Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Check at Amazon

Just finished the Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Great story, clean and eloquent style, lots of infrequently used words. A must for every language learner and simply an educated man.

You’ve got my recommendation on this.

Good Writing, Bad Health

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!

Getting Things Done This Autumn

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?

Book: Wicked Cool Java

Pito has just told me that the a book Wicked Cool Java by Brian D. Eubanks is already available. You can find the review on Slashdot or visit the official site to get more information. In this post I won’t dive deep into details, but will just say why it’s so exciting personally to me.

In the Chapter 4 “Crawling the Semantic Web” the author mentions the project I’ve been involved in as an active contributor for more than two years already — Informa. Informa is the news feeds parsing library with several utility modules greatly simplifying life, own persistence layer with mappings for several most popular database engines, RSS/Atom parsers, exporters etc. In his fourth chapter the author mentions and gives examples of how to use Poller module which is one of my beloved children as well as Cleaner and Persistence Manager.

Well, what can I say!? It’s WICKED COOL and I’m really proud of it even though it looks like there’s no direct mention of me as an author of the modules.

Have a good reading! And go grab the book at Amazon!

Oh That Busy Friday!

Another busy week is over. During this week we received some valuable recognition from our users and I would like especially mark David Herron and his analysis of the BlogBridge performance evolution. It is always inspiring to hear responses of this kind. Thanks, David!

Today was another big and very productive round of product polishing reflected in a long list of small yet necessary fixes and improvements. We worked our fingers to the bone making the application as fast and robust as it’s only possible. Hope that it’s going to turn into a feather in our cap soon.

I plan tomorrow to be a day of healthy rest. My friend and I have decided to visit several book stores. As for me, I wish to discover some more modern Japanese writers. What I noticed is that it’s really hard for me to switch to European or American reading from Japanese. I can feel that the rhythm, stylistic devices and atmosphere of Japanese books is rather relaxing and fits me better than an aggressive and speedy plot of modern western authors. There’s no rush, all the twists of a plot are very well-weighted, characters maintain a deep mental connection with you while you are literally glued to a book.

What I don’t like in books most of all is when authors explain their points and impose their own judgements of situations being described. If you have an alternative vision and own opinion (as I always do), it’s often hard to continue reading feeling disconcerted with author points. I hate to tell that, but often I have no other choice than to drop the book in the middle considering it being a waste of time.

Another good news is that today a new Ubuntu Linux release — version 5.10 — was born. I have already ordered free PC version of it and waiting impatiently for it to come in about two weeks or so. Most noticeable (for me) changes are:

• Updated GNOME (2.12.1), OpenOffice (2.0 beta 2), X.org (6.8.2)
• Integrated writing of audio CD’s
• Updated kernel (2.6.12.6)
• Further laptop enhancements (hope suspend on my laptop will start to work at last)

Well, that’s all for now.

See you!

Book for VJ’s is out

The world of graphics was always exciting. Who from us didn’t wish to create something really coverful and impressive some day? Most of the time I think that it’s not my business and I don’t have time for that, but once I see some really brilliant masterpice of modern art (which is also very simple technically), I start to think “ah, I could do that as well. OK, let me download some painting software and try myself in it once again (as I did it almost thousand of times before).” Yeah, the same thing with a video and video performances. It’s usually expected that when we grow bigger this childish approach to life activities disappears, but, in fact, sometimes it grows bigger following your new possibilities. To be honest, it happens to me very often.

That’s why I was really excited to learn that a friend of David Pescovitz has just released his new book called “The VJ Book: Inspirations and Practical Advice for Live Visuals Performance.” Well, I’m not sure that I will try myself as a VJ soon as I’m already sort of a DJ. But in any case, the book should be really exciting even for a quick scan. Thanks it still not too expesive. Check it out on Amazon!

Java Certification and Skills Assessment

This morning I was surfing around JavaLobby.org to see what’s new. I wasn’t there for a month or so (except those times when I published short announcements for my writings). I was fortunate to notice one interesting link — the link to new JavaLobby network site — JavaBlackBelt. It’s a free skills assessment community which can help you to get prepared to serious certification exams or just give you some fun during the coffee breaks.

Below are two books I recommend to pay attention to, if you are going to prepare yourself to exams.

Sun Certified … Study Guide (Exam 310-035 & 310-027) by Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates

Sun Certified … for Java X Study Guide (Certification Press) by Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates

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