April 2012
1 post
February 2012
3 posts
“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake...”
– George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
November 2011
5 posts
“I always return my Gram’s phone calls and do as she asks right away, she’s...”
– (via kellyoxford)
“You see, I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will, of...”
– Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
October 2011
7 posts
1 tag
“Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance...”
– Robert D. Sprecht, Rand Corp.
“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children,...”
– Stanley Kubrick interview, Playboy (September 1968)
“Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.”
– Pablo Picasso
September 2011
7 posts
“Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that is how...”
– Sue Murphy
Untranslatable Foreign Language Words
Toska – Russian
This word can be described best in the words of Vladimir Nabokov: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental...
“The great advantage of plagiarism as a literary method is that it removes the...”
– Stewart Home , “None Dare Call It Nihilism”
4 tags
July 2011
7 posts
1 tag
“An Outside Context Problem is the sort of thing most civilizations encounter...”
– Iain Banks
1 tag
Absolute Radio, Home of the No Repeat Guarantee →
I’ve been looking through British radio stations lately, and here’s my latest find — Absolute Radio, a station with the main focus towards mainstream rock and music performed live.
So to speak: Coldplay, Kings of Leon, The Killers, Oasis, Kaiser Chiefs, R.E.M., The Police, Muse, Blur — this kind of programming certainly makes for an enjoyable listen. If that hasn’t...
“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is...”
– John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society
June 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Watch
iamamiwhoami is an electronic music and multimedia project headlined by Swedish singer-songwriter Jonna Lee. The project is notable not only for its artistic multimedia output, but also the creators’ leveraging of social technology and phenomena to disseminate their music and music videos.
At the Swedish Grammis held on January 2011, iamamiwhoami won the award of “Innovator of the...
Lake Superior State University's 35th annual List... →
Word “czars” at Lake Superior State University “unfriended” 15 words and phrases and declared them “shovel-ready” for inclusion on the university’s 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.
“The list this year is a ‘teachable moment’ conducted free of...
1 tag
PostRank + Google Reader →
Postrank had been around for a couple of years; however, it’s been only recently when I learned about their offering. I can hardly list new services I’d enjoy to this extent, I think I haven’t been in such an astonishment since I signed-up for Dropbox, and that’s been… Two years ago, so to speak. And if it wasn’t for the news regarding the latest Google’s...
February 2011
4 posts
3 tags
“Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.”
– Ray Bradbury (via arsvitaest)
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
This is going to be my favorite piece of IT literature in a while. The UNIX-HATERS Handbook is a semi-humorous edited compilation of messages sent to the UNIX-HATERS mailing list. It’s been 17 years since the publication date, so it’s pretty old now… Doesn’t matter — a large part of what has been said in this book still remains relevant, regardless of the age....
January 2011
7 posts
French words with no English translation
Dépaysement: The sensation of being in another country.
La douleur exquise: The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have. Even a Sex in the City episode was named after it!
Chômer: To be unemployed, but because it’s a verb, it makes the state active.
Profiter: To make the most of or take advantage of.
Flâneur: As defined in the book Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, it’s “the...
2 tags
Russians *almost* smarter than other nations of...
Recently I stumbled upon VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. What’s truly interesting is the fact that even though it’s a website with well over 100 million of users, it certainly hasn’t been met with any controversies so far. You know, the kind of thing Facebook unfailingly gets itself into every once in a while.
5 years in business, 100 million of users — not...
4 tags
“It is an error to suppose that lions do not approach a fire.”
– Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, “Travels in India” (via Res Obscura)
1 tag
Once you upload something to the Internet...
Apart from giving you standard RSS reader functionality with a bit of social features built-in, Google Reader has at least two other interesting uses. Both are directly related to the fact that Google stores all contents of your RSS subscriptions in the cloud and loads up from there, for your convince.
First, it can serve amazingly well for browsing content on websites with troublesome...
December 2010
32 posts
5 tags
2 tags
2 tags
“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause...”
– Terry Pratchett
Polar bears get the better of spy cameras →
The cameras used for a documentary on polar bears were designed to be as unobtrusive and resilient as possible. Polar Bear: Spy on The Ice used hi-tech “spy cams” to get as close as possible to the bears during summer in the Arctic islands of Svalbard.
But while they were built to withstand temperatures as low as -40C, in the end most could not cope with the curiosity displayed...
“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I...”
– Emo Phillips