In the meantime i want to express my sympathy towards Fanta lovers. I feel your pain when it comes to Fanta Lemon

Stay tuned.

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From the top of my head, and playing a devil’s advocate role, I can come up with:

1. Working remotely gives you an excuse not to work;
2. You are more easily distracted;
3. I cannot just go to your desk and discuss something with you;
4. I cannot control what you do.

I’m probably missing some, so feel free to comment on that and I will add them.

Let’s try to dissect all of those, one by one:

1. Working remotely gives you an excuse not to work. Fair enough. You are not present and – as such – can do whatever the hell you want. But you cannot not work. At least if you want to keep your job, that is. The main problem here – I believe – is just a matter of perception. You can keep track of someone’s work just as easily remotely or on the same building. IT people have it especially easy, since their deliverables are typically in the form of source code (it’s pretty easy to track changes).
2. You are more easily distracted. A fairly good point. I’m not going to say it’s not true, especially if you work at home. Your daily life can easily get in the way and it will take an extra amount of effort to keep them separated. But that is not to say that it cannot be done. Moreover, you will eventually find that the person will feel more motivated, even enough to put in more time and/or work outside work hours.
3. I can’t just go to your desk and discuss something with you. This is a no brainer. Ever heard of Skype? MSN? Google Talk? Email? What about Google Wave? Need I say more?
4. I cannot control what you do. Again, see point number 1. In software development you can. It’s pretty easy to keep track of what people are doing, especially if you use agile methodologies (like Scrum) in your daily activities. Get people to meet everyday in a room with Skype and do rounds talking about what was done the day before and what the plan for the day is. It does not get any easier than that, keeping track of people’s work.

So my question is: How come more IT companies are not doing this? It reduces their electricity bills, their water bills, the amount of money spent on office supplies, etc. I could go on, but you get my point.

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Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country.

Tough luck for all of us poor Europeans who will, as usual, have to wait for the latest gadgets to arrive (from the top of my head both the iphone and the motorola droid were released first in the US, being the latter still to be released in more countries than Germany and the UK).

I think I’ll get an iphone, since Google obviously does not want Euro-scum buying their phone right now

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Just tried to post a comment on a post where the submitter clearly forgot to add the link to the news article. Here’s what I got:

Am I the only one who thinks this is not really helpful to anyone? If any Reddit developer reads this, can you please fix it?

Thanks.

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In any case, one of the things I was hopping for – when I installed it as a plugin for wordpress here on Sugus – was that it would allow me to have open comments (i.e. no captcha) but still protect me from spam. I mean, they do deal with a lot of comments, so they are probably good against spam also, right?. Not really. This morning I checked my comments area and found 120+ spam comments, most in Russian. I am an international kind of guy but I’m pretty sure I don’t know that many Russian speaking people.

Also, for the past month, I have been getting a lot of these spam comments to moderate. It seems that no matter how many I mark as spam there will always be new ones (again, Russian mostly).

But I digress, so my point is: If you are going to make a system to manage comments, make damn sure you figure out clever ways of dealing with spam or no one will ever use them. At least, to be a little constructive here, give the proper tools to the site owners who will moderate the comments, like allowing certain domains from posting comments (for instance, I noticed a lot of these comments came from different accounts at the same Russian email domain).

And this is just my small blog, I can only imagine what bigger blog owners go through. Maybe they don’t use intense debate and rely on captcha like I will once again…

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Every day I grow more and more overwhelmed by the amount of information that surrounds me (and that consumes my time); The twitter updates, the photo uploading on flickr or picasa web, all the blogs to read, the blogs to write on, it’s just too much information (and little bit waste of time, in some cases). So, going for Pareto’s principle, I will gradually start to cut back on those services. Hopefully, this will give me some time back.

This means that I can finally put a bigger effort on my soon to be moved homepage and consolidate it as the *only* place where I post stuff (the final mileage may vary).

Wish me luck

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I would assume I was going to get less stress and confusion seating there than, say, the middle of the airplane. I was wrong.

The first thing I noticed, when reaching my seat, was that both the baggage compartments for these 3 rows (28, 29 and 30) were already filled with KLM stuff. I ended up having to put my jacket 5 or 6 rows further up the aircraft. Not a good start; if you don’t have enough space to put all your crap, KLM, get bigger planes! Don’t make people have to pay for it.

I sat down. The first thing I noticed was that this is the only freaking row on the airplane where the seats don’t recline back. That really pissed me off, since I could no longer make use of this uber cool inflatable pillow I bought. Another thing that was really bad – though, in truth, I never noticed – was that at least in the 30C (mine) and 30D aisle seats there is this metal thing keeping the seat in front more stable, which kind of reduces the space available for my feet. Not sure if it’s there in all aisle seats, but it’s kind of annoying.

Now a bit of good news for those that want to experience a lot more turbulence that in the middle of the plane: You get the food first, since one of the trays goes into the front, and another starts from the back (you are in the last row, after all). This would be actually a good thing, except that the food was crap. Ok, it was shit. No, I take that back; I have tasted shit that was better. That particular corgette salad was inedible and the bread, I’m pretty sure, had been baked the day before. After the food, and as usual, I got the choice amongst several sweets. I went for the lolly pop. I figured that if this company treats me like I’m 6 years old, and have no conscience whatsoever of how much they are robbing me, I might as well continue the child-like behavior.

Now that the good news are done, let’s go back to the crap. Literally! This seat is back to front with the bathroom doors. This means that, from times to times, you will get this really awesome (make that awe “full”) sky breeze that will make you return the food you already ingested. That, combined with the fact that you will get dozens of air toillet users passing through you during the flight, will make for an extremely rewarding flight experience. One that you will never forget, at least.

To make it really really awesome, my laptop’s battery was at 5% when the plane lifted off…

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