(gadu gadu is a Polish IM)

It must be like 100 years since I saw Gadu Gadu last time. Almost all of my friends use gmail embedded chat or skype. And even before, I was rather using tlen (another Polish im).

But today I needed to contact a potential contractor who only provide GG number, and I found that I can use a web interface (web gadu gadu) instead of downloading a client (not even sure if there is one for Mac):

Looks rather cool!

(except for the flashing banners maybe)

My contact in unavailable anyway, so can’t say how well it works for now.

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Just read an article saying that after closer analysis, it turns out that half of supposedly labor-loving ant population may actually not do a thing:

Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task – collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item – while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.

Quite shocking and may undermine some “hard working like an ant” proverbs.

Thoughts:

Ants just pretended to work and relied on their reputation for so long.

Or maybe: ants who appear not to do any work in fact realize some very important but unrecognizable to us function. Like social media experts.

Sometimes only writing a post forces me to identify why something I read seems significant.

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Today is my birthday and aside from this fact, I’m writing to announce that the project I’ve been working on for some time already, called Ogito, is now accessible to the public!

Even though it’s a pretty early version.

Visit it at http://www.ogito.eu, if everything goes fine you should see something like this:

As a matter of fact it was open for something like a week already, but I wanted to fulfill some common requests of people who saw it first. Like, that it should work on Windows. Now it works (I think), even in internet explorer! (update: unless it’s IE 6 or 5.5. then not so much. thanks for a tip Elena:)

So what it does?

Main aim is to explore opportunities to invest your free time.

Like in “use every moment”.

It will have a broad range of content – not only mainstream ones, like movies & theaters, but also less common activities, like voluntary works. The stuff it presents will come with accurate information, including exact (personalized) prices.

The content will be easily searchable, so you can look, for example, into theater shows one month ahead or find israeli movies played right now in your city.

On top of this it comes with community and personalization features.

What of all this is available now?

Everything mentioned is represented, even though in often basic shape. So, for content we start with movies in all Poland and theaters in Warsaw, search works as described but not full text yet, there are profiles and comments but not yet ability to follow other people, etc.

Anyway, see for yourself. Granted, it will improve almost daily. Use the “walkthrough” link on the right for some quick help.

Main message: send me feedback what you think!

And drop by once in a while to see changes. Coming soon: concerts and events data from Eventim.

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I envy people who continue to publish on a regular basis, even in the midst of most intensive work periods.

Myself? I forget about everything else whenever I am fully dedicated to some challenging project.

Therefore blogging always turns victim of this, even though I actually very much appreciate having a record of my thoughts from the past. I would keep a record just for myself even if I wasn’t blogging.

And of course at the moment it is quite easy to forget about everything because I can fully focus on Ogito. Which by the way should have “soft launch” really really soon. I must make some break at that point.

Yesterday, for example, I met a colleague from Accenture with whom I had a very brief contact while still working. But it turned out she was checking my site regularly, until there were no updates for a pretty long time, so then she stopped visiting. I felt quite ashamed.

And another downside is that prolonged silence tends to give impression to people used to the updates that maybe something is going wrong and they become worried.

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