IN MY OPINION

For the last two weeks I’ve been listening primarily to an amazing Georgian jazz singer Nino Katamadze. Her performances are just exciting. The music is mix of the classic jazz with ethno-music style. Listening to the clear deep mellow voice is a real pleasure (like a mug of Guiness beer in the Friday’s evening ). Also she improvises very inventive and non-trivial. You can listen to her singing at the official web-site.

You can figure out the main difference between two main concepts of modern software development here. The only one thing there omitted is a bugafeature paradigm.

For a long time I wanted to take up touch-typing and increase my typing speed. I tried some training programs, but it was hard to find proper amount of time to spent eating alphabet monsters. As an every learning process the touch-typing requires taking lessons repeatedly. However, usually it could be hard to follow this proven rule because of meaningless nature of such programs, when you have to repeat many times a boring character sequence like ’sd jk as jk’. When I had some spare time at home I had to make a choice between writing an e-mail to a friend using the well known ‘two-finger’ method or to make one step towards the ‘ten-finger’, usually I chose the first one.

Some times ago I was given a bright idea how to combine the learning process with pleasure of writing to a blog or posting to a forum.
The main idea was to use a keyboard without any written captions on keys. It makes learning the key layout inevitable. Using this kind of keyboards brings you a great opportunity to beat the bad habit of constantly looking at the keyboard while typing. Actually, there is a good implementation here, however it will cost you pretty much sum of money.

As I was advised, I made the analogue thing from my old simple keyboard which probably costs now about 2$. Using a piece of emery board I erased all captions on the alphabet and punctuating keys.

This post was written using this keyboard and it took more than 2 hours. But, now I can remember all keys locations. I can’t afford using this magic device at work because of great time losses, but I definitely will use it at home.

Update:
I found a good implementation:
Quick and Dirty Das Keyboard (Blank Keyboard)

I deeply impressed how is theserverside.com forum community is weak. I always considered this Java server-side portal as a major resource in this field, but now I am disappointed. I posted a simple question to one of the forums, and it is still unanswered. What’s more it is still the first in the message tree. So, nobody from hundreds of thousands of used didn’t post anything during the whole day. It’s a pity. However there lots of useful stuff like overviews and Tech Talks.

Few things I’ve done this week:
After returning from Kamenec I published some photos from there.

I wrote my first perl script which generates sql inserts/updates that are build according to specific patterns. It was simple and cute. I discovered a Eclipse plug-in EPIC and used it together with ActivePerl - perl distribution for Windows platform.
I joined a Java programming competition of virtual creatures Electric Jungle.

Where do people usually celebrates their birthdays? Common places are flats, cafes or B&Bs in the forest. Some people prefer spending time at bowling clubs or doing another activities with friends at public places.

Tonight I’m having a trip to the ancient Ukrainian city Kamyanets-Podilskyy to celebrate a birthday of my wife’s close friend. It will my first “remote” party. She invited there about 20 person. I know only few of them, but I’m sure there will be lots of nice and friendly people. We are going to spend there 2 days celebrating and sightseeing.

Kamyanets-Podilskyy is an ancient city located in the south west of Ukraine. My grandfather was born there, so I can say that my origins are there too. I have full-charged batteries of my photo-camera, and I’m going to take as many good pictures of the great town as I could.

This year we followed a tradition of the last two years to celebrate New Year with our close friends at home of one of us having a cocktail party. Usually, I choose drinks for a party because I do the drinks mixing job. This year we had four main ingredients which were mixed with soda water, juice, ice and ice-cream:

• Seagram’s Lime Twisted Gin
• Vana Tallin Cream Liqueur
• Baileys Irish Cream
• Curacao Bleu

I prepared all drinks guessing proportions without exact recipes. Everything was quite good and we had lots of fun that night. But if I had known about this great resource drinksmixer.com/ I would have definitely used it.

Happy New Year and Marry Christmas!