive mode this is seen as funny and amusing, but when the visor is in negative mode it is seen as stupid and illiterate. The action, misusing words, is the same, but the reaction is positive or negative depending on the bias of the visor.

Knowing about the existence of the bias visor gives us a way of understanding people's reactions better. I think that when the presence of a bias visor is evident, identifying the real nature of the visor gives us insight on what the real problem is. Take the previous example of the vocabulary misuse. Imagine all of a sudden your better half starts complaining about your vocabulary. Then the habit of fitting the toilet paper roll the other way round starts annoying her. Then you're scolded because you placed the toothbrush mug on the left side of the sink instead of on the right. All these events are considered generally innocuous and relatively unimportant, but if all of a sudden they start seeming important and negative it's evident that a negative bias visor is affecting the judgment of the situation. The real cause of the problem is not the action itself but something deeper.

There are a million different reasons why somebody is affected by a bias visor. I believe that there are so many possible causes that it's best not to try and guess what they are. The best way to tackle the situation is to discuss it, and ask what the problem is. This way there's a greater chance of identifying the real reason behind one's interpretation of events consequently avoiding the risk of misinterpretations and misjudgments. Sometimes however the biased person might not know what the reason is, or else the person doesn't feel like talking about it. In this case I think the best option is to let it pass gradually and give the person space and time.

What do you think about this topic? Can you add some examples of the bias visor in action? I'm sure that what I'm talking about here is something that was discussed by psychologists at some time. If anybody knows the proper terminology for what I'm talking about then I'd be very grateful for a comment.

Lately Europe has been flooded by low cost supermarkets like Lidl, Aldi and Netto which sell everything under the sun and more. I used the term low cost because the business model of these supermarkets parallels the airline low cost model quite well. To keep low prices these stores keep overheads to a minimum by choosing cheaper property locations, using basic shop furnishings, keep minimal staff, stock cheaper brands and promote themselves aggressively.

Whether you like it or not it's a fact that we're influenced by brand names, packaging and ads. While the brands on sale may not be D&G or the culinary equivalent, the low prices are undeniably attractive and these supermarkets are very popular even if not everybody admits buying from them. I've already said that eating is expensive and time consuming so even I'm a Lidl convert especially when it comes to unimportant food.

This post came to mind when I saw some Scuba diving gear in Lidl. Now, that's one thing that I wouldn't mess around with and buy disreputable supplies to save a couple of bucks. This leads me to the question for you – what would you never buy from these supermarkets?

From the top of my head I would avoid condoms, running shoes and toilet paper.

Take a quick read at the BBC article but don't stop there READ THE DEBATE. If you find something positive written in the comments then go and buy a lotto ticket, you're gonna win!

...yes it is so bad

Eating is expensive and time consuming

Expensive – Have you ever thought how much money you spend on food? I want the IPAQ 6915 PDA, all money spent on food could be spent on the PDA/phone fund.

Time consuming – I'd rather be editing photos, playing world of Warcraft, watching the office or hanging out rather than cooking and eating. The cleaning afterwards is the worst part of the deal.

The ideal solution to this problem would be getting free food without wasting time. Let's look at potential ways of achieving this, taking the ideal scenario in each case:-

Expensive
Get somebody else to pay for the food. This used to be the default back home when my parents used to pay for the food but now alternative approaches need to be investigated.

1. Be a guest – valid option except that you've got to get yourself invited which probably involves some different kind of investment on the other side. Probably works better if you're a good looking female.
2. Get the boss to pay for lunch – Best possible option (also solves the time problem since lunch would be on company time) however it's rare.
3. Gather the food yourself – not really a practical option considering there are no farms around from where to "borrow" the raw ingredients.

Time consuming
Eat when it's better to be eating rather then doing something else.

1. Eat at work – Eating the main meal during the lunch break will free time in the evening. Breakfast is also ideal for work. Not only you're given those glorious extra 10 minutes of sleep but you're effectively not losing productive time from work since you can have breakfast while you're still settling in for the day.
2. Eat while you're doing something else – Watch TV, read the paper, browse the web. These are not always practical options depending on the food in question.
3. Eat for pleasure – Going out for dinner.

In absence of the optimal solution you have to strike a balance between the two variables in question. You could save most of the time if you're willing to eat out (or get take away) everyday but then the bank account is taking the bigger hit.

This week I'm going to journal all my cooking and eating aiming to economise on cost and time. At the end of the week I'll calculate the cost of each dish (timewise and moneywise) and determine the most effective eating method. This will also serve as a reference list to answer the famous "what am I going to cook today?" question.

P.S. Mind you I enjoy good food and even enjoy cooking proper multi course meals BUT not I enjoy it only in company. When it comes to eating alone then the process must be fast and efficient without necessarily being nice.

P.P.S. There might be exceptions to the "I enjoy it only in company rule". For instance two weekends ago I went out for a solo dinner on Saturday night in a Japanese restaurant and it was great.

In these last two years I always wrote something about the Eurovision (see 2004 and 2005) but this year I hoped that I'd get away with avoiding the subject. (Un)fortunately I couldn't resist the temptation and here I am writing about the European Song Festival another year.

For starters this year I only watched the Eurovision. Unlike my impressions here in Ireland people can't care less about the festival, in fact it was a chore in itself finding a pub that was showing it on TV. I watched the show with a festival-ultra in soccer lingo, but even with her insistent requests and charming attempts at convincing the bar-man we didn't get very far enough to listen to any songs except the Irish one and my country's song.

Being the fanatic that she is my friend made it her personal mission to convince all the people within a 10 meter radius to vote for our song. I laughed my heart out watching her conjuring every type of excuse why they should vote for our song. Apart from listening to 2 songs, and laughing out loud I have a recollection that I felt a certain urge to lend my body to the Ukrainian singer which was probably the best element of the Eurovision.

All the work and propaganda served for nothing because our country came last and we didn't even get a single point from Ireland. Actually the only point we got was from Albania probably as recognition for our charity work towards them.

At the end Finland won the Eurovision for the first time with the hard-rock group called Lordi. I only have to say that if for nothing else it was a recognition that rock still lives on, although I feel obliged to ask people who don't usually listen to this type of music and liked the song, to experiment further there's much more to it than Lordi. (Drop a mail for guided tour into this musical world.)

Last Saturday I went for what probably is my last Saturday afternoon shopping with her highness. Throughout these last shopping sprees I've been collecting some very unscientific evidence on the behaviour of men out shopping with their partners. I noticed the following types:-

• The star gazer - his motor functions suggest that he's looking at the cloths but his mind is wandering far away.
• The pet - The one who absently follows his partners scent and nods or yeses for each question
• The interested - although a rare specimen this type actively interests himself in the perennial decision whether this skirt was destined to live in her closet or not
• Still in the beginning of the relationship - These are easy to spot. They have all the characteristics of the average I-couldn't-care-less type but are evidently making an effort to appear supportive, maybe tonight they'll get rewarded and get the chance to tear away the goods just purchased.
• The watcher - The people around are more interesting than the clothes on display.
• The Texter - Shopping is the perfect excuse for texting everybody in the address book.
• The Teen - Every rag is fine as long as he gets a chance to get in changing cubicle.

I posed the question to myself and concluded that in my case it's a mix of having the pleasure of good company, an opportunity to scornfully criticise unwearable cloths (and there are plenty out there), do some good-old-people-watching and imagine that I have a say in her choice of clothes. What about you?

This week:- This week was internet free week, no internet browsing or blog / news reading. The amount of actual work done rather than read was surprising and most of the small things that give you a sense of a fulfilling day would have otherwise been spent browsing. I started practicing what I learned in the last months.

Next Week:- Before starting the day spend the first 5 minutes of the day doing the most important thing of the day. It doesn't matter if you then start doing something else as long as you start with what's most important. Don't make excuses that you're too tired in the morning and you can't concentrate well.

I've never been an avid news reader but with the advent of blogging all this change and like many others I started a quest just the right RSS Newsreader. For the uninitiated RSS is a simple XML based technology by which content (normally text but not limited to) is published in a machine readable format. For more information on RSS check out Wikipedia's RSS page. News readers are the programs that automatically poll RSS files to retrieve their content to facilitate the delivery of information to the user. The primary advantage of RSS is that it is an information pushing technology which means that information is sent to the user not waiting for the user to fetch the information himself.

Newsgator - Newsgator was my first RSS love and I've been loyal to it since the times when RSS was as popular as my mom. The one and only reason I use Newsgator is its formidable integration with Outlook which makes reading news as easy as reading e-mail, with the additional advantage of not giving any clue to your manager that you're reading blogs at work. I tried the web version of Newsgator a couple of times but it was too slow for my tastes.

Pluck - Pluck is my weapon of choice at home where I prefer using a web based internet reader. This was one of the first web based readers I tried and since then I didn't feel the need to change. The advantage pluck has over other readers is its extensions that integrate with IE or Firefox thus making it much faster than other web readers with the additional functionality browser components can provide. Recently I was about to ditch pluck because of some very annoying problems with the Firefox extension but as soon as I tried the new Windows version (Pluck 2.0) I reconsidered. This is the only reason I still use IE but it's a damn good reason.

Google Reader - Google Reader was the contender against pluck when I was looking for an alternative but the functionality of Google's solution wasn't anywhere near that offered by Pluck.

FeedLounge - I've read about FeedLounge in Rand's Information Report and the screen shots on the main site look pretty promising. I think it might appeal for people who're still looking for a good reader.

Digg - For me, digg is a crossbreed between a content aggregator and social bookmarking application, and even if it isn't a news reader per se it still fits in the category of news delivery. You can use digg in two ways; say you found a really cool technology related article and you want others to know about it, all you've got to do is digg the article by submitting the article's URL to digg. Other people then go digging for news and see the article that you posted, if they like it then they digg it too to increase its rating. If on the other hand you want to know what are the hottest tech articles at the moment just go into the digg main page and check out the articles with the highest hits. Really Nifty!

Standalone readers - I'm not a big fan of standalone readers like Feeddemon and co. as I already have enough applications running simultaneously. Standalone readers might appeal for dedicated news lovers without serious levels of NADD.

Do you think that the news reader you use is better than these? Go ahead and post your comments.

I was wondering how long will it take for people to start developing an antipathy towards Google in the same way we have the tendency to rebel against over-successful organisations like say, Microsoft or Manchester United. Let's face it, we tend to have a soft spot for the underdogs.

Google had just released Google Reader, an RSS reader developed in the now famous Google AJAX style when I started writing this article, but did the world really need another RSS reader (check out the exhaustive list at the RSS Compendium)? I haven't had the time to review Google Reader in depth, though I have to say that the interface looks clean and very functional. There were some people who claimed that it was buggy and slow. Google slow? I thought that these two words were incompatible, but then Google spoiled us by being fast and efficient.

Apart from Google Reader, Google also released Google Talk (an IM client), Google Desktop 2 and Google Blog Search. All these four tools are all well established technologies, it seems that Google is just improving on the ideas everybody likes and adding the Google touch of class (and AJAX). Would you bet against a Flickr like tool in the pipeline? We'll wait and see.

Another thing, did you notice how so many people complain about popup ads or banners or other foul looking adverts on pages yet nobody ever says anything about Google ads that are littering every page on the web. Google does this advertising so unobtrusively that it seems not to matter to anyone. Mind you not that anyone is going to pay heed to the ads when the can get to 2Gb of free e-mail or a faster news reader or a super compatible IM client. I think Google is managing to thread the fine line of a win-win situation by generating loads of revenue from ads and at the same time delivering excellent value quality software to its fans.

This post will not interest the one or two regular readers because I doubt whether they're familiar with Italian TV.

Probably the commodity we missed most in Ecuador was TV and it shows because we're daily overdosing with the box. This winter season the stations brought some great shows to the extent that we can kiss our social lives goodbye and spend a whole week watching different shows, most of them on the Italian state channel RAI Due. I think their investment will pay off as we're spending more and more time watching RAI instead of the usually superior Mediaset channels.

Wednesday is Isola dei famosi (Celebrity Survivor) week, a program that has stirred some commotion in the news this week after the controversial wife, Loredana Lecciso, of famous singer Albano Carisi released a interview on magazine Gente stating that she's planning to separate from her husband. Great timing Loredana what better time to leave your husband then when he's starring on Celebrity Survivor. I'm sure that the hype was a conspiracy to increase the audience against La Talpa the Mediaset reality rival. Having said that, I must admit that I still end up watching these shows with all their scoops and sensationalisms.

While ranting about TV, I cannot help not to mention the Monday dose of Desperate Housewives. I've only watched 4 middle episodes from season one but I dare say that this is the best serial since Scrubs. It even has the pleasure to have helped me understand myself better too. I adore dark humour and I dig a narrator in films.