Ideas

About a year ago I bought an LG Chocolate. Pretty nice looks, but after a week I found that it was one of the worst phones ever made, my first Nokia 3310 phone was way better and that was 8 years ago. I finally managed to find a phone I liked, the Sony W880i. It looks good, has awesome walkman software, and I have to say, I have been pretty content up until about a month ago.

Line clarity has become simply awful. Many times its fine, very clear, but then it breaks up, and it seems like I’m in a deep, deep cave. Now voice quality is ok, it’s the line quality that’s really bad and this happens on sunny, clear days. We can’t hear each other, the line breaks up, only parts of what we say get through, it is very, very agitating.

I decided to sell it after such an occasion, but I held myself back, I will try and update the software first. Now, I downloaded the update service, which then simply refused to run, because I needed Flash 8 or higher. I was a bit confused since I have Flash 9, and last time I checked nine is a bit more than eight. I realized that Flash might just be a plugin, so after removing it, and installing it with IE it works. How stupid is that? So anyone, if you get Flash error messages for the Sony Update service, just install Flash Player with Internet Explorer.

Also, the update service displays downloading for a while, then just disappears. In the services it shows no CPU use, so it was quite difficult to tell what’s going on. After about 5 minutes things started happening and my phone is updating as we speak. I have had some negative experiences with Sony in their phones, although I have to say no phone has impressed me yet really, especially in the PC connectivity area. If the line is still so bad after the update I will sell my phone without a second thought and never again buy Sony or LG. The only phone maker I’ve been content with is Nokia and I’d rather have a phone that doesn’t look as good, but actually performs.

I got a letter today from someone offering me marketing for Blogtastique for $2500 a month, which is an awesome low price, since for companies they usually offer it for $5000, but they appreciate how startups have less money. How kind of them. They offer to create buzz through thousands of blogs and forums because that’s where buzz is.

My first problem is with thousands. If they would have said, we’ll get you into the top 5 blogs I would’ve been more believing. This is so much like those “SEO products” getting you into thousands of search engines. Well, create your site, put it online and chances are than in 3-4 days you will already be there. Anyway, there are only 3-5 bigger ones and out of those thousands, probably 95% use these bigger ones anyway.

Second of all, I do not want artificial buzz. Artificial buzz is spam, even if it is really good quality and not the filth I get in my blog comments. I want people to like Blogtastique because of the service. Because a person who likes it tells his blogger friends who tells his blogger friends and so on. Now that is buzz, and when it reaches a critical mass, it become the über-mega buzz everyone wants. Yes, I’d love buzz, but natural buzz please.

I spend 5 minutes of my life thinking of a reply, and in the end I just told the person I won’t be needing these services. I just hate these people.

I have finally arrived to a place where I actually feel what I am doing is right. Not from a sort of higher perspective, like I’m working away at my destiny (although it feels kind of like that), but I really feel that I am now doing what I want and what I like. I am managing 4 blogs, 2 websites, already creating a new one, guest posting on 4 sites, trying to write a book with my friend Karl from the awesome Ask The Admin, and I’m also trying to play the guitar and sing.

However, it seems everything is sort of under control, a sort of organized chaos if you will. I just mowed the lawn, and I am sitting out on the patio, the sun is setting, the first Blogtastique customer is happy, I may be getting orders for four unique themes and Hack Your Day is doing ok too. I sort of have time for everything, even some bowling and squash, all in all, I’m pretty good!

I don’t know why, but I have a huge crush on databases. For some reason I just love the way the can store, organize and serve data if used well. I’m getting quite good at Access, and I’m exploring MySQL for the upcoming Hack Your Day Directory. I just managed to create a database with phpMyAdmin and retrieve some data using php code, oh what joy!

It’s quite awesome that I can actually do this, this is the type of thing that goes unnoticed by the common net user, while the technology behind it is really cool. If they would see the code they would think I’m some sort of coder genius, while in the end it really is quite simple and logical.

Anyway, I’m off to do the Hack Your Day Directory and when I’m done with that I’ll have all the technical knowledge to create my own to do list application (I hope).

I haven’t been on a train for a while now, but the other day I had to use it to get home. I had my laptop and the latest edition of Newsweek, so I was all set for a comfy journey. I’m as originally writing this from the train actually, and it was pretty nice for a while, although I managed to miss the first train due to a toilet related emergency.

I thought it worth a mention that there was an oldish man clipping his nails on the train. Isn’t that a bit gross? He looked kind of like Sol from Oceans 11, and for some reason decided that that exact moment was the best for clipping his nails. He then swept the clippings off his clothes on to the ground, how thoughtful of him.

For all old people who might potentially be on one train with me in the future: Please don’t clip your nails on the train, it’s disguisting. Also, near the end of the journey, a clipping landed about 10 inches from me. Yumm.

I may be a bit cruel in this series, but I stumbled onto one of the funniest web hosts I’ve ever seen. And when I say stumbled, I actually mean Stumble Upon. Who would favorite this site? The owner I guess. Anyway, let’s get right to it, why MentorNet is a bad web presence.

Site design

All it takes is one look. MentorNet company was founded in 1998 supposedly, and from the looks, that’s when the website was designed. Menus on the top and left? It could be excused if they wouldn’t have that awful highlight on the left, and the drop-downs on top. Colors are way to contrasted for my taste and as a rule, never-ever use purple for font colors. Ever. Also, there isn’t too much info on the landing page, I don’t see why I would choose this web host.

Corporate image

I am a small time blogger, generating somewhere around 2500 views a day, and I try to keep my blog up to date all the time. I guess MentorNet has to be on its toes all the time, it is a web host anyway. Take a look at the footer. Either the company has been liquidated, or is trapped in some time capsule in 2007. Poor chaps.

Also, take a look at the logo on the top right. Pretty 1970’s “Wow, typing on a computer”. Look at the quasi-transparency on the edges, just a different shade of gray, although that stylish line on top does add to the elite quality. The owners probably saw this shortcoming and came up with a new logo, now to be found on the left, a bit down. In fear of loosing their customer base, they decided to keep both logos though, how thoughtful. Are they trying to symbolize an AOL takeover by the way?

Services

Web hosting for $8 a month? Doesn’t sound too bad, let’s investigate. I couldn’t actually find this deal, I think this price refers to domain registration, but we all know that’s exactly the same right? Anyways, the cheapest hosting pack is $12 (or less of course) and contains awesome options. Hold on to your hats folks, because you are getting 10MB of web space! WOW! You heard me, not 10kb, not 5Mb, but 10MB! That’s enough for more that 3 Mp3 songs and  a Wordpress blog with about 50 posts.

Let’s skip the dozen of offers and go to the top offer for those ritzy folks who need more than 10MB of space (the nerve…). With the platinum package you get an enormous 500Mb of space. That’s truly as infinite as space, you could practically even store three quarters of a whole movie!

Comparison

Ok, speaking out of the irony box, this website is a joke. I have a hosting account at bluehost with about 6-7 URL’s now, hosted for $100 a month. This gets me 300GB of space and infinite bandwidth. I also have 2500 mail accounts (100 on MentorNet) and instead of 6 website tools Bluehost offers about 20, like automatic Wordpress installation, PhpMyadmin, and so much more. How can a site like MentorNet, it’s truly amazing, and you haven’t even seen half of it, take a look for yourself.

I’m embarking on a cool design mission today. I want to give some sort of similarity to my blogs. Currently there’s Hack Your Day, this blog, Organization and Planning, my homepage, danielpataki.com, and another blog coming up soon. I don’t want the designs to match, I just want the same sort of feel to all of them.

To achieve this, I want to implement two things. One is a shared column. This will be on all sites, and will hopefully be driven by only one php file, with different styelsheets attached for the different sites. This sidebar thing will contain my Twitters, links and so on. The other is more of a design element, I want a bar of color on the left side of each blog, like my homepage has.

If you don’t know already, TED is a conference of about 1,000 people, with some of the best minds of today sharing their thoughts on their work, the world and their views in general. This material is now fully available from the website, under a creative commons license. You can view videos, comment on them and so on.

For me this is a great find, since I have a very broad spectrum of interest. Even if you hated biology in school, the talks on it will still pull you in, since people are talking about cutting edge science, often in a way that is very consumption-friendly from a layman’s point of view.

I am thinking about opening a new blog reviewing TED talks every week. I just recently finished a talk by Ron Eglash who is an ethno-mathematician, studying mathematics and culture. You might think “boring”, but it’s really not. The talk was about fractal patterns occurring in African design, and these people don’t know what a fractal is, at least not in a mathematical sense.

If you want to hear very smart people talking about cutting edge stuff, take a look!

I’ve been looking at some laptops for a few weeks now because I’m planning to buy a new one in a few months. I have used my empirical knowledge to deduce that there are two types of laptops. You can either get a good looking one, or one that is actually usable in the hardware department. Good looking laptops almost all have integrated video cards, come with laughable memory and whatnot. My main problem is the video card, I don’t necessarily want a gamer laptop, but I like to play the occasional game now and then, and I would appreciate some power under the hood.

On the other there are the quality laptops with great stuff purring under the cover. These laptops usually have weird lights all over the place, exceptionally ugly speakers, and other visual awesomness which makes my eyes water.

One other complaint I have is the position of jack inputs. Why oh why do they put these so often on the front? Have you ever tried to listen to music while working curled up on your bed? The jack pierces your gall bladder, while it also messes with the jack input itself. I would also love to have a normal numpad, although that is of secondary importance.

So let’s se what my perfect laptop is like. First of all it has to look good. Speakers are generally disguisting, so they must be well designed, also the touch pad should be simmple, no fanciness there. The video card needs to be a decent one, just as the actual processor. I would lke 2GB RAM, but worst case scenario, I just buy extra. A numpad would be great, but thats not a problem if it’s not there. Oh, and having the lid outside matte black would be great, I hate the glossy stuff they put on these days. That’s it, I don’t think I’ll ever find this model though, perhaps as a sort of bare bone, put it together yourself buy.

As you may or may not know, I am Hungarian and I live in Hungary. I think I’ve had a good education, not school-wise, but from my parents. We lived in the US for 3 years, Ireland for 4 years and Greece for another 3 and my parents were very democratic and understanding in our upbringing. I like to think that I have a broad view on life and I think I can think myself into other people’s shoes quite well.

The main problem with my country is that people have a total lack of this capability, and if they can do it, they only see the negatives. This is paired with a huge dose of envy, which seems to be the only impetus people have around here. Here’s a quick example.

You have to know that income tax up until yearly 1,700,000 HUF (roughly 10,000 USD) is 18%, above that it’s 36%. There are some nuances, but that’s the core of it. One of the parties said that they wanted a unified rate of 18% for all income groups. Someone I know commented this morning that she disagrees because this way richer people pay less tax and poor people will not be better off, so the richer will just have another reason to laugh. Well, this is the stupidest comment ever. I mean you can judge and comment on the actual plan, but isn’t it stupid to argue against something by saying, I don’t want this, because people other than myself will be better off? The other problem I have is that this person (who I like very much apart from this) would be the first to let hell break loose if she would be paying 36%, because this is disproportionately larger.

So my problem with Hungarian society is that for most people there is an equality between “I’m better off” and “the other one is worse off”. This is a quality I hate the most in anyone, just because my blog performs worse than others I am happy for those guys who do better, and help them if I can. Everyone would be better off doing this, since mostly people do better because they know something you don’t, or they are simply better at it. Instead of wishing them to do worse, why not accept that they are doing better, and try to catch up.

This is the huge difference between US culture for example. People are brought up to be hugely competitive, in an environment that thrives on competition. Some people seem to have a problem with this, and while it does have faults it does provoke thought, and breeds the kind of people who do not give up after one failed attempt. People also tend to have a more open mind, not thinking of competition as the enemy, but simply as competition.

Everyone wans to live better in my country, but all they can do to achieve this is to bring down those who actually do live better. While this is theoretically a viable route to take, I don’t really think it’s the good one. Instead why don’t people try to do better themselves?