Wu Wei

Feedburner RSS (update: thank you Google for losing all my feeds)

I just noticed my Feedburner RSS Subscriptions have dropped from the usual 90s to 4.  I was fiddling with Feedburner Newsletter.  I don't know whether that had anything to do with it. 

I apologise.  Please come back.

Update

It seems Google has taken over Feedburner and forced us all into Google accounts.  Although Google promises to transfer all the feeds, it has managed to lose all mine.

Thank you Google.  I am really looking forward to the wonderful new services you are offering, if they are all like this.

Another blogger in the family

When Sloph went off to Moscow to learn Russian for three months, we told her we expected a blog.  So far we have had a regularish newsletter which has been hilarious as well as informative.  Now she is complaining that nobody answers it.

She only told me just now that she has posted the newsletters on a blog, Notes on Moscow, so now I can hopefully pass this on and she can get some comments, for encouragement.

UPDATE:  a quick migrate from Blogger to Wordpress, now go here

Here's an example from the last post, on Russian manbags:

i've also realised that while i have commented on russian womens fashion sense, i have neglected to draw to your attention to russian male fashion and i feel the time has now come to introduce you to the russian concept of the manbag:

for many weeks when i was first here, i thought that russian men were simply very chivalrous and carried their girlfriends handbags for them. as the weeks went on though, i started to notice that men were carrying these bags regardless of whether there was a woman with them or not, and that in restaurants they dipped into them for their wallets and mobiles, forcing me to come to the realisation that they were in fact the man's own bag.

Requirements for a russian manbag are as follows:
1. the manbag should ideally be large, with a designer label on it (fake if necessary)
2. small bags are acceptable only if they are of the ladies evening clutch bag variety
3. diamonte, flower designs, shades of pink, and other embellishments are all entirely acceptable and even desireable
4. while across the shoulder varieties are acceptable, the usual choice is worn on one shoulder, in the crook of the elbow, or carried in the hand when the strap design is too small to allow for the arm to pass through it
5. although colour and designer labels are, as previously mentioned preferred, colour coordination with the rest of the mans clothing is not, thus allowing the bag to stand out even more in its incongruity. most common will be a particularly girly looking pink shoulder bag, with a gold chain shoulder strap, coupled with a leather studded biker jacket and army boots or alternatively, full business suit
6. under no circumstances are any of the manbags described above viewed as remotely gay, and if one were to suggest as such to the wearer, this would probably provoke a fight.

This seems to be a subject Carpetblogger should pronounce on, as she is the expert on Russian style and dyevotchkas. 

Dopplr

Just found some great software called Dopplr. It's for frequent travellers and intended as a social network but also to enable you to find where your friends are travelling when so you can actually meet them on the way.

I once spotted ViolainVilnius on the front row of a concert in Kiev when neither of us knew we were working in Kiev. Ever since then I have been wishing there was someway to keep in touch. Some people tell you on Skype or Facebook, but that's usually too late for planning journeys to meet in airports.

Anyway Dopplr looks like it might do the trick. At the moment it's in beta and you need an invite to get to use it. But now I'm subscribed I can hand out any number of invites to my friends. Not much to see on the website until you get an invite.

Send me an email if you want to try it.

Windows Live Writer (and 37signals)

Now got this posting nicely, complete with Flickr4Writer and Tag4Writer  so shan't bother testing anything else.  Still pretty basic though on categories (easy to forget to put them and tags).  Reminders would be useful.

Been busy wasting time with other sorts of software.  I can report that Backpackit by 37signals(www.backpackit.com) is great for making lists for moving.  It even can send you emails and SMSs to remind you to get on with things.  Luckily for me the SMSs don't work to O2 in the UK, so I can get away with writing this.

My project in Kiev is being used to test 37signals' project management software Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com), though it's hard testing it without getting other people to use it.  It's hard on collaborative projects to get other people in different firms to become early adopters, particularly when they are busy.  But I've been wanting to use this for some time, so I have just started anyway.  It will be useful experience for the next project I need to manage.

Time to do some work ... sigh.  (Not long till lunch)

tags: WLW Backpack Basecamp 37signals

Only 2 days behind with work and moving house

Update: the kremlin wall (see below) is actually here, the site below is just the LJ.

I guess this is OK, but no time to post much.   I hope you are keeping up with Tuk to the Road. 

Neeka's Backlog has spotted a LJ blog, kremlin-wall, aiming to create a virtual Kremlin wall on which, for money, you can advertise anything. The aim is partly to raise money for charity, but also maybe to create a "wall" for sale like pieces of the Berlin wall .  Or maybe even the famous Democracy Wall in Beijing in 1978/9, since he suggests you can say anything (but maybe get your neck kicked).  A brick costs 6000 roubles (215$) for 5 years.

This is not the first time this money-making idea has been tried.

In Internetvibes this story appeared recently.  I remember it being on the television as well.

Alex Tew, aged 21, set up milliondollarhomepage.com in August 2005 after thinking of ways to pay for his mammoth university fees. He made one million dollars from his website in only 4 months and started the huge internet craze of pixel advertising.

This page is still there, with blog and book, presumably making money.  But not all ideas like this work. The article mentions another website due to make 1 million for its owner, but there is no trace of it today.  It seems to have been mainly a press release to get publicity.

But it does offer an interest idea in the internet age, of one way to create a Democracy Wall, (if not, necessarily, how to monetise it). You'd need a few bricks for the usual size of painted slogan.

Now you see why I am behind with work.

tags: Kremlin wall democracy Berlin

Rasendschnell internet

Copydude left a comment grumbling at the internet speed in the UK.

All I can say is he should have been living in Athens and he wouldn't grumble. Until June last year just before we left, ISDN was the best you could get. We used to drool at the Dutch adverts on the satellite TV, providing "rasendschnell downloaden and internetten". One particular advert was my favourite with a pair of moles downloading music underground in the tunnel (burrow?) and rocking to the music so loudly that they woke the people in the house above. I guess they had wireless. I wish somebody would put that advert on Youtube, it was really cool (not a phrase I use very often). Then two months before we left a telephone call (itself a novelty) from OTE (the Greek telephone company) which provided us instantly with not too expensive, but rather slow DSL. Still it was enough for us to gear into action, and get Skype and wireless and our lives were changed. I even used Skype to announce that dinner was served, rather than shout to teenagers 3 floors up.

Now in Britain, we are thankful for small mercies. I am surprised to find that BT is the most reliable, since it often has problems (which we are prone to solve by using the wireless of our neighbours (a choice of 3)). Actually we know more about our neighbours' wireless systems than we do them. The wireless exchange seems to be mutual. BT's daft arrangement with Yahoo to host their email is always causing problems. Yesterday I could receive but not send. Very useful the day I decided to try Thunderbird. This morning it is working again, but no BT apology.

Anyone see why amazon.theworld was down yesterday? It would be the day I placed an order expecting next day delivery. Now it seems even despatch has a 4 day delay for things in stock. Must have been serious.

Why do I need an offline blog editor?

Well, it's not that I'm dissatisfied with Typepad, but when you can only blog online it's rather limiting.

For example, in Kosovo we had a rather good internet connection in the house I stayed in.  But having a wireless connection was a bit advanced, so only one person could connect at a time.  Then there were power cuts, which always lasted at least an hour and sometimes more in winter.  Actually that was the best time to blog, when there was something to talk about.  But it meant going out on a cold evening to an internet cafe with a generator, along unlit streets. Although Pristina never felt unsafe for a woman alone, I wasn't often alone.  Usually it was more pleasant and useful to go to a restaurant with a generator than an internet cafe.

However, I found when it was really cold, the best thing was to go to bed early with a DVD.  My laptop battery was usually enough to get to the end of the movie, and the lights would come back on again.

In Kiev, recently, the Soviet hotel we were staying in had the world's slowest connection so that it wasn't worth using.  In the end we rented an apartment so we could use the living room as an office.  Our internet connection was eventually organised with a card, but it was dial up and the phone was in a bedroom.  So no chance to blog late at night.  As days went by, it was hard to remember all the interesting things to blog about, and so I ended up blogging about the price of orange juice when I got back.  It would be nice to be able to catch up with the mobile phone pics snapped during the day. I just remembered a photo now, which I had completely forgotten.

I I spotted this in a corner of a staircase.  It's the only known example (to me at least) of a Soviet organisation exhorting people to save water and energy.  A rough translation:

Citizens!

If a family of 3 people use water wastefully, then every day that is about 200 litres of hot water, which costs on average 2 kopecks.  The waste for a month is 60 Kopecks and for a year 7 rubles 20 kopecks.  For 20 families, the waste for a year is 144 roubles.  That sum has to be paid by all the residents in the block. So save water. Don't let allow waste of cold and hot water!

In the case of bad plumbing, contact the housing maintenance organisation promptly.   

ZhEK (Local housing office)

It's not clear when it was put up, but 144 roubles was still a month's salary at the end of communism.

So I really need an off-line editor.  I'll be trying out more in the next week or so ready for my travels in September.

Posted (successfully with categories) with Windows Live Writer

More on Live Writer and Onfolio

I discovered that I had downloaded the Onfolio Outlook Toolbar by mistake.  This seems to be a Newsreader.  I don't like the idea of having newsreaders in Outlook.  I suppose that's because I think of Outlook as for serious work and newsreaders for play. So I keep them separate and use Yahoo for reading RSSs.  Though these days I use the newsreaders  to read the news as well so it's hardly play.

What does everyone else do?

(This posted quite nicely with two categories)

Windows Live Writer review (updated)

After reading some other reviews, who claimed it worked, I decided to have another go. Maybe I had beginners bad luck.

But no. The first few attempts at posting without and then with categories worked and then suddenly the same error message appeared. I took the keywords off, in case somehow that was connected, but it had no effect. It seems once you get the error message you are stuck with it.

So unless Microsoft can fix this, Live Writer isn't going to be much use to me.

A Third Test doesn't work

Here goes.  Works fine provided you don't have any categories. This time round it worked with one category. Lets try two. Now lets try with tags. Tags don't work but categories do, at least on this post.  But then they stop working.