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 I do remember into Pandora and let it find that or other items with the same feel. I have  already rediscovered and found out names for some of my semi-forgotten favourites. And with bookmarks only two clicks away, I actually have a chance to slowly identify all those pieces. That has a value all of its own beyond just Pandora.

This may not be for the people who enjoy snobby experts on the radio playing something so obscure that it requires 20 minutes explanation of why exactly it is good. Pandora’s interface is still a little bit too-pop oriented with no composer information on the name card.

But for me, it is manna from heaven.

The important thing to remember is that your identity is most of the times stored in the browser cookies. So, if you kill cookies, the session will go away and your identity will go away.

The easiest (but most destructive way) is to delete all cookies. With Firefox, this is the menu item Tools/Clear Private Data (Control-Shift-Del); on Internet Explorer 6, it is Tools/Internet Options/General/Delete Cookies.

The problem of course is that it all your login information for all the websites. Of course, if you were shopping on a public computer, that’s the best course of action anyway.

With Firefox, there is a much more precise way to delete the cookies. It comes with the Web Developer Extension - and cookie management is just one of that extension’s invaluable options. Once the extension is installed, it shows up as a toolbar. Cookies is a submenu on the left with a whole host of different options.

Using the extension, the easiest way to delete cookies is then to go Cookies/Delete Domain Cookies while on the target (Amazon, eBay, etc) website. This will delete all cookies set by that site and on the page refresh you will be a totally anonymous customer.

Advanced user’s notes

The above works in nearly all cases. Some websites get a bit sneaky and set Flash cookies instead. This is mostly done by websites such as YouTube, but for some reason images.amazon.com sets one as well. Deleting those can be done via Adobe’s Flash Player Settings Manager, which is actually a web page with specialised Flash application that shows cookies and allows to clear them.

Finally, deleting the cookie does not mean the website cannot track you otherwise. Google for example, will apparently use your IP address to correlate searches even across multiple sessions. It is not the same issue as keeping you logged-in, so I am only mentioning it in the wider privacy context.

So, I was really happy to discover an audio course Story of Human Language from The Teaching Company taught by John McWhorter. It is quite long a covers a lot of material, but - apart from some overly long parts on universal language - it is really interesting and Professor McWhorter is a great presenter.

I actually had a chance to listen to both an audio version of the course and to see some of it on DVD. Personally, I prefer just audio for several reason.

Firstly, I can listen to the course on my MP3 player when I am walking or doing chores. Video version requires allocating dedicated time, which for such a long course would be difficult.

Secondly, I actually found visual part of the presentation quite boring - for the most part professor is just standing behind the lectern and talks from his notes. In fact, I found the visual part distracted me from the really great and expressive rhetorics.

There was a number of great section in the course, but I found the one explaining language structure of Arabic and Chinese particularly interesting. He talked about Arabic first and I was all keen to learn that language. Then, he switched over to Chinese and I found it even more fascinating. And then, there were comparisons of languages and his cat. This has to be heard to be believed.

The course is obviously available for purchase, but it is also found in quite a few libraries. If you do borrow it from the library, try requesting all volumes at once. I only requested one volume and it was quite annoying to then have to wait a long time for the rest of the course arrive. This is another way I knew for myself that the course was enjoyable, as I had plenty of other audio material to listen to otherwise.

Both authors have argued their points separately and against other people. But now they have squared-off against each other and the sparks are flying. The full text of one of such debates has been published by the Wall Street Journal. Earlier, they also argued at the Supernova conference and the video recording of that debate has been published.

For myself, Weinberger’s argument makes much more sense. I don’t really care about sports, popular music or so called ‘Entertainment’ industry, so most of the content produced by the off-Internet media is of no value to me and often is actually annoying. On the other hand, Internet allows me to track and participate more fully in topics that are actually of interest to me, my work and my research.

Still, even with my alliances so clear, it was fascinating and educational to read and watch both debates. They certainly make you think.

(Update: August 17)

David Weinberger has written a great and  very well thought out follow-up article on the issue. I agree with it completely and just wish I could argue the topics as well as he does.

Following are the pictures of the closed pod, the pod half peeled and the seeds left over.

Apart from eating Tamarinds out of the box, it is possible to make a drink with them. I might try that next.

Being a geek myself, I think it is because we also have to juggle multiple projects simultaneously. Some people I know could probably beat most CEOs by number of projects they are involved in.

I have not implemented GTD fully yet, but keep taking small steps towards it. The benefits exist in any level of implementation though - apparently - they are exponentially higher with a full implementation. But while I am perfecting my process, I am on the lookout for good material on GTD that will help me get there faster and (being honest) will motivate me by example.

Couple of resources I found interesting are:

• A long talk between Merlin Mann of 43 folders and David Allen (author of the book and the system) about GTD
• A short video presentation of one person’s implementation of GTD within Outlook from Ignite Seattle conference
• GTDInbox - a freeware Firefox extension for Gmail to implement GTD on top of Gmail interface . I use this one, since I spend most of my time near always-on Internet connection and most of my action items flow through email anyway.

As an aside, I just realised that Russian drinking toast is ‘Поехали’ (Let’s go), which is exactly what Gagarin said on launch. Another historical riddle is now unraveled.

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 it every day.

Apart from Russian, I know reasonably good English and have dabbled in French, Esperanto and - now - Spanish. I feel that starting from Russian, many other European/Germanic languages are easier, because Russian has a very complex grammar system with its conjugation and cases, tenses and moods. This helps with relating features of other languages to the examples in the one(s) I already know. This, of course, does not help at all with pronunciation, which for me is now atrocious in whichever language I speak.

Studying Spanish, I do find omitted pronouns in Spanish, but even that has its equivalence in Russian. Unfortunately, there is no equivalence for conflating conjugation for he/she and you (él/ella y usted). Using accents to differentiate words is a bit confusing too (él y el, qué y que). I am sure as I progress in Spanish, these things will become the second (3rd? 5th?) nature, but for now they do grate a bit.

I find Esperanto the easiest language of all, which is not very surprising, since it was specifically designed to be really easy. If I had to design a language from scratch, I don’t think I would be able to come up with anything significantly simpler than Esperanto, while still addressing the real use.

It was sad to see how many of those links no longer point anywhere. Promising companies gone, people’s personal domains expiring and going off-line with all their valuable content, newspaper articles disappearing into the paid archives.

But it was also interesting to rediscover old - long forgotten - conversations, insights and soon to be here reviews. In retrospect, some of the items that were near future two years ago are still near future. Others are suddenly so much more close as to be somewhat scary.

In the later category are two videos that 2-3 years ago were talking about a distant, but interesting/chilling future. Both are a riveting watch.
The first one is EPIC 2015 about citizen media and (semi-incidentally) loss of privacy (it was EPIC 2014 when I first blogged about it). Revisiting that particular story, I notice that it is now even more relevant and has even been written up in the mainstream media.
The second video (ACLU Pizza) is a much more direct statement about loss of privacy and consequences of unified databases of personal information. While, it is (hopefully) still not true, it is becoming more realistic each day and faster than I would have expected.
These two videos are the memes I spread. I point them out to people who are trying to understand the future of the internet and the costs of it to the personal freedom. As a one-two punch, they show both the exciting and the scary things about the future that is rapidly becoming the present.

This was not always a case though, at least for China. Until 1844, it was illegal for a foreigner to learn Chinese. That changed for America, when Caleb Cushing had negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia, which made it possible for Americans - and Americans only - to learn Chenese. Later, the privilege was extended to Britain and other countries.

This whole story comes up, because China has a new project of translating Chinese classics into modern Chinese, English and - potentially - other languages. This Library of Chinese Classics spans 5000 years of Chinese culture and includes all the famous works.

It should be useful for language learning as well as for general reading pleasure, as it will come with original and English text on the facing pages.

It would also be very interesting to find out what other languages are planned and in what order. Russian used to be a language that many official documents got translated to early on. Would Russian be even on a list now? Would Esperanto, still one of the transmission languages of the China Radio International?