I have tried Tamarind before as an ingredient in dishes, but I have never actually seen the real fruit. I wasn’t even sure it was edible uncooked. So, when I saw it sold in the shop, I had to try it. It turned out to be a very educational experience. The fruit is layered with multiple inedible seeds covered by sweet and sour pulp, inside a little cage in the hard-shell pod.
Getting Things Done (GTD) is an interesting system for managing one’s time and making things happen. It was originally pitched at CEO, with a lot of different projects on their plates at the same time. Lately, however, I have noticed a significant uptake of it by system administrators, programmers and other IT geeks.
Being a geek myself, I think it is because we also have to juggle multiple projects simultaneously. Some people I know could probably beat most CEOs by number of projects they are involved in.
Tonight (April 12th, 2007) is Yuri’s night, a celebration of first manned space flight done by Yuri Gagarin, the russian cosmonaut. It is 46th anniversary of the original 1961 event.
I had missed the party last year, but - being Russian and a geek - I am certainly making it this year. There are parties all over the world (124 parties in 35 countries), including where I live currently.
As an aside, I just realised that Russian drinking toast is ‘Поехали’ (Let’s go), which is exactly what Gagarin said on launch.
Сегодня - Международный день родного языка. Мой родной язык - Русский! Я горд моим родным языком даже если я не использую его каждый день.
Today - 21st of February - is the International Mother Language Day. My mother language is Russian! I am proud of my mother language, even if I do not get to use it every day.
Apart from Russian, I know reasonably good English and have dabbled in French, Esperanto and - now - Spanish.
Today, I was weeding my blog garden! I have used Xenu Link Sleuth to find all the dead outgoing links from my old blog entries and tried to fix them to point to the new locations, the Wayback Machine or to just mark them dead.
It was sad to see how many of those links no longer point anywhere. Promising companies gone, people’s personal domains expiring and going off-line with all their valuable content, newspaper articles disappearing into the paid archives.