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.

I am just so spoiled by the incremental filter in the Eclipse’s preferences dialog! In fact, I was totally taken aback when I tried to turn off so-called smart quotes in the Microsoft Office. I thought the choice was somewhere in the Tools/Options dialog, but actually looking for it manually was a real pain. I even stared at the overloaded screen for a couple of seconds willing for the search box to show up.

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.

What could one do with a portable hard-drive that can be connected to wirelessly? And with software API to boot. More than one can think! Robert Scoble has a video interview with a Seagate exec about D.A.V.E/DAVE, the new device they are releasing in the coming months. It is envisaged to be an external storage device for person’s other gadgets with limited memory, such as mobile phones, mp3 players, etc.

These days, learning a foreign language is considered a useful thing. The advantages are many: from travelling to foreign countries to getting a preferential treatment in the ethnic restaurants of your own to keeping the dementia away. This was not always a case though, at least for China. Until 1844, it was illegal for a foreigner to learn Chinese. That changed for America, when Caleb Cushing had negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia, which made it possible for Americans - and Americans only - to learn Chenese.