Persistence

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge

DDJ (Dr. Dobbs Journal)

DDJ was the magazine I could never follow as a noob. I understood one out of every ten articles that were in there, but I kept coming back to it and used to buy a copy once a year.
So, I was amazed to find out that for 20USD I could get a subscription to the online version (distributed in .pdf format), full access to past archives, access to what is left of the once great Byte magazine (and of course the articles of Jerry Pournelle) and what appears to be the remnants of an early 1990s magazine called AI Expert...

AI Expert must have lasted a couple of years or so... Not exactly sure how long, but it mustn't have been longer that that. Discovering that it still exists, albeit in a bi-monthly newsletter form, really made my day...

So, here's a link I came across while reading some of the articles there. Although old, still quite interesting. And with an impressive title, too: "Virtual Urban Legends: Investigating the Ecology of the World Wide Web"

Luba - Let It Go

After years of wondering, I finally got down to it and discovered the singer of "Let it go", a song I've been listening to far too often in the past few years. Turns out, group's name was "Luba", first name of lead singer Luba Kowalchyk, a Canadian girl from Ukranian parents.
Go ahead and try it - type "Luba - Let It Go" in your favorite P2P client - you won't run into any trouble locating it; it's quite popular.

Interesting trivia: The band got a Juno award (the Canadian music awards, named after Pierre Juneau) for the song in 1985

True Nerd

I have become a true nerd. Instead of waking up, opening up my bedroom window and enjoying the sunshine, I wake up, power up my pc, connect to the internet, and check ForecastFox to see if there is rain or shine outside my window...

Only then do I decide what to wear for the day.

Της Πουτανιάς το Ζάρι?

Κάποιος να μου εξηγήσει τι διάολο σημαίνει αυτή η έκφραση!
Κάποιος? Κανένας?

Copy - Paste Blues

Another collegue of mine alerted me to another interesting quirk concerning the windows clipboard: the way text is copied into it, is dependant on the current language setting.

Let me explain:
If you ever tried copy-pasting greek text into Microsoft Word and came out as gibberish, there is a solution. Just switch to greek (usually left alt+ left shift) and try copy-pasting again. Greek will appear correctly this time...

Control+C in System Dialogs

After nearly 10 years of using windows, a collegue of mine introduced me to a little secret knowledge that I couldn't believe I had passed by...
When a system dialog pops up (the ones with a message and an ok/cancel button)
you can press Control+C and copy their FULL contents (title, message and button text) to the clipboard as text... go figure...
This one is gonna save me a lot of time...

Eurotrip

I never thought I'd be writting about a teen movie, but this one was really funny. Great cameo appearances by Matt Damon, Vinnie Jones, Lucy Lawless and others. Great soundtrack with Scotty Doesn't Know and Morning Train being the most catchy...
Check it out...

5Nov@Figaro - Revisited

I just posted an updated version of the Figaro thread. This one contains all 143 messages from November first to November sixth. You can download it here.