Today is supposedly human rights day, a celebration so empty and void of any consequental meaning as Christmas, Birthdays and any other arbitrary date and/or event people decide to celebrate.

Besides, every day is a day of something and it’s getting kinda old, what when new ‘days’ need adding? We’re going to do special days on a fiscal year that lasts 1.6732 years instead of 1.0 years like it does now?

Nigga please.

There you go @anca_foster, I ranted absolutely carelessly about human rights day. You can thank me later.

This post brought to you from the special department of sleepiness, tardiness and general mehness about the current big important thing(tm).

They say the digital book revolution is upon us, that in a few more years everybody reading a dead-tree book will be silly, people with bookshelves fetishists and soon after that we’ll arrange witch hunts against anyone even thinking about killing a tree for t heir amusement.

They also say 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 is the year of the linux desktop.

They also say the internets will kill the music, movies, television, newspaper, book et al. industries … oh no wait that was the 1990’s.

They also say television will slaughter the radio … no wait, that was the 1960’s.

They also say movies will slaughter proper theatres … no wait, that was the 1930’s.

Excuse me while I let out a big hearty LOL in the corner.

Alright, enough making fun, let’s see some pros and cons about e-book readers because, honestly, there’s a lot of good about them, but nevertheless it’s going to take a while before I even consider buying one.

The biggest advantage of book readers is that they’re a compact form for storing texts, easily transportable and so on and so on. This is also their biggest weakness compared to books and the reason why they suck.

Compare reading a book to reading a sterile book reader will you. In a book your fingers interact with the text, the paper’s texture, thickness even the smell, they all tell you something about the book. You’re likely to disregard a cheaply printed book as stupid and a quality book you’ll instantly have more respect for. In a book reader they’re all the same, one can be The Great Gatsby or Nineteen-eighty-four and the other some sort of Da Vinci Code but they will all look equally stupid. Granted, paperbacks suffer a bit from the same problem.

And not to mention, instead of flipping pages in a book reader you press buttons, at best perform gestures with fingers. This will never change because that would defeat the whole purpose of having a reader.

Which brings us to the next point – book thickness. In a reader all books live in the two dimensional world, but real books are three dimensional. Now I don’t know about you, but personally I find it very important to judge when I will attempt reading a book by how thick/big it is. You won’t tackle a Ulysses during the toughest of exam seasons, but something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is just perfect.

Not to even mention the benefits of time estimates when you’re studying and don’t have to do mental juggling to notice you should start reading this or that textbook very early and which can wait a bit.

Oh and there’s just something instantly gratifying about seeing how much you’ve read, the number 100 in the bottom-left corner is just stupid data, but feeling with your hands that you’re half-way through. Now that’s quality information.

The name of the game is tactile feedback!

But not all is lost for e-readers as there is a certain application I would use them for – storyless books.

Let me explain, there are millions of books out there that don’t contain a story. Everything from ‘tips&tricks in javascript’ to ‘becoming a better person 101′. They are all somewhat useless to read cover-to-cover and often get looked at in random locations or when you’re searching for something specific.

This is where a digital book excels, you can search, you can very very quickly scan through pages and with moderner e-readers you will even be able to make annotations.

However, for real literature, please dear e-readers, stay the fuck away from me.

And this is all simply taking for granted that e-readers will ever be as robust as books are. How many electronics do you know where half the contents can be missing and the rest still works perfectly? Or electronics that are still in mint condition 300 years since being made?

Here I am at Hekovnik, alone in the romantic ambient of spotlights, whiteboards and loud music that makes me just wanna code code code. Yep, it’s Iron Maiden, felt like it, and son, I am not disappoint.

Lounging on the sofa, with my trusty MacBook in lap, shiny logo greeting anyone daring to enter my bubble of deep concentration and flowing code masterpieces.

It’s time like these that I truly love what I do, I know us developers are a fussy bunch and like to get all up in arms over the littlest thing that upsets us. That we love nothing better than to nag about some app or another taking 10 fucking milliseconds too long to open! The travesty!

But fact remains, I love being programmer, despite stupid tests not passing, despite frequent choices not to use testing that end up biting us in the arse, despite always changing design specs, despite all the bugs and all the weird shit and that little typo that brings the whole system to its knees and takes a week to fix …

… heaven really is where your code lies, because code is an expression of one’s self, because code is art and no matter what anyone ever says, I will continue to see myself more as a poet than an engineer.

For the past month I’ve been working on a freelance project shoved between all my other responsibilities because I felt I needed some sort of cashflow. But yesterday said project went poof and I’ll probably never get to work with that company again, over the phone it sounded like there was some bad blood between us, but because of how they led the conversation I didn’t feel like prodding and finding out what specifically went so poorly.

However, I know exactly why I lost the project, poor communication on mostly my part and an extreme lack of proper time to devote to the work. But none of this really matters, the reasons are arbitrary and I’m sure the client would put forth completely different reasons and I’m very certain in my career I’ll lose countless projects and gain countless others. What matters is what I learned from the experience.

1. Negotiate a clear deadline

Working under the assumption that the project needs to be finished when it’s done, while the other side expects you to finish in a month is very problematic. The biggest problem here being that without a deadline you’re naturally inclined to give it your 100% very bestest effort, which leads to over-engineering and too much pedantry and just plain old producing something they don’t really want.

2. Clearly very clearly negotiate the time you’ve got

Certainly I told the client, hey, I’ve got 10, at best 15, hours of time every week to work on this project. Most of this will be during weekends. And of course they agreed. But I don’t think they realised just how serious I was about this constraint (has happened to me before). So next time dear freelancing Swizec, make very extremely 100% fucking certain both sides know what you are able to bring to the table.

3. Listen to your gut feeling

When your gut smells something suspicious, it’s usually right. I won’t go into specifics as to what the smells were and just how bloody early into the conversation I knew this wasn’t going to be a perfect fit, but I did know, and I didn’t listen, because I thought that meh, I’ll make it work somehow.

I didn’t.

4. Negotiate who they’re hiring

Now I won’t go so far as to say this was the problem here, but I’ve had a similar issue once before. Sometimes when people hire a freelancer, they actually want an employee and all the perks that come with that. Well, you have to negotiate this in advance, otherwise both sides just end up being disappointed.

5. Make sure they know in advance when you’re down

Apparently not everyone is going to like it when you stop your life for a week to take care of exams, midterms and such things at school. They might not realise this is important stuff, but it is. In the past I didn’t use to do this, but I’ve learned the hard way that NOTHING and I mean absolutely nothing is more important than school.

6. How you know you’ve not lost much

If, upon breaking up with you, the client calls you names – yes even calling someone arrogant is calling them names – then they’re sending a clear message to that the relationship breaking up is rather a good thing than a bad thing. Yep, even when they’re just doing it as an emotional response and a rationalisation for breaking up.

And commenting someone’s work with “We’ll try to use what you make, but I doubt it’s possible since it’s all crap” … seriously man? Seriously? I may not be on the level of someone who builds software for NASA or Google, but I am in fact a professional in my field and have a certain amount of empirical data to prove that my work is not, in fact, useless.

Civil conduct, it matters!

The good stuff is more important!

But most importantly, I got to work with a fucking brilliant developer. He knows who he is and I do hope he’ll continue reading my blog despite my having left him with a bit of mess to clean up – it’s not a big mess, but unfinished code is always a mess – he was very great throughout the whole process, very helpful and very good with showing me around their codebase. Yep, despite this being supposedly his first shot at it.

Oh and did I mention that he designed a very brilliant framework? I’ve been into web frameworks since 2004 and I know very well when I spot something well designed. Kudos man.

Needless to say that if I’m ever in the position of poaching this person I am SO doing it, without a second thought. Mine! At the very least I hope we can remain in good relations …

And that’s all I’ve got to say on the matter, thank you for the lesson dear client who shall remain nameless.

Throughout the month of November those of us not afraid of our masculinity fought for the right of all men all over the world to refuse feminisation and fight neutirisation and all other things that make us less manly. As some smart bloke in the bible once said Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. For any heathen that knows not what beardvember is this helpful link might shed some light upon the matter. For all the rest, here are some pictures of my masculinity popping out upon my face like mushrooms on a rainy afternoon.

To catalogue the event I wanted to take a photo of my face every day and then produce a funky video … but I only took 16 rather than 30.

So yeah, rather silly the whole thing and you can’t believe my joy when I finally got to shave all that pesky hair off … but nontheless, I still sort of miss it.

Oh and I totally posted this way later than planned because of software trouble with creating the video.

Mmkay, one for the slovenian oldfags who are gonna feel a bit old listening to this.

Some very incredibly NSFW remakes of the popular hits we had to endure in the 90’s.

Have fun, don’t report me to SAZAS. Thanks.

DJ Dejan – Vroce Poletje (Morska Vila)

DJ Dejan – Vracam Se (Helena B)

DJ Dejan – Trzinka

DJ Dejan – Reka Prasic

DJ Dejan – Johnny B

DJ Dejan – Jaz Sem Tvoja Muca

DJ Dejan – Bum Bum

DJ Dejan – Brez Mene

It was it truly was! Happy fun times all around.

Until about like six in the afternoon or whatever the time was when everybody looked like a knackered zombie held together solely by the caffeine molecules in the blood stream. The last presenter I was paying any amount of serious attention to – Igor Kolar – even opened his talk with something to the extent of Excuse me when everything goes wrong, but I’m knackered as hell.

But it was fun, although the insolent bastard who provided only herbal tea should be shot, quartered and hung as a pinnata and beaten with sticks by small children until tea started falling out … meh we the tea drinkers forgive him, there was still taurin available.

I put forth a presentation of the Synaptic Web, how we’re getting there and what it means blahblahblah. Unlike last time I even uttered actual words this time! Victory for all involved! Well … not completely, there was the small issue of my having been versed in doing pitches lately, which resulted in the talk being bloody too short by a country mile.

Somehow we fixed that by me blabbing on for a few moments about what Preona is up to and then the whole presentation sort of devolved into a conversation of sorts and we stumbled around the interwebs for a while looking for interesting things and we even watched a video! Yay.

Now that I think of it, I could’ve just rolled the video of Khris Loux talking about these things that can be found on synapticweb.org, some other time perhaps.

Meh it wasn’t all that bad, we ended up being thrown out and even if the public was less than amused, standing there in front of them and making a fool of myself was damn fun.

What else … (the phrased used often during my presentation) … oh right! We can talk for a bit about the wonderful food that was served. It was wonderful! Omnom!

And uhm … well I guess 90% of the people reading this were at webcamp ljubljana anyway so I’ll just shut up now, here’s the slides for my presentation.

In my usual fashion I’m a bit late to discover this bit of news, a day or so late. Naturally I still wanted to share my thoughts on the matter, I mean that’s what blogging is about, our narcissistic tendencies to shout into the void and see if anyone will hear it.

Last week an image surfaced on Google Image Search Results of Michelle Obama photoshopped to look like a monkey. It was first hit even, great SEO guys, you rawk!

But then a whole lot of backlash started flying in and Google seemed confused and didn’t know what to do. So they created an apologetic adsense thingy saying something to the extent “Yeah, these results are sometimes offensive because the internet is one big cesspool of insanity. Fuck it”

It was not enough, earlier this week the result was completely removed from any sort of search for “michelle obama”. However it can still be found through a bit of a Streissand effect when you search for “michelle obama monkey”

Here’s the image:

Now, some say this thing is incredibly offensive and goes far beyond political satire just because a black person is involved. Personally I don’t care, I think it’s specieist towards monkeys when either a black person or Bush is shooped into a monkey. Nobody seems to care about that though.

So I ask of you, why is it political satire to shoop a white person into a monkey and a horribly horrible sadistic act of racism when a black person is shooped? Isn’t making this distinction an act of racism in and of itself thus proving that anyone who actually cares about this matter is in fact a racist?

For final summation, a very smart man once said “I may not agree with what you’re saying, but I will fight to death for your right to say it”. Apparently said wisdom does not hold anymore on the freest medium of all – the internets.

This is just a little something I found on a certain internet message board yesterday, but I really think it encompasses what a woman should do to have a perfectly happy man.

Not only is she baking me cake, she’s doing it in the nude! Win!!