It’s not the end
Not the kingdom come
It is the journey that matters
– Wanderlust by Nightwishes

I think I know why I’ve been happy recently – I found the meaning of life.

And the funny thing is that I found the meaning of life without actually realizing I found it. The trigger to my realization was a video called Music and Life (by Alan Watts) (it’s short enough, I promise).

Zen … does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan Watts – The Way of Zen, pt. 2, ch. 2 (1957)

I think I’m starting to like this Zen thingy.

As it’s the journey that matters, and not the end, being an inquisitive type, I of course started thinking about the end of the journey. And I found out I’m not really scared. When I’m dead, there will simply be void. The same one there was before I was born (or, before I was conscious (btw, this post is not big enough to contain a discussion about abortion)). It’s actually quite consoling… no matter how bad I fuck up, the worst there can be at the end is void.

The only people who have a reason to be afraid of death are followers of various religions that believe in afterlife. Also, life itself is not the ultimate fun for them, as the eternal afterlife is far more important. Oh well, I just couldn’t do without a little trolling, could I?

Friday: I couldn’t sleep well, sweating and waking up all the time. In the morning I didn’t feel any better plus I had a horrible headache. After measuring my temperature and finding out it was slightly over 38˚C, I knew I had a problem. A big problem.

Decisions, decisions… First thing, I’m not going to go to work, that is completely out of question with my head spinning at about 180 rotations per minute. The big decision was whether to take vacations or become officially ill. If I became officially ill, I obviously couldn’t go to France in the afternoon. So I decided to risk it, called my boss, explained the situation and asked him whether I could take Friday off. He wasn’t too happy but he actually didn’t have much of a choice…

Then I slept for few hours and after that went to visit the doctor. After explaining my symptoms, I got the expected “no way you are leaving anywhere today” response. I let her know that I’d really really like to go there, and after some tests (urine, blood, etc.), none of which ended up well, she concluded that maybe I could try it.

Off to buy Paralen and Smecta. Temperature jumping back and forth between 37 and 38˚C. Funny how it was completely in sync with my headache.

After getting diarrhoea, drinking smecta (I bet I could get some clay way cheaper than this) and sleeping through the whole afternoon, I was facing a decision: should I stay home, get healthy in three days and regret it for the rest of the week, or should I leave and die far from home? Opposed to advice from almost everyone, I decided to leave.

Those 24 hours in the bus weren’t so bad, I just kind of sat there and waited. Both high temperature and headache were practically gone, all I was left with was a diarrhoea. And smecta for the rescue (it really tastes like mud). I think I ate about one roll during the journey.

We arrived at Tignes a bit earlier than planned, so we had some time to just enjoy the sunny weather and look around the town/village.

Sunday morning was rather sunny. There were ~30 centimeters of fresh snow, which was, uh oh… very nice… at least for those who were able to ski in it somehow. As for me, I never was any good at skiing in deep snow. I think I fell about 4 times. Moreover, stale rolls + smecta did not exactly give me much strength to fight all that snow. Luckily, the weather got substantially worse in the afternoon, so I just stayed home and slept through it all.

I don’t remember much of Monday, except stale rolls, smecta, and bad weather. I slept through the morning and only went skiing in the afternoon, but I don’t recall the details too well.

Tuesday was the turning point: The diarrhoea stopped (well, almost), I tried some new food like rice and even had two squares of chocolate. Weather was perfect, there was no new snow (ie. the pistes were groomed) so we went exploring the surroundings.

You might want to consult the map, as I’m going to present some otherwise rather boring names:

After skiing on Tichot for over an hour, while my sister was getting her snowboard repaired, we went up from Val Claret through Tichot and Col du Palet to L’Aiguille Percee (2748), then went through Sache piste all the way down to Tignes les Brevieres (1550). Over 1km vertically down in one go. It was very nice and there was plenty of nature around, so we had a nice lunch in the forest. Then we returned to Tignes 2100. As there was still a lot of time left till the evening, we went over Toviere (2704) down to La Daille (1785) and then by “funiculaire” up to Rocher de Bellevarde (2827).

Wednesday was also great. The weather was excellent, so we headed straight over Col de Fresse and Rocher de Bellevarde to Val d’Isere (1850). Then up to Solaise (2560) and down to Le Laisinant. From there to the fifth (!) and (as we thought) last valley. There we went down to Le Fornet (1930) where we had lunch (mmm, cheese). “Signal” was possibly the steepest red slope I’ve ever seen. We were rather surprised that Glacier de Pissaillas and the slopes on it were in yet another valley, it certainly didn’t look so on the map. And boy it was cold in there. So, after going Cascades once, we headed back using Leissieres Express, which is a silly chairlift that takes you up on one side of the hill and down on the other. Alas, it was the only way to get back. We returned in basically the same way from here (Solaise, Val d’Isere, Rocher de Bellevarde, Col de Fresse). As there was still some time left, we went to funiculaire Grande Motte, and then to the huge cabin (they call it “cable car” in English, but I don’t think that describes it well, “fucking huge cabine” describes it much better, imho). At 3456m, this was the highest point we reached in Tignes.

The weather worsened significantly on Thursday. We spent the morning on Lanches, with the occasional funiculaire not to get bored. As the weather was so-so, we lunched back in our appartment. After the lunch we went to Tignes 2100, where we spent the rest of the day.

Friday morning, clouds and fog everywhere. Plus 20cm of fresh snow and still snowing. First few rides were an ordeal, I tried skiing the way I’m used to (long turns accross the whole piste, mostly carving, sliding slightly on steep slopes to keep the speed under control). After getting no answer from my dad, I watched others and noticed most of the people who seemed in control of the situation were doing very short turns. I think it almost trippled my speed when I discovered (almost simultaneously) two very important things about skiing in deep snow:

• It is vital to only have your weight on one leg at a time (I used to be very precise about this, but with carving I kind of forgot, since there it is not very important). If possible, try to have the other leg high enough not to get it stuck somewhere.
• To greatly increase your stability, you should try to move your body in a constant direction at a constant speed. Make extremely short “turns” just with your legs. These slow you down considerably, while constant direction and constant speed of your body provide perfect stability.

Actually I didn’t fall at all on Friday, which is very good considering the zero visibility and huge amounts of snow (which got irregularly scattered during the day). There were many (dozens) cases where I almost fell down, but always somehow miraculously prevailed.

We spent the afternoon on Bollin and Tichot, as all the other lifts were closed.

The journey back home took a bit longer (slightly over 24 hours) as we got stuck in a traffic jam, but otherwise it went ok.

All in all, it was a great week, I further improved my carving skillz, and I finally learned to ski in deep snow.

I think I have a drinking problem.

During all of my life, it was enough for me to drink 4-5 glasses (slightly over a liter) a day. I was never thirsty and often had to force myself to even drink at all.

Recently, this has changed tremendously – I drink over 4 liters a day. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I drink water almost exclusively. I used to drink a lot of sweet carbonated water, but now I can’t stand it. It leaves a very annoying aftertaste (funnily, I used to think exactly that about pure water). I am not sure when I started drinking water so much, but I think it was around last summer. I usually drink just tap water, and at work there are big canisters with water kind of similar to tap water.

*Think think think… There must be some kind of a point at the end… Or just something…*

Does anyone have any idea what could have been the cause of such a dramatic change in the amount of water (or liquid, if you prefer) I drink daily?

I’ve always wanted to see how succesful players on littlegolem are in overall.

So after waiting a year or two, I decided to create it myself…

And thus (haha, “thus” is such a lame word) Little Golem Monster Ratings were born. There’s a thread on littlegolem where Monster ratings are being discussed – feel free to join.

I feel that I should write something more and/or something more interesting, but I’m just too tired at the moment…

PS: I am currently fourth in the overall ratings, which is not too bad. But I’ll start playing more games to hopefully improve my position.

You often hear people complaining about how much money someone else makes. They talk about politicians or football players or anyone else who makes a lot of money (actually, politicians don’t really get that much money). They are envious and want to have that much money too.

But when was the last time you heard anyone complaining about those buddhist monks who achieved happiness? Surprisingly, most people are not envious of them. I’m not really sure why that is so, but I think that it’s because people don’t really want to be happy. They want to have a big house, luxurious car, and many other things, but they don’t actually care about happiness.

Don’t get me wrong here, money is very important for one’s happiness. People who completely lack money are likely to become unhappy as a result. Complete lack of money makes it difficult to get food, place to sleep at and other important things like that. But as long as you have enough money to survive comfortably (ie. not permanently stressed about where you are going to sleep tomorrow and what you are going to eat), getting more money is not going to increase your happiness nearly as much as you might think it would.

I think the key to real happiness lies in consciously and fully enjoying small joys of everyday life. I won’t suggest anything particular, as each of us has to find their own, different small joys.

This is not going to be only about the systems themselves, rather about general (desktop) working environment. As I had to spend substantial amount of time working with Windows recently, I feel qualified enough to share some insights:

What I like in Windows:

• Total Commander: it really rocks, it remembers my ftp connections with passwords, it allows me to use tabs, and it has many other nice features (I just don’t get it why I can’t rename files with F2)

What I don’t like in Windows (sorted by annoyingness):

• Broken clipboard: When I select bloody text I want it in the bloody clipboard. This is just fucking annoying as I have to copy text between apps several hundred times a day.
• No real terminal with real commands: Sure, I can use ALT+F7 <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <space> in Total Commander, but I find “grep” much more comfortable to use than ALT+F7 <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <space>, not only because grep is just four keystrokes and ALT+F7 <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <space> is eight, but also because grep has all sorts of things like -i or -x (those can probably be reached in Total Commander with something like <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <space>, but again, that’s not very comfortable). As for commands I miss, I mentioned grep, but there’s also bc, tcpdump, df, du, top, ps, and that’s just off the top of my head.
• Moving windows with alt: when I hold alt, and press down mouse button, I want the window to move. Especially when the window jumps out on me with its title bar hidden above the top of my screen, as is usual in MS Windows (a colleague suggested a very useful ~5 key combination that helped, but I already forgot what it was).
• Missing package management: want to update all the installed software to newest versions? Out of luck, I guess…
• All those annoying messages that attack me from lower right part of screen everytime I log in.

What I don’t like in Linux:

• General inconsistency in behaviour of different apps (one gets used to it occasionally, though).
• Applications crash much more often (though the system itself stays stable). But it’s getting better (I haven’t experienced gaim crash ever since they started calling it pidgin , and firefox 2 doesn’t crash anymore either).
• No good filemanager for everyday work.

 
And now for something completely different:

Yeah, separating different topics into individual posts and all that… never been too good at that…
So, I’m searching for a good Linux filemanager… here are features of the ideal one (sorted by priority):

• Two-panel layout
• Find-as-you-type (without having to press alt key or something to enable it, I have a terminal in the other window, thank you)
• Ability to remember ftp connections (w/ passwords is a big plus). Also, ability not to segfault when one tries to upload a file through an ftp connection that timed out (hello, mc?).
• Lynx-like motion (left and right ascend/descend directories)
• Tabs on each panel (that’s useful when working on many things at once)
• Ability to run in a terminal (not too important, but it surely would be neat)

So far, mc is the best, but it’s still far from perfect (doesn’t remember passwords, segfaults on ftp timeout, no tabs support).

When I saw the link to “badge creator” (marked as new) on flickriver, I knew I just had to add that to my blog. But somehow the side column was too long already…

Making the whole thing wider, adding the second side column and adding my flickriver favourites was the first change (the most work on this one was to change the header picture).

The second change was setting the main text to left-align instead of justify. I spent a great deal of time thinking about whether I should do it, but I really couldn’t decide. So I just decided to use the common advice of the experts (that site seriously rocks, they even hang left quotation signs, and follow just about every other rule which is normally almost unfollowable on the web).

The third change was the most difficult and tedious. I won’t say what it is, but I’ll give you few hints:

• it has something to do with the bits of extra empty space that appeared almost everywhere
• it was especially necessary because of the extra column
• it has a very positive effect on the visitor, although 98% won’t even realise it

Can you guess what the third change is?

Why oh why do native speakers suck at spelling so much?

English people are notorious for making the most basic mistakes. Your/you’re and their/they’re/there win shared first place for the most annoying and stupid misspelling. It twists the meaning and shows that whoever wrote that can’t even grasp the absolute basics. Also, if your keyboard features the apostrophe, please differentiate between its and it’s.

Another pearl is when people use “of” instead of “have”. Not in “I of a dog” (surprisingly, no one writes that), but much more in “could of” or “would of” (makes me feel like poking my eyes out).

Except/accept, where/were, loose/lose (if you ever “loose a game”, something is seriously wrong with you), principal/principle, quiet/quite… wtf…?

Sadly, English speakers are not alone. I’ve just seen someone repeatedly saying “żucił” (instead of the correct “rzucił”) in certain Polish chatroom. Luckily, I knew the correct spelling and readily corrected that horrendous mistake. But what if I hadn’t known…?

Sincerely, I don’t care about your spelling. What I do care about is my own spelling. And I learn to spell from – you guessed it – native speakers. So, when they fail, I do, too.

After you of read this post, I think your definately not going to make those grammer misteaks again.

PS: Having written that, I expect to make a very serious Czech spelling mistake during the next 24 hours… Karma is a bitch.

As we all know, Flickr is the best photo sharing site (if you haven’t heard it yet, Microsoft is buying Yahoo, who own Flickr… so there’s a very real possibility that Microsoft will kill Flickr, which would make me hate them even more). Almost unbelievably, the flickr source is only 60k lines of php and 60k lines of templates… I’ve seen 10k lines files that didn’t do anything useful. The fact that all of the Flickr’s functionality can fit in 60k lines is simply amazing.

Flickr has the best features and – even more importantly – best photographers and best photos. Flickr Explore shows some of the most interesting, provoking and artistic photos.

And the best way to view any Flickr galleries (including Explore) is Flickriver. It’s currently my most favourite site on all the internets.

Why Flickriver rocks:

• Infinite scrolling (aka river) enables you to get to see more photos simply by scrolling to the bottom. No more clicking “next” and “previous”! (I absolutely hate paging, having everything on one page is just perfect)
• Black background just makes it look good. Show me a photo that looks better on white background and I’ll show you a hundred that look better on black background.
• Larger image previews are much better than the small squares you usually see on flickr, you see the full uncropped picture, and you see it at a size which actually enables you to recognize what is displayed on the picture.

At least once a week, I visit Flickriver and go through at least top 50 explore photos from each day since my last visit. I’ve been doing this for several months yet I’m amazed over and over again how perfect photos there are.

Give Flickriver a try, I’m sure you won’t regret it!

Oh, and I can highly suggest viewing my favourite photos (mostly falling into at least one of these categories: hdr, landscapes, mist/fog, cities, conceptual).

…at least from my point of view.

Typography (or whatever you want to call it; the way letters are handled)

If it’s unreadable, your visitors will not be able to read anything, the more readable your website is, the more they will be able to read.

One of the most common cause of problems is “liquid layout”. Say what you want, but having 150 letters on one line is no good. Wikipedia is guilty of this. They try to make up for it by having short paragraphs, which usually works rather well (or you can resize your browser window, but I like to keep it fullscreen), but it’s far from optimal.

Another common problem is “designers” raping the letters by setting unusual letterspacing. This can be excused in titles and such, but having longer text with any letterspacing but default (be it lower or higher) should be a prisonable crime.

Wisely choosing linespacing (line-height) can also significantly help improve the readability – the longer the lines, the bigger linespacing you should use.

It’s usually a bad idea to set text-align to “justify”. That’s because today’s browsers can’t break words. I use justified text here, because I think it looks a bit better, but maybe I should drop it (comments are welcome! )

And one more thing… the letters should be in a colour that is readable on the chosen background… which brings us to the next part:

Colours

Colours are very important, as they are the first thing your visitor will notice. What colors you should use depends largely on your audience, but you should just use common sense (don’t be like the wackos who use completely black background surrounded by the shiniest green you could imagine ).

Whitespace

I consider whitespace (the empty areas that are not filled with anything, they don’t necessarily have to be white ) to be the most important and most overlooked aspect of webdesign. If you need to separate two elements, inserting some white space is the most natural and effective thing to do. The more of it, the more separated the elements become. It’s actually amazingly simple.