Pandora.com has just added classical music to their already huge collection. It made my day.
I like classical music, but never took enough time to actually figure out my exact preferences or composers. I just recognise familiar or mood pieces when they are played and enjoy them.
So now I can put the name of the piece [...]
Continue reading about Two thumbs up for Pandora.com’s new classical section
Ed Foster has discovered that it is very difficult to sign out from big companies’ websites. Yes, it is true when staying within the website’s rules. But it is dead easy otherwise.
The important thing to remember is that your identity is most of the times stored in the browser cookies. So, if you kill [...]
Continue reading about Easy ways to sign out from Amazon, eBay, others
As part of doing a PhD in Computational Linguistics, I need to understand both computers and linguistics. I am fine with computers, but linguistics is not my strong point. Unfortunately, many of the linguistics books and resources are quite dry.
So, I was really happy to discover an audio course [...]
Continue reading about Story of Human Language - great introductory audio course on linguistics
Two books, two views - no agreement, but certainly a lot of sparks. Is the Internet full of junk and by killing off the conventional media we are loosing all our good information sources? That is a point of view of Andrew Keen, author of the book Cult of the Amateur. On the other [...]
Continue reading about Is the Internet good, bad or bits of everything? - Weinberger/Keen debates
I have tried Tamarind before as an ingredient in dishes, but I have never actually seen the real fruit. I wasn’t even sure it was edible uncooked. So, when I saw it sold in the shop, I had to try it. It turned out to be a very educational experience. The fruit is layered with [...]
Getting Things Done (GTD) is an interesting system for managing one’s time and making things happen. It was originally pitched at CEO, with a lot of different projects on their plates at the same time. Lately, however, I have noticed a significant uptake of it by system administrators, programmers and other IT geeks.
Being a geek [...]
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Tonight (April 12th, 2007) is Yuri’s night, a celebration of first manned space flight done by Yuri Gagarin, the russian cosmonaut. It is 46th anniversary of the original 1961 event.
I had missed the party last year, but - being Russian and a geek - I am certainly making it this year. There are parties [...]
Сегодня - Международный день родного языка. Мой родной язык - Русский! Я горд моим родным языком даже если я не использую его каждый день.
Today - 21st of February - is the International Mother Language Day. My mother language is Russian! I am proud of my mother language, even if I do not get to use [...]
Today, I was weeding my blog garden! I have used Xenu Link Sleuth to find all the dead outgoing links from my old blog entries and tried to fix them to point to the new locations, the Wayback Machine or to just mark them dead.
It was sad to see how many of those links no [...]
These days, learning a foreign language is considered a useful thing. The advantages are many: from travelling to foreign countries to getting a preferential treatment in the ethnic restaurants of your own to keeping the dementia away.
This was not always a case though, at least for China. Until 1844, it was illegal for a foreigner [...]
Continue reading about Is it a crime to learn a foreign language?