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Yesterday I was fixing a pipe in the kitchen, today it was the bathroom door. These days I’m feeling like a true house-husband. Taking the wooden door heavy as hell off the hinges appeared to be not a do-it-alone kind of task even though I managed to succeed. Just let the professionals do their job the next time you need to fix something like that, or at least find a good helper if you still plan on doing it yourself. I was half dead when I finished as it took several rounds to make everything look just right. Phew…

This week I was working on my memory. I mean that part of the body you use to hold the address of this blog. Well, my amazement can’t be put in words. The site I discovered is very concise and has tons of practical advices and methods. They are dedicated to the single topic — memory training — and extremely easy to grasp. What distinguishes this resource from many others is that it cuts to the chase. No fluff, just stuff. Please meet Build Your Memory dot Com.

I spent no more than 20 minutes to observe the first results and, frankly speaking, I was close to shock. It virtually knocked me out when I saw how good my memory works when well-operated. The first bright illustration was my ability to remember 20 unrelated words (and I’m still able to recollect them easily) in the correct order. Can you do that right now? I bet you can’t.

There are heaps of valuable advices on working with memory. Just to name some, they teach you how to remember big numbers (like a hundred digits long or more), organize your dreams and recall them at will. If nothing else, you will have some good time exploring your limits and there’s no doubt you’ll find something excitingly useful.

In my case, the life has already started to change for the better. Today, when I worked with a text for my next English classes, I was able to remember and still able to recall more than 35 new words and phrases after the single pass without any visible effort. It used to take more than a day to learn them before and at most only the half of them made their way to active vocabulary. It’s a remarkable progress to me.

As a side effect of this miraculous improvement I’m no longer afraid of learning new. There’s no feeling that the head is about to explode, if you know what I mean, and there’s no need to preserve precious space for really important special occasions. It’s a great pleasure to know that there’s room for everything I need.

Another small step to perfection. I love it!

I was planning to write something different today, but this just poped up in front of me and I can’t help sharing it with you. So please enjoy and hope you appreciate it.

It’s always interesting and, what’s more important, pleasant to learn some hack you could continue using; something really useful and not obvious. Yeah, it’s nice. I have something of a sort for you today. A feather in my hat actually; but at first, here’s some background.

I found couple of neat podcasts on English and one of them sounds incredibly. That’s the reason why I decided to stick to it and follow. In this specific moment I mean The Bob and Rob Show which is terrific and I really mean that. I will share my feelings on this matter later, but today I wish to turn your attention to something different. They do have a wonderful podcast feed with detailed show notes and all bells and whistles; admittedly, it’s universally great. But there’s a downside — it’s limited only to the latest eight episodes. What a trouble indeed!

I need to get off track here to say that I have become and avid iTunes user since my buying of iPod and have recently discovered the beauty of the tight integration of podcasts in it. So, as you have already realized, I’m using iTunes for podcasts fetching and monitoring.

As it supposed, there’s no surprise that iTunes picks only most recent 8 episodes from that feed. What about the rest? Am I supposed to wave my hand in goodbye to them? No way, and I decided to fight bravely against it. And here’s what I came up with.

Their feed link looks like this:

http://www.englishcaster.com/bobrob/?feed=rss2

The site runs on top of the Wordpress platform, so I took the sources for deeper analysis and found I can add a parameter to control which page is displayed, like ‘paged=2‘ to display the second page. I also found the protected parameter to control the number of posts on the page, but its nature doesn’t let manipulate the numbers. That’s why I took this page number thing and started experimenting.

The idea was to dump all pages into XML files, merge them into consolidated XML and feed it to iTunes somehow. Plus preferably, it shouldn’t be a different podcast as I still wished to continue following the original once I finished with archives. The goal was clear and I jumped right into action.

It was an easy yet a little mundane task to dump all pages (7) into separate files and copy-paste item tags from them into one big consolidated XML (200 Kb).

Here comes the tricky part. I needed iTunes to pick up this file when it looks for the podcast updates next time. To do so, I needed to put the handmade XML on some server and route the query to it, but how? The magic trick here is to route all the calls to the original server (www.englishcaster.com) to some other server with my file. I decided to use my local Apache server for this purpose: created the ‘bobrob’ directory and ‘index.php’ in it. You know that when there’s no file mentioned in the URL (like it is in our case; see the link above), the server will look for ‘index.php‘ and ‘index.html‘ before throwing out the white flag.

I named the file ‘index.php‘ and added some simple code to set the content type header for iTunes to think it’s valid XML. Here’s how the code looks like:

<?php
header(”Content-type: text/xml”);
echo ‘<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>’;
?>
<!– generator=”wordpress/2.0.2″ –>
<rss version=”2.0″ > … </rss>

The last, the most interesting part was to tell Windows to route all requests to my local site. There’s a file ‘hosts‘ in ‘c:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc‘. The file holds aliases for site names and maps them to IP addresses. The address ‘127.0.0.1‘ stands for local PC (as you might know). All I had to do was to put the desired host name ‘www.englishcaster.com‘ to the end of the localhost mapping line, and upon saving changes, the system started to recognize my PC under the new name.

The last move was to open iTunes and ask it to update the feed. It showed the complete list of 51 episodes (at the moment of writing) ready for fetching. Delicious…

I removed the fake mapping and continued with downloading. That’s all tricks for today. I hope it helps you some day.

Let me know what you think of this. Was it clear? Do you have any enhancements or alternative tricks? How would *you* cope with this situation? These are all interesting questions and I would love to hear from you.

Have a nice day and happy listening!

This week has started with learning very promising JavaScript toolkit — Dojo. Yeah, it’s been for some time on the stage, but I didn’t quite needed it until now. For the last couple of years I’ve been involved in extremely intensive development, and you know its name. Right, it’s BlogBridge. Mainly, we do some serious Java programming, but sometimes, and Feed Library is a great example, we switch to web development. This is the reason I’m trying to expand my horizons and learn something new in the area.

So, well, I started digging Dojo. Thanks God, there are a Book and a Wiki available. The manual is still incomplete which makes the learning a bit slower, but as it was mentioned by other fellow diggers almost billion of times, the fact that it’s all written in JavaScript compensates the lack of documentation; you can effortlessly pick up anything you need right from the code.

At this point, I’m glad with the progress and more than satisfied with how the whole thing works. My object-oriented mind rests here as it can create objects and tie them together to work collaboratively instead of multiplying infinite number of standalone functions building the tangled spider web of method calls as it’s common in conventional JavaScript programming.

I wish to share some links that helped me to make first steps. Hope they will give you a hand some day.

• Dojo Toolkit: Mailing List Archive — unbeaten words of wisdom
• Dojo Toolkit: Fast Widgets Authoring — widgeting tutorial from the author
• Ajaxian - Dojo Topic — great articles and pieces of code. Specifically the The Dojo Toolkit in Practice article.
• DDQ: Widgeting — really quick widgeting tutorial (note that while it’s still valid for Dojo 3.0.1, the widgeting methods significantly improved since then)
• Brian’s Widget Tutorial — lots of good advices saving ton of time

Oh yes, and just to boast a little, couple of minutes ago I sent a small report where pointed out several miniature mistakes in validation module and SwtWidget code preventing them from loading normally into IE and Safari browsers. FireFox grits its teeth but still eats the scripts; others seem to refuse.

Couple of weeks ago I started the next round of attempts to improve my workflow and organize the day better. It had started to take way too much time to stay on top of things and something had had to be done about that. So, I began collecting feeds and read books on personal productivity and management, scanning them on a daily basis for new, more effective approaches and methods.

Today, catching up with collected reading, I stumbled upon an article by Michael Sampson sharing his productivity recipe. In the essay, he describes in details how Clarity, work without Interruptions, and Rested brain help to maintain top RPM of his brain cells during a business day. He gives a rousing speech with lots of examples; highly informative at the same time.

Needless to say, it helped me. I picked up some good advice and, what’s important, now I see that I’m not alone in my troubles with noise, distractions (I’m constantly fighting with) and documents organization. Thanks, Mike, for sharing your experience!

Please take a moment to read the article though as it may turn whole your life upside-down.

Whole yesterday night the electricity was acting up, like a naughty child, and in the end went off. We woke up that morning only to find the lights, computers and radio completely dead. An unusual feeling… especially if all your life depends and is mainly spinning around the Internet that comes over the wires with electrons on the run. We spent a wonderful day reading, solving Japanese puzzles and preparing to our English classes that had started earlier this week. Now I’m back online and ready for action.

This time I share some of my recently discovered hidden places on the Net. These are all dedicated to photography, creative, never widely advertised and all holding immense value. Please join me for this quick tour.

Let me start with some extremely stylish thing. Here’s Cole Rise and the collection of mostly monochrome works driving you away into the mystic world of air. The spirit of flight is dominating in his works living in a cozy space of imaginary world. Take your time to discover the truth of birds and the power of winds, explore the volumes and break the law of gravitation with the wizard of this amazing gallery.

Moving slowly from unreal to Earth views, here comes Kenneth Parker with a colorful and extremely powerful collection of “windows” from all over the planet. It’s hard to put in words how high in quality these images are, and how breathtaking the views in them: pristine colors, professional cropping leaving vast space for imagination and the plot off the beaten track — all make the time collapse guiding you through the eternity of life. With lost settlements, the strength of nature, whims of flora and much more Kenneth Parker welcomes his visitors.

Eric Myer is an artist of a different kind. He spreads his wings with the urban culture. His definition of art is invariably based on humans, their surrounding and communication. The way he chooses to deliver the message through the boundaries of a static pulls the deepest strings of a soul. Never before have I seen such a sincere and lively reflection of human feelings as it is set in paper of his works. The color and action go hand in hand making you feel invigorating power of a radiant smile.

Quite opposite side of the human nature is shown in works of James Nachtwey; the dark side, with its unhealthy trend towards self-destruction and inflicting pain. In his own words, he witnessed a lot, and this experience is clearly mirrored. The position is doubtless and leaves no room for hesitation. There are no wonders of the world, there’s no joy, no fun in his work, just the deepest sorrow and the chilly breeze of an utter despair. Turn the pages of the dark side to see, to believe, to remember.

Hope you enjoyed this little journey in the stunning world of creative photography. Color and form is not the everything, you still need a feeling, a sense and a strong hand to make it real.

Until the next time!

My fever was progressing slowly over the last few days and I had to spend whole weekend at home almost chained to bed. It gave me enough time to review what essential reading was still in progress and choose some books to move on. It appears this weekend was dedicated to English studies and improving of writing skills.

For some weeks my favorite bed-time reading was The Elements Of Style by William Strunk, Jr. This is not really a book but a thin concise brochure on English grammar, usage and writing style. The most essential parts of the language are explained in great detail followed by deeply thought out examples. Even brief and elaborate reading can be of a real help to any newly baked writer. These fifty pages of concentrated wisdom will change your world as they changed mine. If you believe your text is ideally correct from the grammar point of you, don’t be so sure. Trust me, there’s a room for amends. It won’t take much time, but I promise you will be proud of yourself afterward.

A week earlier I had found a site — Writers.com. It had started as a first on-line writing classes. In addition to numerous courses and workshops on creative writing, fiction, poetry, screen writing and many others, they diligently collect valuable resources and send out a newsletter. Among other resources on digital law, copyrights, publishing advices, fees and taxes, there is tips section that really knocks out. It impresses with the variety of resources exhibited: capitalization, dangling modifiers, passive & active voice, point of view, punctuation, spelling and unacceptable words — everything is rather delicious. I spent long days there and my eyes are still wide-open. This very second I’m facing serious dilemma — to finish the sentence or literally dive back into reading.

Hardly anyone could overestimate the significance of these resources. One thing I’m constantly paranoid about is how many other interesting places I would care of do exist. It seems, I’ve been looking for something simply as useful as this for months and what troubles most is that it existed all that time… in some parallel world. Heaps of information are out there — undiscovered — to be explored!

It looks, feels and smells, like autumn has finally come. It’s raining two times a blustery day and it’s cold like on Moon chilly nights. Some day this week I caught light cold and still suffering from aching throat. The heat wave had left unexpectedly, then the door bell rang, and in a fraction of a second we are welcoming the autumn in all its colorful beauty.

Our today’s journey has been canceled as meteo-channels forecast rains all over the area, but still there’s a hope it wasn’t the last time this year when we could set off for a long cycling trip.

This week I discovered one amazing personal time management technique. You know I’m an addict when it comes to productivity and organization. It’s my obsession, and I’m always open to learning something new to improve and develop personal skills. As it comes, the technique is extremely famous among business people. What I started exploring is Getting Things Done methodology brought to us by David Allen.

The set of methods and rules helps you stay on top of things at all times, unload your memory by pushing the agendas and to-do’s out of it to some convenient persistent storage, lets you focus more on what is going on right now and improve you next task selection skills. It’s no way a panacea from all the daily job troubles, but still it helps to hack your life and tackle with it one step more effectively.

My immediate victory was that since half a year I could make a deep breath of relief watching my Thunderbird inbox emptied and transformed into a tidy actions list (I’ll give you a tip about what software I used of course.) It was the result of an intensive review effort I had Wednesday evening. All the sheep were separated from the goats and important things stayed. I converted them into concise lists of concrete actions, so that they didn’t return to my inbox. Then I spent two wonderful working days in pure action picking tasks from my new actions list one by one for immediate unconditional execution. Surprisingly, I made much bigger progress than usual and the explanation I found in the book by David — I was no longer spending time hesitating about the choice to make. I always picked the right task.

The book I mentioned is entitled the same way as the technique — Getting Things Done. It’s written in clear language although frankly speaking I skipped over the first few chapters scanning them briefly because they are too narrative to my taste and bring very little practical advice. However, I would highly recommend reading them to those who doesn’t feel motivated enough to start. These chapters contain numerous invigorating real-world examples full of sense and value.

While the technique by itself is nothing really complex and doesn’t require some unusual tools, but files, a pile of printer paper, a pen and boxes to hold your “stuff”, I felt that it won’t work well for me because mainly (and it’s 99% of time for sure) my job is closely tied to electronic materials (email, documents, graphic files etc) and I need some software tool to support my updated workflow. I Googled and Digged through out the Internet only to find very few specialized desktop and web-based application for GTD, which I didn’t like. Continued looking for something really simple, sitting in my system tray, working perfectly without a mouse and taking very little memory to be almost invisible in all terms, brought its results at last.

To my greatest surprise I found a Delphi application KeyNote which is convenient and quick note taker with hierarchy of pages and multiple notes per file. Unfortunately the author — Marek Jedlinski — had terminated the support long ago with some dim explanation of his current programmer’s block. As a fellow programmer, I can reassure you, Marek, that having little blocks each day and big ones at least once a month doesn’t really actually give an excuse for getting things undone. One way or another it’s all very personal and not really the point. The point is that this little nice application fits my workflow and requirements extremely well at the moment. I would love to say thank you to Marek for this free bit of useful software. It’s a big luck that I found it on the ever growing Net and it’s elevating. It has no GTD specific features, but quick and reliable interface allowing to paste any reference materials (files, pictures, links etc) into a note body. I like it and recommend to give it a whirl.

This is all news for today. Perhaps, I’ll continue reporting my progress as I move on. Let me know if it’s interesting to anyone though. Maybe I’m just flooding?