Rational Idealist

first task on my recent move to NYC was finding an apartment, which me and my girlfriend performed really well at – three days to fly-in, search, decide, move. it was a complex multi-variant decision process that involved a lot of walking and interacting. I don’t think we could have done it faster.
next task was paying the rent. sounds trivial, specially in this digital age and in this most-advanced country in the world, right?
well, the landlady wanted me to pay with a ‘certified cheque‘, which for us, being from Euprope where we banned bank cheques decades ago, was (a) unknown concept and (b) obsolete concept. but the affirmative nodding that accompanied the instruction scared us, and we really only wanted to cook a homey dinner.

so, since I own a HSBC.UK account, i figured: they claim to be the world’s local bank, for sure they’ve solved this problem. and I went to ask what this cheque thing is.

• they said no problem, you give us cash, we give you piece of paper, and we’re done.
• but I don’t want to carry thousands of dollars around, can you take it of my hsbc.uk account?
• no.
• mhm. so what now?
• can’t do it, sorry, goodbye.

… felt strange. there must be more to international banking than this. so I walked half the town again, to another branch. their answer was different:

• sure, you open US bank account with us, order money transfer, when it lands we can give you all the cheques you want. oh, and would you consider paying extra for our premium account?
• mhm, wait, what do you mean ‘when’ it lands?
• well, we are just the receiving end, it’s up to your UK branch to send it.
• ok, ok, let’s open this account and i’ll call my branch to check.

… so we did, and in that 1 hour that it took to fill out all the papers i’ve learned that it can take up to 4 business days to wire the money. and i was ordering it on friday afternoon, which meant my landlady could be waiting for the cheque 6 days, because i had money transfered from hsbc to hsbc!
well, it couldn’t be helped, i emptied out ATMs and collected everything we had on us to at least pay the security. we moved in, cooked a tea and chilled. and then it hit me:
why haven’t I simply wired the money to her directly?
…
I could simply print out a confirmation of transaction and save us both the trip to the bank. well, to be honest, it is because she wanted it so, and that’s simply due to an obsolete custom of banking with pieces of paper.
the moral of the story: never listen to instructions, they are usualy not optimal. think outside other people’s boxes.

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It’s over 9 months since I switched my keyboard layout to dvorak and I wanted to write about my experience with it for some time now.
i decided to give it a try after I read a comic book describing it’s benefits – an amazing comic book that is, published to promote this layout in public. dvorak was supposed to be easy to learn, comfortable for typing and heavily undersupported – specially if you require some weird characters for some weird languages like me. Luckily I am using open source operating system so I wasn’t to concerned about this. It took me a day to hack the keyboard layout and adapt the us-dvorak to support all the weirdness I wanted and started learning it.
I started using computers some 15 years ago, and were self-taught but very efficient typist. Often the system was not

fast enough to support my typing speed anymore. I don’t have this problem anymore.
I felt seriously cripled because all the typing skills gained over the years vanished completely. It took me a day to somewhat memorize the key positions, two weeks to type somewhat comfortably, but still get the “you’re slow” messages on IM, and after 9 months of intensive typing I still can’t say I’m efficient with it. So minus one for hard-to-learn.
It however does feel a bit more natural. It’s really hard to describe, but Dvorak was up to semthing with his idea of alternating hands as much as possible when typing. Plus one here.
Dvorak did make one little mistake – it put the letters ‘k’ and ‘x’ together, and I noticed I mistake them quite often, which I think is due to glimpses towards keyboard even when blind typing. Another interesting observation is increased number of mistakes with typing vowels. They are placed together in the middle row, and it seems the hand is not smart enough to differentiate between them efficiently.
For self-taught typists like myself it’s also important to finally force yourself to learn to use all ten fingers properly. It might be that this alone takes care of the previous benefit.
There is another important set of observations regarding the change – the social impact it has.
First, it’s geeky. I guess that’s positive, since if you didn’t want to be geeky we wouldn’t do such crazy things, and there are not so many geekier things you can do with your computer than changing it’s entire interface.
But, if you are geeky, there are good chances you will be hanging around with other geeks, that will sometimes want to borrow your laptop to do something fun, important or even urgent. While it’s a laugh fun for the first few seconds, if the issue is really important, your exotic layout can account for serious problems. It can be frustrating to watch your friend trying to rescue his web server from a terminal screen desperately looking for a dot.
Lastly, let’s say, that deciding to change the layout and retrain your brain takes courage. And going trough with it despite all the strange looks from others takes determination. So we could say that learning dvorak builds character. 🙂
I can’t recommend it whole-heartedly to anyone really, but I personally don’t want to go back. But I will totally understand anyone who decides to try it. 😉

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Image by RMJimenez via Flickr

Vsaj tako me po novem kliče moj inÅ¡truktor 🙂 Po desetih letih upiranja sem se namreč sprijaznil z dejstvom, da tudi mestni otroci občasno rabimo hitrejÅ¡o svobodo gibanja kot je peÅ¡ačenje.

Avtobusi me niso nikoli motili, taxi se izkaže za razmeroma zanesljivo in znosno drago metodo, pa kljub temu prepogosto žicaš starše, prijatelje, kolege za prevoz. Enostavno ni pošteno.

Image via Wikipedia

No, in sem se obilno načudil tej po mojem mnenju izjemno zastareli tehnologiji, ki ji rečemo ‘samohodnica’. Ob vsem čudovitem razvoju elektronike niso uspeli napraviti kvalitativnega preskoka od Ford model T. Å e vedno traja nekaj mesecev da Å¡olanega človeka dobesedno zdresiramo v vlogo avtomata v racionalnem prometnem sistemu.

Ni samoumevno, da se morajo Å¡oferji naučiti čutit s svojim vozilom, kdaj prestavit viÅ¡je ali nižje, kaj je ravno pravÅ¡nji kot za vzvratno bočno parkiranje, opažat naključno posejane znake za omejitve in prepovedi… Promet je eden redkih sistemov, ki je popolnoma racionalno urejen za vse enako. Ergo, ima potencial da se ga popolnoma avtomatizira – vsak znak in vsak ovinek bi lahko bil radijski oddajnik, ki bi sporočil vozilom kako naj se vedejo, ne pa da se vlaga v razvoj pametne elektronike za izogibanje trčenjem. To je jalovo reÅ¡evanje problema na napačnem koncu.

Pa Å¡e en dober razlog obstaja – ker imajo vsi ostali opravljeno to mučenje gledajo na svet in promet nekolikanj drugače. In ne moreÅ¡ jih zares razumet dokler ne izkusiÅ¡ sam. Zdaj Å¡ele razumem kako zelo nevarni smo kolesarji in peÅ¡ci v mestu. In Å¡e toliko bolj prepričan da bi ravno zato morali ukiti avtomobilski promet. 😀

Image via WikipediaEvery time I blog with Zemanta I get excited, because it does all the right things for me.

I went to write the previous post with just a simple trail of thought in my mind, spurred by a newsletter in my inbox. Suddenly, I had relevant posts published trough the night sitting in my dashboard, so that I could get a grasp of the context in which I was writing.

Links to all relevant sites, divergent picture to illustrate my point, and boom, everything done easily, first thing in the morning.

After a successful post, I was happy to grab a breakfast. And guess what, when I came back, my post was already linked to from another blogger’s “related articles” section. Amazing!

Zemanta really does help me create a nice post I would never have enhanced with links and pics, and it promotes my blog in the network of users. My perfect companion!

But then again, I might be biased… 🙂

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Image via WikipediaThere is a segment of users, that has to daily deal with incredible amounts of contact information. The problems are numerous, from having to manually type-in infos from cards, to contacts changing their detail regularly, and the best tools avaliable still have not changed much since we started abusing spreadsheets for this task.

There are insane amounts of startups trying to tackle this, but so far the improvements were minor. From automatic scanners of cards with proprietary database of my contacts, ZyB that plugs into my phone, Highrise that can even auto clasify my emails, but makes me update contact data as it changes, to dynamic linkedin without address book functionality.

It’s hard to explain all the caveats of these services, but anyone with this problem knows what I have in mind. What we really need is having these different services communicate with each other.  I want Highrise connected seamlessly with my LinkedIn for instance, and I don’t want to type-in details that will surely change eventually. Everyone should maintain their public info in their accountsand we should all just pull from them. Also, I need this to function asadresbook in the end, not just sitting one one part of the net, separated from my email client. It’s great to be able to tag contacts in Higrise, but no nice way to send newsletter to all my VC friends.

After two decades, many other fields got consolidated, but in the social space, it seems that everyone is concerned only with playing games and annoy me with virality, rather that producing a useful tool. Argh.

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Image via WikipediaI run for 30 minutes, based on combined length of first eight tracks of the album Volk by Laibach.

When running, I make 500 steps in 3 minutes, based on Y’Israel by Laibach.

I estimate my step to 0.8m long.

This means I run 4km each time, at the speed of 8 km/h, which is exactly twice the speed of walking.

It ‘s nice how the numbers line up 🙂

Image via Wikipediato je test Dvorak tipkovnice. to je precej impresiven nabor tipk, kjer cisto zares prstov skoraj ni treba premikat s srednje vrstice. ima pa natanko dva problema:
1. slovenske znake bom moral sele naprogramirat,
2. backspace bi moral biti pod palcem

[tri ure kasneje]
ha, slovenski znaki delajo! backspace je pa zal hardwareski problem… zanimivo je, da sem si najprej zapomnil lokacije bolj tečnih črk in da vztrajno ne najdevam tistih, ki so natanko na prstih… najvecji problem zdaj so ustaljene kombinacije tipk, na primer ctrl+C in +V, ki se jih nenadoma ne da vec narest z eno roko.

[osem ur kasneje]

ha, backspace sem tudi uredil!  sem preprogramiral tipkovnico tako, da je sedaj prilepljen na desno windows tipko… medtem je ales prebral, da so dokazali, da dvorak ne prinese pospesitve tipkanja *sigh*

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

New release! We are busy!

Zemanta is proud to announce the first major upgrade of our service, expanding our reach with new plugins and improving the suggestions by supporting new semantic types. Altogether we are announcing 5 new features:Blog, Jun 2008

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I don’t do addictions. Whenever I sense I am not doing something out of a neccesity or a ritual habit, I get nervous and worried about my future.

Addictions are evil, in the sense of stealing your attention from the real world into a imaginary one, and put it in a feedback loop there. No problem if it’s a small controled loop, but serious problem if grows to influence other parts of life. Some addictions do that, because they have a viral nature – they need to spread to survive. In order to fulfil their demand for attention, one has to give up chuncks of his spare real life.

I preffer standing firmly on the ground. So I canceled a habit that started to make me unstable a bit to often lately. One should never have to decide between real and imaginary – to decide means to reason, which means solving problems. Imaginary should be there for pleasure, not for problems. I have enough of those already.

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