noizZze

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?

As it has already become a bad habit among some bloggers I know, I’m begging your pardon for not writing here for a long time. I had lots of things to tell from new coding techniques to links I found on the web lately, but I honestly thought that it’s better to dedicate this blog to something specific. It can be about either photography or coding, but not both at once as it lowers the value. Hm, at least I thought so and still do.

What I decided is to start two other blogs here under noizeramp.com umbrella for specific purposes as soon as I need them, and leave this particular blog alone for my random thoughts, links and announcements. Well, not as random as freestyle. I still like cool Web designs, electronic music, photography, programming, and basketball. If you share some of my interests, stay with me.

I would like to share lots of links with you, but let’s nibble the pie bit by bit:

Max Kiesler’s Demo Design is a good collection of best practices in the Web 2.0 world. I like the endless list of AJAX projects on the front page. It’s extremely invigorating and if you are looking for new ideas or inspiration for your next project, it’s worth looking. Never before had I seen such a big crowd of cool things in one place.

The next is LiveHack blog by Chris Brogan and Leon Ho, which is an amazing daily stream of wisdom. They spread the ancient knowledge of productivity through articles, link digests, and simple advices. Highly recommended! It doesn’t take much time, but brings some fresh air in the head.

I had never “believed” in humorous sites and never visited them rating all potential jokes there as “for dumbs”. Couple of days ago I was scanning one feed library when I came across this blog. It was mentioned among “Miscellaneuos” things and had that title you never let pass by — Smile of the Day. I gave it a quick glance and then it made its way directly to my daily reading list around the trials. What’s there? A very nice stream of healthy jokes, anecdotes, and fun stories. I really like it!

Let me have a break stopping on this major note. Time to get back to work!

Oh my, it’s been a long time since I wrote something in my blog last time. The last few weeks were the busiest time this year. At first, I had my laptop BIOS killed. Then it was successfully restored even though it required to unsolder it from the motherboard, reprogram and solder back. No, it was my father, the magician, who did all the job. Big thanks again, dad! Then there were some other minor troubles here and there taking all my focus and time.

To catch up with the news and, for a start, here’s a nice and magic service — San Francisco Cab Tracker. Never before had I seen anything like that as well as little did I know that it’s even possible to track the location of each specific cab in the area. Is that GPS-tricks?

Next time I promise to publish some cool photos from some factory in our Crimean mountains. It’s building was never finished, but what was built impresses.

Until next time!

One friend of mine showed me this mind-breaking game. It’s free and it’s dangerous.

The rules are simple:

• You are required to help these people cross the river.
• The policeman can’t leave the criminal with other people.
• You can’t leave father alone with the girls as well as mother with the boys.
• Children can’t cross the river without the help of grown-ups.

Now that you know the rules, go try it. Oh yes, and for those who don’t know Japanese:

Press that big blue button to start.

Good Luck!

See more interesting games:

• Discovery Channel Puzzles

Also try:

Related Link: casino game

Sometimes it’s even hard to imagine what will be the next gem you find on the net. This time it’s something really amazing and fun (as usual). I was just clicking here and there having a good time after my evening studies at Linguist Centre when one site grabbed my attention. The site is a large repository of links to different sounds. Yeah, it’s the well structured catalogue — FindSounds. The catalogue of various shrieks, beeps and clicks from all around, no matter whether it’s natural or artificial — anything you can ever think of.

Of course, it’s not the commercial library of sounds, it’s just the structured repository of the links to the sound files all over the Web. For the users it means that the quality of material is relatively low sometimes and can’t be used in serious projects. Other than that, the respository can easily be used as an excellent educational resource. Your children and neighbours will appreciate that, believe me.

On the related topic, a while ago I heard about some pet-care organizations playing sounds of kitchen stuff, noises of the city and the like to pets in their early ages to familiarize them with the future environment. That’s a great idea, I think, and it sounds pretty innovative — to train pets not to fear usual attributes of our modern living. Think about it.

If nothing else, now you know where to take all these “bells and whistles” for your grandma’s kitty, right?

Until next time!

For those who are curious where that four-leaf clover symbol Apple uses for Command key today came from dedicated — Macintosh Stories on Folklore.org.

Sometimes the ideas are floating on the surface, but for some unknown reason no one sees them. This time is no exception.

Geominder is a very simple reminder software for your Nokia mobile. And now prepare yourself for some science fiction… It allows you to bind messages to any geographical locations, so that they pop up as you come there. Yeah, I didn’t get and believe this from the first run as well. The fast example is when you walk into the shop your mobile beeps and reminds to buy some stuff you need, or when you enter a library it automatically gives you a list of books to grab. Fiction? Yeah, we are living in some distant future already, but no one seemed to notice the transition.

The whole idea is based on the mobile cell ID. First, you teach the phone by giving the names to the cells and then you associate notes with them. Later, when you walk through the cells, it pops up the messages.

Everything genius appears to be so simple!

Photographers never stop to surprise and creativity of some of them knows no limits. At that very moment when I start to believe that there’s nothing conceptually new one could create, I immediately find the proof of the opposite. This time it’s absolutely unbelievable pictures of liquids, forming amazing breathtaking sculpture. Take a break and spend some time with a natural beauty — visit Liquid Sculpture.