I am not into poetry. This could be easily explained by the fact that we had to learn by heart very long, very boring poems about hapless peasants in the Russian literature class. But there was one short piece of poetry that I really liked. It was a translation by Marshak, who was often said to produce a better translation than the original was. I did not remember who it was translated from, just the poem itself:

Netscape has decided to remove RSS DTD, but - under brunt of developers’ fury and logic - brought it back. But until July 1st only! Given that back in 1999 Netscape, insisted that RSS documents must be validated, this feels more than a little annoying. And given that - as a developer of web content - I cannot control which client my users will use to read my feeds, I don’t have too many options.

When I speak to other people about Esperanto, they often ask whether there are any practical uses to knowing the language beyond the language itself. I used to talk about Pasporta Servo, ability to listen to other countries’ radio and global community. Now I just go straight for the big guns. I ask them whether they ever tried learning another language. Usually the answer is yes and usually the language was never learned well.

Account cancelation is a great pain in the rear. A PCWorld article (via BoingBoing) tests multiple services and discoveres that most of them go to great troubles to keep people subscribed, willingly or not. Something has to be done about it. I propose a new business that will cater specifically to the people calling support numbers (e.g. to unsubscribe) and expecting trouble. Let’s name this service: Calling for trouble. It will work by recording people’s communications with the support centers and will provide easy tools to manage those records, publish them on the web and maybe even establish transient communities between multiple people calling the provider at the same time.

I am interesting in publishing (as in books, e-books, etc). I think the field is rapidly changing due to e-books, print-on-demand and other factors and watching the change is quite exciting. Unfortunately, I don’t have time or wherewithal to get into the topic seriously. So instead I dip into a sub-genre mailing list, get the feel for their challenges and recent advances and move on. The latest list I am on is the ebook-community Yahoo group.