You read blogs. I also read many (but for sure not as many as some of you). I'm sure you appreciate the effort author put into thinking out and writing the post. But do you also recognize and benefit from the effort he put into creating a visual appeal for his messages? You should. It is also part of what author has to say.

Now, if you use Google Reader as I do be sure to click tiny button on the right of the title which will get you to the post on author's site.

Read it the way author intended it to be. And then go back to star or share. I wish there is an option in Google Reader that would make post title link directly to author's site.

Check your blog reading habits.

Leo Babauta of Zenhabits describes an interesting concept of pigeonholes in interpersonal communication. My personal experience with this suggests that there is always a hassle that stops people from changing for better. Changing for worse usually happens gradually and unconsciously; and when it is conscious (I can not imagine that, but still) you do not care how others perceive you anyway. Changing for better is in most cases a conscious action and involves a great deal of thinking. Here perception of you by others is important.

Unfortunately, often the first reaction to change in you (or in other words you trying to change a pigeonhole) is suspicion. Why would he wonna do that? Is he going to fool us? And you really need to get through this. One of the better options to do that is to get an alignment of a person you trust. With her belief in your new personality and her support it would be easier to convince rest of the world that it is not about them being fooled, but about you becoming better.

Beware that when you want to move something from one pigeonhole to another you need to pick it up first.

I'm a huge fun of "Maximize it!" approach when it comes to use of computer screen real estate no matter how big the diagonal is. Initially it was because I could not stand wasting precious pixels. And now it has more to do with attention and concentration rather than anything else. The idea behind this is quite simple: your computer can multitask - you can not. Period. If you think you can multitask enter "why context switching is expensive?" and read whatever article happens to be referenced from the first page. (I was surprised by how often they refer to humans and not computer systems). And then return to the beginning of the paragraph.

When you are at your computer you want it to be one task - one window. No IMs, no blinking something, no "Oh! Here is Firefox, let's check what they say there on the news..." Nothing! Just you, the task you need to accomplish and a piece of software that helps you.

The best way to achieve that is

• Hide the Task bar. You do not want anything to blink at you.
• Switch to full-screen. You need nothing expect for text editor when you write something; e-mail program when you process you messages; spreadsheet when you put together budget for next quarter; etc.

Many programs do support real full screen mode. Web browsers do, Microsoft Visual Studio does, some Microsoft Office applications do. That's pretty good coverage and you should make use of it.

When you are trying to relax and watch a good movie can you enjoy it when your cell rings every 5 minutes? What do you do in such situation? Right, you switch off the phone. Productive work is the same - you can enjoy it when no one disturbs you.

Turn off distraction and let your brain work at full capacity.

You can not imagine how easy it is to learn. If you want to every little piece that you read, see or hear can enrich and advance your bag of knowledge. You never know when you are going to use what you learn, but one day you will not regret that you born this baggage. This time it was this neat post by Seth Godin. Simple yet powerful message, but there was one word that really caught my eye: "Moleskine" .

Did you know that Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway used the same notebooks and were all called Moleskine? I didn't.

It is really interesting that many of the sources referred to Moleskine as "legendary notebook". Some people argue that one should not buy Moleskines as they will not make him Hemingway or Van Gogh anyway and some no-name "set of sheets of paper put together" will do just fine. The important thing here is not that all those famous artists, writers and painters are great because of owning a Moleskine, which is apparently not true. The important thing is that there must be something to these Moleskines that made all those great people choose these notebooks and stick with them.

What you do is important not what you have. And if something can help you do better then it must be a good thing.

It has been a really long summer, winter, whatever blogging vacation for me. And I really feel sorry for that. The excuse for me is that I learnt a lot and will try to share my discoveries and observations with you from now on. In this New Year 2009 I want to wish you to enjoy your life no matter what and always have a dream that will inspire you and drive you to success.

Happy New Year!

Some days ago I watched David Heinemeier Hansson's presentation on creating a profitable startup where he suggests that is generally more effective to sell to businesses than individual customers. That was kind of a useful observation that I, not being very experienced in running businesses, took for granted. In several days I concerned myself with checking out latest article in Joel Spolsky's column in the Inc.com magazine. It happened to be How Hard Could it Be: A Real Cool Customer. It was like one of those not rare alignment of stars that make certain idea pop-up again and again.

In his article Joel gives great arguments on why you'd better sell to businesses and not to consumers:

Businesses will happily spend large sums of money on fixed costs, because those costs can be spread out across so many of their customers.

Also Joel discusses this with Jeff Atwood in stackoverflow podcast #5, which I listened to yesterday.

This line of coincidences made me think a little about this idea. Being myself a part of a business I see that businesses pay easier not because they have lots of money (well, not only), but also because often for businesses it is easier to evaluate the value of certain costs.  Businesses can see how "costs can be spread out across so many of their customers" and what they would have in return. Individuals usually do not go that far to do such kind of analysis and therefore their decisions to buy tend to be based on momentary considerations.

I recently subscribed to TechCrunch and so far I noticed 2 things:

• This blog literally chocks up my RSS aggregator (which happens to be Google Reader) so that I have to modify my reading habits not to miss posts from others feeds. Near dozen posts a day may be not that big number, but it definitely outperforms my other subscriptions.
• Every once in a while TechCrunch posts really touch my soul and make me stop to think.

One of such posts was What To Do With Failed Startup IP? It was always sad for me to see humans' ideas, aspirations, accomplishments becoming thrash. Be it physical objects or results of intellectual effort.

I do not remember where but once I've read or heard that less than 10% of Earth population contribute to development of mankind civilization and this percentage is decreasing all the time. I think this "total productivity" can be greatly improved if we figure out a way not to let priceless man-hours of mental and other efforts be thrown to trash cans of oblivion and natural erosion.

Did it ever occur to you why there are so many different languages which people speak? How did they form and why are they so different? And most importantly, how do languages affect our thoughts and thinking process in general? Many years ago I was amazed by the novel Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. It really made me think about differences in human languages and their influence on our behavior. If you have not read this novel you definitely should. It tries to answer the question of how strong are the ties between language and thinking and elucidates the hypothesis of very strong interrelation of word and thought.

Why would I write about this? I was reminded of this by post on creative thinking from Presentation Zen. Summarizing psychologist and physician Dr. Edward de Bono's theory of Six Thinking Hats Garr Reynolds says:

People are reluctant to be creative out of fear of making "a mistake." Problem is (at least in the English language) we don't have a good word to describe creative ideas that just don't work...except to call them "mistakes." That is, we do not have a good word for this: "Fully justified venture which for reasons beyond our control did not succeed." If you do not succeed with your creative idea this is called a "mistake." And people generally like to avoid "mistakes." (We need a better word!)

How truthful this is! We are very social beings and we always care about what others say. Not having an adequate way of naming creative misleads(?) we are not able to perceive them correctly and express without unnecessary negative shade. Here we are once again caught in a labyrinth of the form (words, language) and the meaning (thoughts, feelings). But being aware of the problem we've got to find a way out.

There has got to be a way out.

As many of you I read many blogs and sometimes I would like to let you know which articles really touched me. Touched me so that I want to share them with you. Posting something like "Hey! Check out this recent post by Robin Robinson" is kind of silly.

I'll use sharing feature of Google Reader to let you know which items I consider worth mentioning. Short guide to how it works:

Some time ago I was reminded of an article by a man whom I know personally and am really proud of being aquatinted with. In article "10 software developers' books which shook the world, but are still unknown in Russia" (in Russian) Andrey Terekhov discusses top 10 books from his library which are definitely worth the time you spend reading them. These books are "must read" for those who want to be software engineers instead of mere "programmers".

What is interesting about this list is that not all the books would be "Yes, sure! You've got to read them!" for everybody. While going through the list I understood that, for instance, "Peopleware" will not cause reader's eyebrows to go up. But with following 3 titles:

• Jeffrey Ullman, "Elements of ML Programming"
• Clemens Szyperski, "Component Software"
• Andrew Appel, Jens Palsberg,  "Modern Compiler Implementation in Java"

I would expect that some people say "Hey! I'm a Java/.NET/PHP/Ruby/whatever developer! Why do I care?!" And those are people who fail maturity test.

Mature people (this has nothing to do with age or junior vs. senior developer) look for and appreciate opportunities to widen and deepen their knowledge and understanding of things. They realize that going to next level also means going beyond current horizons. And sure way to do that is study adjacent (and not only) areas of knowledge even if this new information is not immediately applicable to what they are doing now.

So do not miss opportunities to go beyond and know more than you need today to make sure you know enough tomorrow.