As you know I don’t like media, be it newspapers, television or any other medium which existence relies on attracting masses with catchy slogans, or dumb programs just to make even-more-money.
According to Polish media a couple of days ago there was a large outbreak of so-called swine flu epidemic on Ukraine. The reports from there were hysteric: showing the flu great progress, one service reporting higher death toll than another, showing people queueing to pharmacists seeking flu vaccine, anti-flu drugs, garlic, lemons, honey, and God-only-knows-what-else.
As we share border with Ukraine government instructed our border service to take a closer look at who enters the country and started considering giving a flu vaccine to all health/public service workers. Some of the opposition politicians started arguing that we need to act quickly to stop the pandemic, Polish media suggested some countries already vaccinated 40%, 60% or even all country population. Panic is emerging thanks to people’s foolishness and to mass media.
The thing I want to point out is how much place are reserved for this hypothetical flu outbreak in Ukraine in western mass media. There is literally none. I checked BBC, CNN, and Reuters and the first two doesn’t even mention this fact on their health pages, Reuters being the only one referring to this outbreak in an article on flu season in northern hemisphere.
I can think of a few possible explanations of this fact but you are creative people and can figure it out on your own, don’t you?
My experimental website edge.jakubpawlowicz.com has been featured on html5gallery.com – a place living on the edge of HTML and CSS technologies. Think that’s cool.
Tuesday, 1PM: buying a jar of apricot jam in Paris – delicious with bread or crepes; Tuesday, 4PM: putting it into my personal bag (mistake!); Tuesday, 7PM: guy from the security gate on the airport accused me of taking a forbidden jar of jam to the plane’s deck as I may throw it at the plane’s cockpit, open a window while flying and throw it into the engine or simply detonate onboard. Sure, I’m mostly known as MacGyver and could have used that jam as an ingredient of TNT which I could have made by mixing the jam with soap from plane’s toilet, ketchup from sandwiches, and cola sold by plane staff. But those smart bastards figured out my master plan… Wednesday: Figuring out if they have already detonated my jar of jam or disarmed the jam by consuming it.
In the past months I have been experimenting with cutting-edge web technologies and in the same time I decided push my current website a little further.
For the sake of the experiment the way I took a “top-down” approach in requirements by ditching all browsers older than 2 versions back which gave me a lot of space to play. One thing I always wanted to push to a working website was Canvas 2D API and it fit there perfectly. Also advanced CSS3 and HTML5 made their way into that new project and both proved its value.
Enough writing. I would like to present you an “edge” version of jakubpawlowicz.com website which is now available under edge.jakubpawlowicz.com
You may not notice a difference between edge and standard version at the first glance, but it was my aim to keep it looking the same while rebuilding the insides.
I encourage you to dig it inside out, write down your comments, questions or suggestions and share them if you like the idea. Enjoy!
PS) Internet Explorer is not yet supported. Work in progress.
In the past months I noticed a shift in the way I search things over the internet. I started using vertical search engines (like YouTube or IMDB for music/videos related topics, Wikipedia for articles, BBC for news, or Wolfram for scientific data) more often in cases when I definitely know what I’m looking for. For these tasks I don’t use Yahoo or Google search engines anymore because these give me too wide set of results often from categories that don’t interest me at all. The traditional search engines still do work fine when there is no evident place to look for a piece of information or data is scattered between multiple pages, but these are no more an entry point in searching for something.
Some wise people foreseen such a shift a couple of years ago and I see it becomes the case for me, an experienced internet user. It probably won’t be a case for beginners and casual internet users but since Google and Yahoo start to enhance search data with more contextual results it feels the change is about to happen.
I found Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine a really great way to learn science-related things. If you have a moment (or two as once you start playing with it is hard to stop) check it out.
PS) I was trying to find what are the average temperatures in Marseille in September and Google couldn’t help me with it. For WA it was a piece of cake. Cool!
As many of you already know I will be leaving Sabre on March 15th. It has been about 2,5 years of corporate life in the very best edition which taught me one thing: I’m not a corporate beast. Although I really liked the people I was working with (it’s past as I’ve already left Sabre taking the vacations for 2 weeks) the corporate reality with its distributed responsibility and deep-tree structure doesn’t work for me.
The time for retrospection will come soon, but for now I’m simply happy joining a small company!
I consider banks as the institutions who lie to us all the time. However these lies are not ones visible at the first sight but rather ones hidden deeply, like in the documents we are asked to sign, which are written in a very formal and not understandable manner.
I hate these situations when after signing the documents in a bank I check my bank account to find out I misread something and they “robbed” me out of my money. It is interesting to point out that I have never experienced a situation when bank gave me a bonus I didn’t expect. It is always the case they took as much as I have expected or more. The “more” being the more probable case.
Although I am used to banks not telling us the whole story about interest rates, mortgage costs, money transfer fees and so on, this time I found the polish Alior Bank TV ad to lie in a bit different way:
This ad tells us that with the Alior Bank card you can take your money from all the cashpoints in the world free of charge. First it shows Krakow’s main square and Floriańska street corner where someone takes money from a cashpoint. The problem is this cashpoint does not exist! I have never seen it there before so I deliberately took a walk to that place to find out a bare wall instead of a cashpoint. Computer generated scenes are popular these days to the extent they drive the reality…
In the subsequent scene there is another cashpoint presented near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As I will be there this year I will take another walk to find out whether that one is real or fake!
I hope for a bank which doesn’t lie to me. I don’t know if I ever found one, but I will keep searching.
PS) Thanks goes to Hubert Gajewski who told me “post it on your blog” once he heard the story.
UPDATE) We were in Paris in September and didn’t find the cashpoint. Lame, Alior, very lame.
