Yesterday I came back after a few days in my old hometown Milan. Even though I had brought a laptop I didn’t actually use it, much. It’s good to unplug every now and then.

As you probably know CES took place recently. As it is the the world’s largest annual trade show for consumer electronics, all media that reports about technology sends someone over to cover it. That must be really hard work playing with the latest gadgets and toys for several days in a row!

I bought What Mobile today which had a round-up from CES. What? What mobile. Having read a lot about the event online there wasn’t many things in there I hadn’t seen or read about already. But this was new though, the article starts like this:

“It’s that time of the year again when manufacturers show off the hottest new products they’ve been secretly working on for months.”

Months? Like proper months? Noooo, really?!!

I just thought that was hilarious. And if I think it is, it probably isn’t. But there you go. If it had said “years” that would actually have been equally funny too. Crazy.

It’s Saturday morning, the sun i shining and I have time to work on my projects. This is the plan:

• Fix the timezones on Whenda. Now the service is rather useless unless you live in UTC+0
• Investigate why it said “Newer posts” instead of “Older posts” for the link to older posts at the bottom of this page. I must have done something really silly in the early hours. Nicely spotted Perly, thanks! I might also spend some time on the template, I’m not completely happy with it.
• Write something more interesting in this site’s about page.
• Implement some new features, clean up and release a pre-alpha-live-single-user-prototype of FavoRead which is my bookmark engine. The domain is currently parked so I’d like to put something there because it takes time for search engines to pick it up.

Tonight I’m going out for dinner with friends so I think it’ll be a bit tight timewise and tomorrow I have other plans. So for this to work I’ll have to stay focused, which may turn out difficult. I’ve gathered some interesting links this week that I’d like to check out, didn’t have time to read when I found them. Let’s see what happens, I posted this as a little motivator and to let you know what’s going on. Laters.

Iterasi is an online bookmark service soon to be launched. The twist is that instead of only storing a link to the page you bookmark, it stores the whole page as it is. This means is that it’s possible to open up a bookmarked page and see it exactly how it was at the moment it was bookmarked. Not only how it looked like, a screenshot would’ve been sufficient for that, but it saves all the HTML, images, JavaScripts, stylesheets and so on so that it can be used like when it was saved. It’s a bit like a web page time machine. They’ve got a video of their DEMO presentation on the front page of their website so you can see it in action. Since I can’t use the service yet and in case they remove it from their site: the video can also be seen here.

For those who need this “serializing” pages feature it looks like a great tool. When they go live I will do a more in depth review. Until then I’ll continue working on my own bookmark engine but more on that later.

I don’t mind internet ads, not at all actually as long as they don’t slow down a page too much. Non-hobby websites must be profitable to earn their existence and I don’t mind seeing ads on the sites I choose to visit. I’ve even clicked a few. Ads are not there because someone wants to pay to ruin my web experience but because someone has something they think it’s worth spending money telling me about. So they can make money of course. So I think of ads as funding the sites I like to visit and without them some sites would simply not exist. I’ve even found some nice, cool and interesting things by clicking on ads that had a message that appealed to me.

The next big thing in internet advertising according to this sales letter is audio ads. Reading that got me thinking about how it would be if that became common.

I listen to music when I’m in front of my computer, almost all the time. Either using speakers or headphones and I dread the day when the web becomes full of noise that interfere with what I actually want to listen to. There are already video ads with audio but fortunately the ones that starts playing sound without user interaction are few so far.

For a site owner though these kind of audio ads have a couple of benefits(given it doesn’t scare the visitors away). They are invisible, hence don’t take up any space and ruin the looks of a page and they bring additional income.

With visible ads it’s measurable how many times an ad has been displayed or how many times a link has been clicked. With sound, there is no way of measuring if someone as actually heard it. This is something they have already taken into account. They expect 20% of the played ads to actually be heard by someone. I think that sounds like a reasonable number, until it becomes common knowledge how to avoid the audio for those ads to ever reach the eardrums!

What happens is that I come up with a topic that I just have to write about, an opinion or something else that I find interesting. Then I start writing a post but after a while I go back and read what I just wrote and start analyzing it. Is it good? How will that be interpreted? Is it correct? And so on. In the end I end up(see two “ends”, that looks weird) with a text that is full of comments about the text itself and fragments of half finished sentences that I’m happy with scattered all over the place and doesn’t work as a whole. After a while I feel like it’s taken way too much valuable time and gives it a rest for later. I haven’t gone back to finish one such post.

I used to be a good story writer when I was a kid, good imagination and all that. I’m also able to keep a conversation going and I can code(not relevant but anyway). So what is the problem? Possibly it’s because I feel that I can’t release anything that is not good enough. But the only judge of that if I don’t publish is me, and since I’m not a good blogger how can that count for anything?

So, here I am writing about writing. Something I promised myself not to do because I think it’s lame to fill blogs with topics like “ah I don’t know what to write” and that becomes a post about that there’s nothing to write, if you know what I mean. What happened was that I was writing another post and ended up editing back and forth just like I described and just had to stop and think about it for a minute. While thinking about it I wrote this. The good thing is, I didn’t go back and edit this(ok a little). See this post as personal exercise(for me) and in no less than in two minutes after I put this dot here. <- yes that one! …this post will go live!

Connectile Dysfunction - The inability to get a connection. Most commonly experienced when using a cell phone, but can refer to laptops with Wi-Fi cards, etc. If it persists for more than four hours, please contact your doctor. He can’t help your connectile dysfunction, but can give you something to ease your frustration.

Found on BuzzWack

After reading Paul’s post I had a look in my bag and here’s what I found:

• Asus Eee
• Umbrella
• Multicard reader
• Nintendo DS
• Glasses
• IPod Nano
• Camera + charger
• 4 GB USB memory
• Magazines
• Notebook
• Pencil

(Chargers and various cables excluded)

I used to carry around a 13″ Vaio in a bag that was just big enough to fit the laptop and not much else. It worked well but sometimes I need to carry more stuff so I bought a bigger bag. Shortly after that I got myself an Eee and that’s what I carry daily now because it’s only for taking notes and reading on the train to work. With a bigger bag and a smaller laptop there is plenty of room for other useful and not so useful things. Actually, when I looked in my bag now I had stuff in there that I had forgotten about.

This was a good exercise because it made me realize I don’t need to carry all that stuff everyday.

Blamestorming – Debating with colleagues why a deadline was missed and who was responsible.

via Metro

Since I wrote this yesterday I’ve learned that the means for doing exists and is spelled XMPP. I first heard of Jabber years ago but didn’t start using it because none of my friends did so there wasn’t much point. Now it feels like I’ve missed out on something really cool and interesting

Operation Catch-Up-On-XMPP starts now!

So far I’ve read skimmed the specs for the extensions Publish-Subscribe and Personal Eventing via Pubsub and they seem very promising to what I want to do.