When I was a child, there was a TV advertisement that strongly attracted my attention: It was a microwave commercial. I can’t recall the brand, but vaguely remember what they said. It was something like this:

“Defrosting chicken, 4 minutes. Heating food: 2 minutes. Boiling water: 15 seconds”

Time durations are invented, I can’t remember them exactly.

“Wow! How fast!“, I told myself. In those times, latest ’80s, microwaves were not very known, at least in the Canaries, and were more considered luxury stuff. But it wasn’t that what I found hard to believe. I rememeber my mother putting the chicken to defrost on the kitchen sink in the early morning, to start cooking it at midday; if I were to boil water for an infusion it took me at least 3 or 4 minutes in our gas cooker. So, was the advertisement telling the true? How could it be so fast?

Unfortunately, that was a bad omen: Not only cooking would speed up (with the arrival of microwaves): Everything did. People want to do everything quicker. And among this hustle and bustle, one asks oneself why: to save more time? more time to do more things quicker? It’s supposed that, in the end, you’ll have more spare time, but I’ve seen many people having fun in a hurry during their spare time, not knowing very well why, putting the foot on the accelerator all the time…

We live in a microwave society, a more and more vibrating one, of which symptoms are now moving into the blogosphere. If something requires time, few people take the trouble to try it.

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Posted by Boriel as Internet, Blogosphere at 9.27 pm

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Captcha! was my 2nd plugin. When I started creating it, I knew this solution wasn’t very suitable for this system nor going to last forever. By that time I was using WP 1.5, and didn’t knew Akismet. I’ve already seen other Captchas, but they look rather weak to me.

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Posted by Boriel as Wordpress at 6.26 pm

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With the overhelming arrival of the Blog Fashion, hundred of netizens from being passive news readers, have become active the publishers and authors. This, as first glance, it’s rather positive: In principle, anyone can post whatever they one inmediately (there are exceptions, like censorship in other countries, but I will write on that topic in a future post). Browsing sites like Sifry’s Alerts, we can see thet blogs are a plague, and it doubles almost every five month. We’re living an age of freedom of speech (well, not everywhere…, but almost) as never seen before. But… ¿Does it really creates more information? ¿Have the people actually so much to tell?

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Posted by Boriel as Internet, Blogosphere at 11.28 am

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To me, 8 bits computers have something that marked deeply many of us forever. This is what a friend of mine, PookyII, tells about it:

I was about thirteen when I came back from the UK and saw the poster announcing Arkanoid (this was nearly 1987). I felt something that compelled me to buy the game, despite I didn’t know whether I was going to like it or not. Coincidentally, by that time, Spectrum games were being distributed by a company which made history: Erbe Software. They cut the prices of the games from 2.500 pts down to only 875 pts. (that’s about nowadays 5 €).

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Posted by Boriel as Games, Vintage computing at 6.54 am

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Do you feel overwhelmed by the huge amount of news you get from the internet? How to keep up to date without getting flooded?

If you want to be up to date with this blog (and many others) entries without having to visit them everyday then RSS is for you.

RSS is a sindication protocol. It’s basically an electronic news agency. This site has the RSS protocol already enabled. There are many news sindication applications. Among them, my favourite is, by far, Mozilla Firefox, with the InfoRSS extension.

Once installed the extension, restart Firefox, and the sindication bar will appear at the bottom. Click on the bar icon (as shown above) and, if the site (like this one) has the RSS protocol enabled, the option to aggregate the feed will appear on the pop up menu. Once you do it, you’ll be permanently up to date with the latest news, and you won’t need to visit the aggegated sited so often.

Posted by Boriel as Tips & tricks at 12.20 pm

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