Jeromakay

Probably you noticed there’s a big gap in my blog, that’s what busy people usualy have on their lifes.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with time management techniques and it turned out to work pretty well until few days ago when I realised I have no time left for myself, to breathe.

I’m doing all those activities that life/work requires, but I didn’t really have time for my self, to stop, and breathe, relax and just let things go by.

OH yes, I’ve been running hard lately, but besides the physical benefits, there’s no boost on the mental side, I can’t see great improvements.

My guess it’s just stress, and I’m realising it as I write this post. I need to stay away, and watch things from the outside for a while.

… and of course, commit less to do other people’s work. There’s no real benefit in this – for me or them.

What I learned? UCC is a great environment to be where knowledge floats around the place and it’s there for you to grab it. I think this is a great boost for me right now.

I’ll write some more here later.

Vladimir

Happy new year, yes!!!! We’re in the next decade now

Hope you’ve got your new year’s resolution sorted, I’ve got lots of energy to spend wisely in this new year and I can see many good things ahead. Many of the things I’m focusing are around growing Loopthing and hopefully by summer there will be massive focus on the network we’re building here.

May all your wishes come true in 2010!

Vladimir

Hey everyone,

Just want to recap the latest happenings, I think this year has been a good one with lots of stuff to learn. I managed to understand things I wasn’t able to in the past, Loopthing managed to reach a decisive point which I hope it’s going to be all right, became a student, started learning Italian, and also went through many many small things that should help me in the future.

For now, this is it, I don’t have much to say, just to push things hard around us.

Happy holidays,
Vladimir Ghetau

Horrrraaaaay!

A quick video on Loopthing, the business networking website, where Joseph Kelly talks about what is Loopthing and how it can help your business.

The action happens in The Hub, in London, from what I’ve heard.

Now, as I was playing with Vimeo’s API, I stumbled across this video:

Now, I wonder what’s the connection between the dead animal singing and the lyrics which say “You are so beautiful…”.

LOL

Ola! I have promissed to myself that I’m going to keep this blog updated consistently. Been off for few days in a great trip to Lisbon, and here’s what I’ve found there – a bridge which invited me for a jump.

I’m going to come back with more serious posts, lol.

Internationalization can be messy when developing applications targeting multiple countries.

If you are developing a DB backed application where users can enter non latin characters, you may want to retrieve those rows which have non-latin characters used by different non-english languages, like: Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Hindi, Swedish, Romanian, etc. (such as: ăâîşţ).

If you want to check all the rows having content which doesn’t use only latin characters, you can try the following query which returns these rows.

SELECT `column` FROM `t` WHERE CHAR_LENGTH(`column`)<>LENGTH(`column`);

In my case, the table.column has an UTF-8 character set.

I’ll let you guess why rows containing non-Latin (non-ASCII) characters are returned by the above query.

Reference: MySQL’s String Functions

Summer is still with us, so here’s some fun links:

• Screenjelly – a screen capture utility, capturing everything straight from your browser
• Drunk russians yoga via Damien Mulley
• why you must hire top employees not top candidates (article)
• have you ever wondered what is your web site’s ARPU
• an european startups blog.

Ah, and in the end a Facebook fun happening:

Getting caught on Facebook by your boss whose inside your friends list is stupid, saying you don’t like your job but keep doing it, is called waste of everyone’s time – including yours.

Got to close this post with a big LOL!

Thanks for taking part of this experiment! In exchange I’ve got something rewarding to give you back, please read on.

I know you’re willing to learn more on social media and how you can apply this to your business, that’s why I invite you to  follow @loopthing on Twitter, and then submit your business to Loopthing.com.

This is it!

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s OK, it wasn’t designed to. This post is part of an experiment related to this tweet.

I’m going to make this  a monthly post, a habit of posting pictures I take across different places I travel.

The one you see below was taken on July 25th, 2009 and what you see there is the view you get in Wexford. My camera is a bridge camera Fujifilm FinePix S6500 fd and the picture has been retouched a little bit.

Click the photo to see a higher resolution version. Cheers!