Twitter Charts plots any Twitter user's tweets on a chart by time of the day and day of the week.
Here is the chart for my Twitter feed:
If the time on the chart is right, it appears that I tweet mainly on a Saturday and generally between 6 and 8pm.
Via Micro Persuasion.
Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:
So last night I uploaded into Gmail all the old emails I had in Outlook.
It was a very easy task, as simple as dragging them from 'Personal Folders' to the IMAP 'Gmail/All Mail' folder, then doing the same from Sent Items to 'Gmail/Sent Mail'. It took a while, but now all my emails are available online, and I can access them from any machine, including my iPhone.
Why have I done this? Because I like keeping similar things in one place, and because with Gmail's fast and advanced search it is much easier to find what I am looking for.
By doing this, a portion of my messages (those received since I started using Gmail and before I stopped using Outlook a few months ago) have now been duplicated in Gmail. Upon investigation they appear to differ only by some elements of text formatting (extra line breaks), which is probably why software such as Duplicate Email Remover for Outlook failed to identify them.
After a bit of fiddling around, I chose to live with it – Gmail groups duplicates in one conversation anyway.
If Google loses your email, closes/locks your account, or the service is simply down, you will have no way to retrieve your messages. If that scares you, you might want to keep your Gmail account in sync with Zoho (painlessly via POP mail).
Alternatively, you could see the loss of all your emails as a welcome opportunity to start afresh with a clean slate, like a very wise former colleague of mine said when we were discussing pros and cons of keeping all your data 'in the cloud'.
I recently spent a long weekend in Rome with Dr B.
We left on Thursday morning very early, took a taxi to the hotel (guide books and even a sign at the airport say that it is a fixed price, but Roman acquaintances told us 'Good luck with that!').
The Hilton Cavalieri is an impressive hotel, and I am so grateful that Dr B. still had some points left over from when he was working away and staying at the Hilton in Swindon (sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?). These points meant that with a very small contribution we could use a 860 Euro per night room.
We got out straight away and I showed Dr B. the place where I got cruised for the very first time in my life. I was eighteen, sitting on the edge of the fountain at Piazza di Spagna, and this curly blond guy my age in a tracksuit asked me to go home with him. I thought it was well dodgy and didn't – but kept his number for days.
We met Ugo, went for a drink and a chat, he is adorable and speaks English fluently (considering he has never travelled to an English-speaking country, he said). Definitely a clever chap. We talked about going out that night to the opening of Muccassassina but we never made it as we got back to the hotel soaking wet and tired from the early start. Ugo, being much younger, partied the night away.
The following day we went to the Vatican. The queue for the museums was ridiculously winding around the building, so we tried the cathedral, which had a very long queue too. The square? All cordoned off because apparently the Pope was out running errands ('Gut morning. Let's zee. One loaf bread, one litre milch, one pair of Prada slippers…'). We hung around until his popeness came back. I filmed him but the movie did not come out, unsurprisingly as he is the spawn of Satan. Just kidding.
And then the great adventure commenced. Either a dodgy pizza the night before, or a dodgy pizza that lunchtime, made us start a tour of Rome's cafes and we spent the rest of the weekend from toilet to toilet. I seem to get that a lot when I travel, and have now a collection of anti-diarrhoea tablets from three different countries (Sweden, Spain and now Italy). First thing I did as I got back to London was to put some in the washbag for future trips.
Fortunately, by Monday morning we were alright, which meant that we could visit the Vatican Museums without too many calls of nature, and then meet an old friend of mine who moved to Rome a few years ago.
We saw most of what there was to see, thanks to:
A few tips:
And a few photos:
Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:
Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:
Two months on, I am still as much in love with my iPhone 3G as the very first day. Sometime I catch myself sticking my hand in my pocket just to stroke its smooth, curved edges.
What I found out yesterday is that it also makes me love my friends more. Let me explain.
I used to occasionally sign emails and text messages with 'Lx' – L for Luca and x for kiss. By the way, why do we still sometimes sign emails and text messages, when the name of the sender is forever embedded in the message itself? I guess it is because they remind us of the days of yore, when letters could be separated from their envelopes (which in turn might not show the name of the sender). Just think of contemporary communication media that are not associated with lost practices – wouldn't it be absurd to sign your IMs or tweets?
The iPhone has an innovative text recognition pattern that auto-corrects words that contain letters positioned near those you wanted to type on the tiny on-screen keyboard. And every time I type 'Lx' it auto-corrects it to 'Of'. True, I can override it with one touch of an x next to the suggestion, but often I forget and send messages like 'OK cool will do. Of' – or 'Speak later. Of' – Of what?
So now if I want to sign a message I will end with 'Lxx', as there is no word that can be typed by jabbing your fingers blindly in that pattern. There you go, an extra kiss.
When I write a blog post, I often spend almost as long looking for good links to complement my point.
I am writing this post with the help of Zemanta, which sits on top of your blogging application and suggests Wikipedia links, maps, homepages that are related to the words you have written.
All the links in this post have been generated simply by clicking on the tags in the WordPress interface and selecting the preferred option if there is more than on. For instance, to link to Firefox I could choose to link to a map, the homepage, the Wikipedia entry or the corresponding Crunchbase page for it.
The linked words withing this post and the group of links at the bottom pointing to related articles were suggested based on this post's keywords, and turned into links with one click.
Zemanta also suggests related images that can be incorporated in your post just as easily but I have chosen not to add any to this post.
If Zemanta manages to integrage my workflow nicely, I could see it becoming an important part of my blogging and could even push me to write more, as it removes the pain of finding and placing contextual links.
I have tested both the Firefox extension and the WordPress plugin and both work pretty wel. The extension is set up in a matter of minutes and it offers the same functionalities as the plugin.