A Bit Of Literature - Only The Dead Know Brooklyn
October 7th, 2007 :: by Vivien
There are many cities in the world that I’d especially love to visit in this lifetime. Some of those cities on my list to see I’ve already been very fortunate to explore: Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, St. Petersburg, Moscow. Tomorrow I’m off to another city-legend - New York. I’m going there for a week on a business trip, and will be conducting a training during the day, so I’ll have only evenings left for sightseeing. Nevertheless I’m taking my camera with me and will do my best to see as much of New York as I possibly can.
I wonder if any of my readers live in NYC or will happen to drop by there next week. Then perhaps we could meet at one of the Big Apple’s funky cafes. Give me a shout if you would.
I was wondering if I could find a short story dedicated to New York for my today’s bit of literature. Some time ago I bought a book of 50 Great Short Stories, so I opened that book’s contents page and there it was - “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn”, written by Thomas Wolfe, one of the distinguished American writers of the twentieth century.
In his short life (1900-1938) he managed to write four autobiographical novels and many short stories. This story was first published in 1935 in the magazine New Yorker. He had a very unique literary style, and was great at his impressionistic abilities to imitate life in his prose. See it for yourself, and dive into a vivid Brooklyn dialect. I wonder if New Yorkers still talk like that. Well, I guess I’ll find that out soon 
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Fighting Spam Without Captcha
October 6th, 2007 :: by Vivien
What is the one common thing that all web site and blog owners hate? You’re right - Spam. We all use Contact or Comment forms to interact with the site’s visitors, but ending up as perfect targets for spammers to annoy the heck out of us.
There are different ways to fight the spam, some are helpful, others not. One of the popular methods is to use a CAPTHA, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
However to make captchas efficient they have to be very hard to read by generating an image of a few random letters, using colours, distorted letters. Why? Because there are already several scripts used by spam bots that can OCR simple captchas in no time. The problem with this method is that many use captchas that even humans have a hard time recognizing, which is very frustrating.
Other methods include an addition of a simple skill-testing question that only humans can answer. I used this method myself on this blog, asking people about the number of letters in the word “inspiration”. The problem with this one is sometimes even humans make mistakes answering these questions (simply due to not paying much attention to them) and often losing the entire comment when clicking back to correct the answer, which is very exasperating.
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WP Vivtiger Image Resizer
October 3rd, 2007 :: by VivienBack in April, during the Reader Appreciation Week, I’ve participated in a contest hosted by Ronald Huereca on his blog Ronalfy, and won a fabulous prize for giving two suggestions on how to improve his website. The prize was any non-monetary thing I wish for, and since Ronald is so great at writing plugins for Wordpress, I wished for a custom plugin that would “proportionally resize my uploaded images to a pre-defined size, and link them to the original image in a popup window”.
Last month Ronald has completed the work on the plugin, calling it WP Vivtiger Image Resizer and publicly (with my permission, of course) releasing it on Wordpress.org. The plugin has been tested on all major browsers and used with Wordpress versions from v. 2.1 to the latest 2.3.
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33 Timeless Time Management Strategies
October 1st, 2007 :: by Vivien
Have you ever wished to have more than 24 hours in a day, have you ever felt that your head is about to explode as you’re trying to assign at least a few check marks to your To Do list? Have you tried every trick in a book on how to manage time but still can’t quite tame this beast?
Despair no more - the help is on its way, the real solutions from real life time management gurus who unveil their secrets to one of the most challenging problems that most of us struggle with. These 33 time management strategies will cure every workaholic in the world, will motivate any procrastinator and encourage the utmost pessimist to get things done in no time and still have time left to enjoy life.
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A Bit Of Literature - The Fatalist
September 29th, 2007 :: by Vivien
Russian roulette, duels, the Renaissance, the Nihilism, the wars - these are just some of the most famous characteristics of Czarist Russia in the first half of the XIX century. One of the youngest and loudest literature voices of that time was Mikhail Lermontov. In his short life (he died at the age of 26 in a duel) he wrote hundreds of stories, poems, and the novel “A Hero of Our Time” that represented the entire generation of highly erudite but bitter and bored young men who treated love and life just like another game of cards or a roulette.
Today’s bit of Literature - The Fatalist - was published in 1839 and only later included in the novel “A Hero of Our Time” that turned out to be a collection of stories united by the common hero, or rather an anti-hero Pechorin.
Is it true that a human’s fate is predestined, that it’s not in our powers to rush or postpone the death? Read Lermontov’s take on the fate and tell me whether or not you’re a Fatalist yourself? Was there something in those numbers “1″ and “4″, or was it only a tragic coincidence that Lermontov was born in 1814 and died in 1841, the last two digits of his year of death are the reversed numbers of his year of birth?
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Favourite Tips From Blogiverse
September 25th, 2007 :: by VivienAs you know, last week I’ve participated in Daniel’s group writing project over at DailyBlogTips, which resulted in 122 submissions with tips on practically anything from blogging to business to travel to food to life.
Here are my four personal favourites:
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The Naked Truth About David Airey
September 24th, 2007 :: by Vivien
Some people seems to have it all - the looks, the luck, the recognition, the respect from their peers and admiration from their fans. But behind the mask of effortlessness hides a naked truth about the long hours of hard work and the tenacious perseverance in following their dreams and achieving the goals.
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