Ljubljana is once again going into overkill with all the December holiday festivities. The good news is that there is nothing better for the community to go out there in the cold, buy insane amounts of mulled wine, roasted chestnuts and just talk about things worth doing over the quiet new year holidays.

Now go out and organize your mulled wine themed meetup.

Related posts:

1. DjangoCamp Ljubljana, lets do it!
2. Introduction to Findability, Cyril Doussin [WSG meetup 28/05/08]
3. Group Roller Blading in Ljubljana (Ljubljana Nightskate)

My laptops are usually full of stickers. While my usual excuse for them is that stickers are great conversation starter, there is a point where there are too many for the individual stories to matter.

That’s why I’m happy that I’ve been more conservative with this sticker real estate. Looking at it while surviving 11-hour flight I realized that every brand that I put there, is there because I respect the people behind it and that I’m happy to endorse any one of them, if someone would come up to me and ask me about an individual sticker.

I also like the way they’re only temporal as they wear out with time, leaving just a white space and opportunity for me to reconsider if I want to put that meme on my computer or is there something else that I would now feel more comfortable endorsing.

I would imagine that creating time-lapses of laptops with stickers could show us some interesting trends within our industry as well as provide a nice visual.

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More great fun a few days ago when a failed coffee attempt turned into opportunity to go to a concert of a group called Tortoise. Powered with only Wikipedia infobox, I decided to give it a try and see how I like them. I liked them a lot and based on my latest last.fm scrobbles, they have a new fan.

To get a feel for them, check Tortoise on YouTube:

There was another surprising thing with the whole event. The crowd was really, really nice to the degree it was almost unreal zombie experience. Everyone stood nicely in front of band, gave lots of personal space to everyone and besides a bit of headbanging of a few, didn’t do much. Just stood there like in a trance. Everyone had one beer and that was it. How very unusual.

Thanks goes to K. for the tip

Related articles by Zemanta

• Music Review | Tortoise: Subtle Indie Rock, Aged for 20 Years (nytimes.com)
• Grow Baby Brains With These 5 Sonic Soothers (wired.com)

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My current travel/summer plans include a dinner or two each week, trying new foods and restaurants as recommended by locals on Yelp, and to also blog about a few of them.

The pick of this week was Happy Shabu-Shabu that serves Shabu-Shabu Wikipedia describes the dish (more the whole experience of eating as):

Shabu-shabu is a Japanese variant of hot pot. The dish is related to sukiyaki in style, where both use thinly sliced meat and vegetables, and usually served with dipping sauces. However, it is starkly different in taste; shabu-shabu is more savory and less sweet than sukiyaki. It is considered a winter dish but is eaten year-round.

Image via Wikipedia

Source

In the beginning the experience is a bit funny. It’s one of those more involved dishes where you have to actively work during the meal in order to have food. In this case, it involves quickly cooking different vegetables and meats in the pot, that you add extra spices and sauces for the taste. After it’s cooked, which usually takes less than a minute, you can dip it in on of the additional dipping sauces.

A great experience overall and something to keep coming back to in San Francisco.

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This allows for some interesting car license plates. Here is one I’ve discovered recently:

In tribute to good old Herbie

Related posts:

1. Probabilities through Poker, Werewolf and Deal or No Deal , Melinda Seckington
2. 28.06.06
3. Notes on How To Organize BarCamp[London4] – Ross Bruniges

The year revolved mostly around my work at Zemanta as I spent most of my waking hours doing something for the project.

Q1 ’08 gave me my first real full time job and opportunity to see what it takes to take care of a big part of a project. Lessons were mostly in engineering, quality assurance and testing as well as planning and letting go of the things that you can’t complete in time. At the end of the day, I’m happy that Marko S. took over so I could continue learning from him as he’s a much better skilled at all these things.

Q2 ’08 was mostly a lesson how to do user support and gather user feedback. Much less coding and more work on User Interfaces and talking to users, figuring out bugs and what we needed to to do to make a great product in the end. Started a bit with traveling as a community manager.

Q3 ’08 lots and lots of traveling and connecting to people directly in person. Through the year I’ve visited London, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Cork, Copenhagen and many more great places. Interestingly enough, there was a huge overlap of people that I’ve met at these events, making me realize just how small the Web 2.0 community of doers really is. More great lessons on connecting with people and about building relationships across multiple countries and continents.

Q4 ’08 finally brought in more focus other things. I’ve finally started to run, making it a big part of my day and I’m slowly starting to see results in terms of better health and more positive world view. I also shifted my every day work more towards marketing which is an area I’m not enjoying that much, but I have to learn more about it to make a final decision.

Overall it was a great year and I wouldn’t change it in any way.

Image by Lutz-R. Frank via Flickr

My plans for 2009 are modest, focusing mainly on more sports to finally get in shape as well as working more with different communities around open source, web and usability.That’s probably going to translate to more active involvement in Kiberpipa and organization of diferent BarCamps in Slovenia (we’re already making plans for second one).

I’d also like to invest more time in creating visualizations and continuing my studies as I’m feeling that I missed a large part of social informatics that really interests me.

Thanks to everyone that made this year such an incredible experience!

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Why all the brainwashing with the commercials, you ask? Since I’m just starting to incorporate running into my everyday activities, I need help from all the directions to make it succeed.

Since it’s a lazy Sunday, I’m just going to link to the top ones. I recommend you give them a long (they’re short) and then get out and enjoy the day

Related posts:

1. Is Nike Apple of running?
2. My simple running resolution for 2010
3. About Nike+, pedometers and some common questions I get

So for this experiment I’m going to try to visualize some of the popular classic books, using text files of Gutenberg project. Technical details at the bottom of the post.

Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice as through words and tags

Pride and Prejudice through words

Pride and Prejudice as tags

Herman Melville – Moby-Dick

Moby Dick through words

Moby Dick through tags

George Orwell – 1984

1984 through words

1984 through tags

Technical details

The whole process is done using a simple python script. The script reads in the text file, breaks it into chunks of 360 words, as is roughly one A5 page and then sends it to Zemanta API. It repeats this process for first 30 thousand words of the book. The limit is arbitrary, I just didn’t want to run the script for too long.

Afterward, the text was manually pasted into Wordle and I played with random function and details until I started to like the image. You can also take a look at my full Wordle gallery.

Lessons learned

I’m especially happy how 1984 turned out. For this kind of visualization it’s important to choose source carefuly, so you can get more powerful results that way. I’ll probably continue experimenting with this on 1984 text.

Related posts:

1. Visualizing Slovenian coalition agreement
2. Zemanta Penguins
3. Visualizing Koornk chatter

People often ask me what is the value of constantly checking status of other people and updating mine. After doing this for a while in a group of friends you start getting completely new experience that makes the whole effort more than worth it.

Today it started with twit from @klemenrobnik at about midnight, with a short message that he is playing with his marten:

This turned out to be much more exciting as it seems at first. This marten is just a few months old and pretty wild. This was actually her nightly exercise in the wild. In a few weeks it’s going to a farm where it’s going to live in nature.

It actually proved quite challenging taking pictures of her with only Blackberry as it could not match the speed and interest of the general world. This is one of the rare times that built-in flash turned to be actually useful.

Related posts:

1. Eyetracker, late night hacking
2. Playing with Project wonderful

The idea itself is “simple” enough. Take the laser with its motor out of CD-ROM and build a connector for its motor so you can connect it to Arduino.

Afterwards you need to build a casing for the motor, and put a mirror on top of it, so your motor can move it. At that point you take a normal laser pointer and shine it towards the little mirror. Reflecting surface is being moved by the Arduino mini-board computer, so you can run the whole thing off some batteries and don’t need a computer.

And that is it. Some more pictures of how the final Laser Graffiti looks like. More hacking continues after the holidays.

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