MenZa’s Weblog

I purchased this baby about a month ago, and I have to say I’m quite impressed with it.
It’s a Sony Ericsson K750i. I don’t really know about the ‘i’-part, I think it’s just a suffix added when sold in Europe. It’s nowhere to be found in the US anyway.

Right, where was I–ah yes, the phone.
It’s menu system is very easy to navigate, and the camera takes fantastic pictures (at least much better than most mobile phone cameras).

It’s also got nifty little functions like a USB modem and a pretty nice webbrowser (although I think I’ll stick with Opera Mini), aswell as media player for music and videos.

I love this phone.

Edit: You’ll have to excuse the above picture. The camera gets dodgy in the dark :P

After several months of my blog having very few visitors, it seems I’ve hit the jackpot.

A few days ago, my site was featured on the everpopular CSSMania, which sprouted a massive number of incoming links–and got my feed subscribers up from 0 to 31.

As you can tell from that picture, it’s a lot.

Coming up on what must be my 17th post now.
So far, the Blogathon’s been really exciting, and I’ve come across quite some interesting people to talk to, such as Skenmy, Kamigoroshi and Dave.

All cool people with interesting content.

And… do you remember that contest I was talking about 3 hours ago? I won one of them :)

I also fixed the comment form, so feel free to comment on any of my entries.

A lot of people have written articles on open source applications–about how open source lets people modify other people’s software and how it encourages freedom in computing.

However, I’ve never seen any proper and comprehensive article (this article won’t be either, but I’ll try to do as much as I can in 10 minutes) with the subject of how open source software promotes forming of good communities willing to help and offer support to others who use it.

That is, in my opinion, one of the biggest advantages of open source software.

Let me present you an example: most people who’ve been online for more than 2 weeks know about Microsoft Office aswell as OpenOffice.org.

I don’t know of any Office communities–however, I do know that there is a large userbase on the OpenOffice.org forums–aswell as their IRC channel.

It’s the same with most Linux distributions.
I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for quite some time now but frankly; I don’t think I could’ve done it without help from the many people in the forums or their many, many IRC channels.

To bring out another example: Gentoo is probably one of the most widely-used Linux distributions out there. I just looked at their IRC channel–930 people.
An astounding 930 people.

Open source software builds communities. Not only with Linux is this the case, but also WordPress, SimplePie and a ton of other projects.

Sure, some communities are better than others, but that’s an impossible task to solve.

Right, another little report from me.

I’ve popped open my first energy drink, and I’m already feeling the caffeine flowing through my veins :)

I’m just doing various things to my blog right now–like adding a pledge-box to the top of my sidebar and styling various little things Nick never got done– and I think I’m going to go and cook some more noodles in a minute, I’m starting to feel slightly hungry.

For some reason my blog disappeared from the Blogathon site not long ago. Remember, you can still sponsor me by following this link.

My desk is a mess right now, and it’ll get worse:

Empty cans of Cult will take part of my desk within a few hours, aswell as assorted snacks.

It seems I screwed more on my blog than I fixed when I tried to correct my comment form (which still isn’t working properly, by the way).

I’ve been hopping around on various pages, and I’m starting to feel slightly hungry.

I’ll be bringing out the energy drinks in a couple of hours :)

Most of the software I have on my computer right now is either alpha, beta or even PoC software.

It has a tendency to cause a lot of problems–crashes, lack of feature implementation, bad implementation, eyecandy flaws or security problems are all a major problem when you work with software that isn’t final.

For example, I’m running Windows Vista Beta 2. I’m posting this blogpost on Flock, which is Beta 1. I ran the flights–or RCs of Ubuntu Dapper for a long time, and I manage a lot of my photos in Beta 3 of Adobe Lightroom.

I don’t really know why; I just like to be bleeding edge.

I’m having problems with my comment form right now–I’m working on it.
The last hour hasn’t been very hectic–I was out to get some fresh air and grab a few pictures, as you can see in my last post.

The Blogathon is on and I’ve been reading a lot of interesting blogs the past few hours, notable Kamigoroshi’s, which has an interesting competition every hour.

Thanks for keeping the spirits up with this competition, Kami :)

(consider this a Blogathon entry)