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 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.

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 all over the world (124 parties in 35 countries), including where I live currently.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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?