Monday, February 6, 2012 at 2:40PM 
Gina Trapani wrote a couple of days about the importance of verb-based interfaces.
Modern programming languages and APIs are verb-based (think MyObject->setName() and and HTTP’s GET and POST), and the user interface should be, too.
She is right, at least if you are working within the English language. How well does it apply to other languages?
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 10:14AM 
In the last day of January Lifehacker ran an interesting story about public speaking. They shared what Jason Freedman does before talking in public. Amongst several tips he also shares a good axiom:
Don’t try to become a good public speaker, just try to speak like a normal person while in public.
Never met anyone that didn’t need some tips regarding public speaking.
Public Speaking, Skills in Public Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 11:06AM 
Like many other people I definitely need to be more organised, otherwise I’ll end up overwhelmed. I found an entry in The Atlantic that gives a few hints. It’s written by Alan Jacobs. He’s system goes:
“(1) Our story begins with RSS feeds (in my case via Google Reader) and Twitter. Lots of reading material turns up every day through these initial filters. Some of it I can tell immediately I don’t need to follow up on, but if I see something that’s even potentially interesting I send it to …
(2) Instapaper. What a great gift Instapaper is. The bookmarklet makes it trivially easy to send articles to Instapaper from your browser, and the better Twitter and RSS clients for the iPad and iPhone — I’m beaming at you, Reeder — support it as well. So every day I send many articles and posts to Instapaper, and once or twice a day set aside time to go through them, ideally on the iPad, since the reading interface of the Instapaper iPad client is superb. Then …
(3) What I read in Instapaper I pass along to one of three destinations. If I have no further use for an article or post after reading it, I simply trash it. If I decide I’d like to share something in the article with others, I post it to my tumblelog. (I also have the tumblelog set up so that anything I post there goes also to Twitter.) And if I think the article is something I might want to use later, I select a representative quotation from it and then bookmark it, with an appropriate tag, in Pinboard — which is just as wonderful as Instapaper. Incidentally, I also pay $25 a year to have Pinboard generate a (searchable!) archive of all the pages I have bookmarked, which insures me against link rot.”
I’m not sure if I need a pinboard account as I’m not a journalist but I do keep loosing track of stuff that I’d like to read later.
Instapaper, RSS, Reading, The Atlantic in Public Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 11:14AM 
Photo by austinhk (in Flickr)The German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke to German voters stating that southern Europeans should take fewer holidays per year and retire later. A Portuguese newspaper (O Público) has in its paper version today (page 24) a graph showing that in Portugal people spend more time at work per year than in Germany and also retire later. In the same paper there is a report on how Michael Page is recruiting a lot more Portuguese people to work abroad than last year. Apparently Portuguese are technically well prepared, work hard and speak more than one language. This begs the question:
What is wrong with Portugal?
If people can work so well abroad why can work be so productive in Portugal? Surely the same types of people have been creating jobs and enterprises in the last years in Portugal. As far as I know, no one has a switch that allows him or her to become good workers as soon as they leave their home country. So the problem can’t be in the private sector.
Is the problem in the public sector? Quality in most Governmental services and infrastructures has been increasing since 1974. There are still a lot of problems but things have been improving steadily. I remember when to renewing an identity card was a lengthy process that could only be done in a limited number of places. Nowadays there’s dozens of different places where it can be renewed and it’s fairly quick. I also remember lots of journeys inside Portugal that have been cut in less than half since the 80s.
In my eyes it seems that the problems are:
My question now is: How can we fix all this?
Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 3:06PM I’m consolidating my web presence. I’ve decided to merge my old blog, about my experience of being an emigrant in Northern Ireland, with this blog that I have been slowly starting.
