Digger

If you’re old enough, then you know what Digger is, so I’m guessing no introduction is required. There’s even an online Java version of the game.

Did you know that you can sometimes meet people that know the game very well, but don’t know that you can use F1 to shoot?

Encountering the same new word twice in one day

Does it ever happen to you that in one day you encounter a new word twice? It happened to me yesterday. The word is homeostasis, which is basically resistance to change. Anyway, yesterday I heard it for the first time on Channel 9‘s interview with the creators of a completely new, experimental OS by Microsoft called Singularity. About an hour later I encountered the word in a book I’m reading, “The Lure Of Happiness” by Raphaella Bilski.

Feels really weird when stuff like that happens.

Introduction To Tagging

Tagging, also known as labeling, is a pretty new concept in software. This concept is so simple, it’s surprising that it took so long for it to become popular.

I’ll explain what tagging is by example. Assume you send an email to all your friends about a party you’re throwing. In your email program you created a special folder for the party. You already have a folder for each of your friends, where you store emails you previously got from them. Now you start getting replies from your friends about the party and you have a problem – should you put the emails in the party folder or in the folder designated for each and every friend? Or maybe you should save a copy of each email message in both folders?

What if you could do both without copying the email message? Using tagging, instead of the traditional hierarchical concept (like the folder tree structure), you can apply the tags “Bob” and “Party” to the only copy of an email message. You can think about it as if the email message “belongs” to both “Bob” and “Party” categories.

Tagging has become very popular lately. GMail, Google’s mail service, has labels instead of the traditional folders. It takes a while to get used to it, but later on you realize how much better labeling is. Another example is the website del.icio.us, which not only lets you store bookmarks (aka favorites) to access from anywhere, but also lets you tag them. What’s especially nice about this is that you can see how many people have tagged a certain link, like the links tagged “programming”.

There’s more to tagging, but I think that’s enough as an introduction.

IM Waiting

I’ve been using IM (instant messaging) software for years. Currently I have 55 contacts in my MSN Messenger list. Generally speaking, at any given moment around 15 of them are online. One of the things that keep happening to me is that days can pass by with no one talking to me and then, all together, three of my contacts will start a conversation.

Personally I can’t handle three conversations at once. Actually I can, but I don’t stay as focused as I would like to be, especially if any of the conversations has any emotional value to me or to the other party and requires my full attention.

My idea is to have a call waiting feature for IM software. You define how many conversations you can handle and, assuming you’re already having that number of active conversations, when one of your contacts tries to send you a message she gets a message saying that she’s “IM waiting”. Just like phone call-waiting. Naturally, you will be notified that you have an IM buddy waiting for your reply, so you will have the choice of talking to her.

Note that this is different from having an “on conversation” status (or an automatic “busy” status, for that matter). This kind of status would let people track your talking habbits, so it would be the wrong solution.