Inspiration Bit

Back in school we had a young teacher of Russian Literature whom no one in class would listen. Those literature classes were the noisiest, and the students were doing anything except studying Literature and following the teacher’s orders. One day he brought a book, and started reading it to us. After only a few minutes the teacher got our absolute attention. He was reading to us stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko - one of the funniest of Russian writers.

He was often criticized for his careless and simplistic use of language, but behind the mask of semi-literacy was hiding a sober look at the realities of the Soviet Power. The significance of the presented here short story Electrification is the fact that one of Lenin’s most famous slogans was “Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of the Whole Country”.
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A few months ago I posted an article about the importance of paying attention to details in design and presented some inspirational examples on styling your blog titles, dates, post details, bulleted lists with icons and comments.
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Fortunate, blessed, grateful, awed, reverent…. That’s what I feel when I think about readers of Inspiration Bit. What did I do to deserve all those hundreds of subscribers and fans who favourited this blog on Technorati? Sure, there are hundreds of other blogs who have thousands of subscribers. But there’s only a handful of blogs that managed to build a loyal community of readers and friends, not a fanatic following nor the eager crowd to imitate the success of others.
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Karel Čapek (1890-1938), Czech playwright, novelist and short story writer, is recognized for his intelligent humour and exceptional imagination. He’s probably best known for his futuristic play R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots), where he was the first one to use the word ROBOT, invented by his brother Joseph Čapek (poet and cartoonist), as well as for his anti-fascist novel “The War with the Newts”. He was even nominated for the Nobel Prize for the anti-war messages included in his plays. Unfortunately, it was during the Nazi Germany and the Swedish Academy was too afraid to give it to Čapek.

The Last Judgment is just one of the brilliant short detective stories from a hilarious work called “Stories from a Pocket and Stories from Another Pocket”. The story only seems to be pretty straightforward, it’s written with a clever humour with a rather sophisticated message.
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Is Internet the Devil in disguise, or is it an Angel? What about those brats that took over our lives - Email, World Wide Web and Chat?

The Web has grown so big that already has its own little rascals that became an essential part of our life: Google, Blogiverse, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, and the list goes on.

We became alarmingly dependent on the Internet, it controls a dangerously increasing number of our daily activities. Our trust in Internet is disturbing if we just stop and think about it for a moment. We plan our life on Google Calendar, we store our important documents on Google Docs, we drive to our destinations according Google Map. We entrust our photos to Flickr or other online image galleries. But what if… what if something happens to all those servers, then we’d lose it all. I can hear you saying - don’t forget to backup. But how many of us do forget, or simply don’t know how.
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Just when I thought that Britney can’t go any lower than she did on the stage of the MTV awards, I’m finding out about another controversy related to her name. This time it’s her venture into the beauty industry, launching a new perfume, called “Believe”, branded by Elizabeth Arden. Little did she know that the design team didn’t find her worthy of their design skills and imagination, they simply borrowed (read: ripped off) an already existing brand from a Vancouver-based Canadian company Mondonation. Their word “believe” is in lower case, with a distinctively highlighted “i” in the middle.
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Guess what famous American writer said “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration”? Yes, of course, Ernest Hemingway, whose minimalist writing style and deceptively simple prose earned him world-wide recognition.

James Joyce once reflected on Hemingway: “He has reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do. Have you read ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place’?…It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written.”
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August 6, 1991: Tim Berners-Lee releases his idea for the World Wide Web and publishes the First Web Site with the guidelines on what is WWW, how to install a browser, how to set up a server.

August 6, 2007: John Boardley launches new blog iLoveTypography.com and starts a “Type Revolution”. In one month his RSS feed count gained 2160 subscribers, with each day that number grows by another hundred. That’s an amazing achievement, especially taking into consideration that John didn’t promote his new blog anywhere but his other site Redsil, a blog dedicated to Graphic Design. However the clean and meticulously designed RedsilWP theme for the blog has been featured on various CSS galleries and Smashing Magazine.
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