Yesterday for the first time (shame to admit) I had a lobster experience. Turns out overrated – lobster is not as difficult as it is usually pictured. I would say some fish are much worst. Perhaps it was prepared in the way that made eating it easier. Lobster, in any case, tastes more or less like a big shrimp.

I don’t write much lately, even though there are some interesting topics – the reason – I don’t feel like writing. As usual, I never manage to force myself into undesirable activity. Why not wait, anyway. The productivity advantage, while being motivated to work on something, is huge.

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BBC quotes Nobuyuki Idei, chief corporate adviser of Sony, commenting on the first foreign CEO, Sir Howard Stringer:

Mr Idei said Sir Howard had retained his Welsh sense of humour.

Japanese executives were studying how to understand his jokes, he said – “but Welsh humour is very difficult to understand.”

Poor Japanese executives.

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Either it?s my life that is getting so complicated, or it?s a natural course of things as time goes by, but every year my daily todo list and things-to-remember list is getting longer and longer.

Of this long list of pending items ? and this probably reveals that I rather suck at prioritizing things ? I chose horse riding as the one to push this weekend (sorry, driving license, another time).

The topic was pending since my horse riding adventures in China?s Tiger Leaping Gorge, which I enjoyed a lot.

I selected the Patataj horse school near Warsaw, which was suggested by a friend, after a short selection process, which in fact involved only one contender.

Typically, getting to Patataj is easy, 35 minutes with a suburb train, and then 15 minutes walk. But not this Sunday, and not my train, which struck, but only slightly, a car on the cross roads. A car struck slightly by a train looks like this:

The actual horse experience met expectations, even though I did rather poorly.

In order to make it clear to the horse how it?s supposed to go (and otherwise it is not going anywhere), one has to push it on both sides, or side after side, by the lower part of the leg, while pressing knees to the body of the horse. This involves some muscles which I apparently don?t have, so it didn?t work out very well, and I was more tired that the horse afterwards.

And as far as when to push, or when to rise from the saddle, horse riding is all about the rhythm. Adding the issue of steering the horse, in a shape of giving it signals, it?s suddenly all like dancing salsa with a partner. At least the horse is not so outspoken when you screw something.

On a positive side, though, I managed to make the horse go trot by myself, which according to the teacher allows some hope for the future.

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…when listening to Sigur Ros.

Famously all of the lyrics on ( ) are sung in vonlenska (also known as Hopelandic), nonsensical vocalisations which resemble the sound of the Icelandic language. It has also been said that the listener is supposed to interpret their own meanings of the lyrics which can then be written in the blank pages in the album booklet.

Genre according to Wikipedia: “post-rock”.

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At last, someone put it on Youtube.

Death in Vegas – Dirge.

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We leave the cinema and I share my feeling that the movie was light and optimistic.

- Light and optimistic?

Magda is a bit shocked by this statement.

- Rapes, incest, murders, and you find it light and optimistic?

- Well, relatively speaking, I find it optimistic, compared to previous movies of his, besides it ends quite well, if you disregard the back-story, no?

And the next day I watch Polish “Plac Zbawiciela” and I feel reassured that Volver was optimistic.

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It just feels lame to point to something previously recommended by Nick Carr, because I feel like everyone already is or should be reading him anyway.

But I can’t resist in case of Steve Job’s Secret Diary. My favorite post as of recently concerns visit of Sony executives to apologize for screw-up with their faulty batteries.

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Now they’ve got even my Monty Python’s favorite, Lumberjack song (with barber sketch in the beginning):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=M9Ly2XCE3jQ

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Lately I started to wonder. But here is some reality check from the Register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/

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I started to search for online collaboration solution and immediately found several sites as interesting as totally irrelevant to my topic, including:

1. Google Trends
2. Pandora music service

(rather unexpectedly, I was directed to both by one of the company’s internal blogs)

Google Trends allows you to input a keyword and see a nice chart presenting the news and search volume for this keyword changing in the course of time. Moreover, you can input several keyword and see them stacked together on a chart.

Pandora, on the other hand, is a music service. It’s a music serendipity engine, to give this entry a double bottom. I am so impressed that I will probably devote a separate article just to it. Do not wait, though – give it a try now!

Serendipity definition:

1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
3. An instance of making such a discovery.

A word I was first introduced to by Nick Carr’s article, here. Note interesting discussion on whether Internet is enhancing or killing our ability to experience true serendipity.

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It’s a reading for Friday. Florida’s problem with pythons is spinning out of control:

“Last year, we caught 95 pythons,” said Skip Snow, a biologist with Florida Everglades National Park. That’s not counting the 13-footer that exploded after trying to eat an alligator, or two others that got loose and ate a Siamese cat and a turkey.

Pythons are bought as pets and released when they outgrow expectations of their owners. Idea of python as a pet is controversial in itself:

Lawmaker Poppell says he’s no snake lover and doesn’t understand people’s fascination with the slithery creatures.

“How can you want something for a pet that looks at you when it’s hungry?” he said. “I don’t want something to look at me as food, I’d rather they (pets) come to me for food.”

It will only get worse.

Three years ago, a 15-footer stopped traffic when he spread himself across a four-lane road. Last year, another 15-footer gave a 60-year-old woman quite the jolt when she walked outside to find the snake sunbathing on her patio. And rescue workers had to save a cat from the 10-foot python that was chasing it around the backyard pool.

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Judas Iscariot not a betrayer after all, instead the trusted one, to sacrifice himself and eventually surpass them all – two thousand years of defamation. New Gospel, copyrighted by Gazeta Wyborcza and National Geographic, to be published soon. Feels like Phil K. Dick novel today.

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In how many ways can you screw sushi delivery? One of the Warsaw restaurants, Sushi 77 from Zelazna 41, is determined to find out.

Count to three

Sushi 77 gets into trouble whenever your order exceeds two sets. With three sets, there is 90% probability that you will receive only two soy sauces. You would expect that it would help if after couple of such cases you specifically demanded ex ante that they make sure about that, but you would be wrong.

Still, nothing compared to ordering even more sets – things are getting out of control then. Yesterday when we ordered 6 sets, we received 6 sets, 5 soy sauces and 0 sticks. On the second try to deliver 6 missing sticks and one sauce, the driver appeared with 5 sticks and, for some reason, 4 sauces, reaching required number of 6 sticks only after the third and final round.

Six sigma excellence

Jack Welch would find Sushi 77 to be an attentive listener to his six sigma preaching – one inconsistent product per 3 millions and all this stuff. We are still figuring out how to prevent octopus (no one likes it) from randomly appearing in our orders. According to the menu, it is not a part of the pieces we ask for, but it matters little. Composition of ?standard? sets seems quite flexible.

Streamlined invoicing

We order from a lot of places, but Sushi 77 is the only one not able to attach the invoice to the delivery ? instead, it is supposed to be sent by mail within a couple of days. It never is. I have a dedicated spreadsheet for tracking invoices flow. Average delay for booking invoice is one month.

Final verdict

Basing on the available evidences we can conclude that Sushi 77 has one of the worst, if not the worst, service in Warsaw.

Nevertheless, we are still ordering tons of food from them.

Others providers have sometimes faster delivery, often worse-tasting sushi, and always at least twice as high prices. It seems that if you have a good product and good pricing, you can fail in almost everything else. And with this optimistic conclusion I will leave you, thank you for your attention.

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Still reading Ulysses, last night I stopped on this:

“What was their civilization? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehowah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.“

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Wow, it?s been quite a break. I skipped the last weekend and didn?t write anything here.

I am studying Ulysses, which I always wanted to read, as part of my quest to get better in writing in English. Just before it, I went back to basics with “Old man and the sea” and it was fine, but with Ulysses, things are different.

I wanted to take a sample paragraph, retype it here and mark all the words I don?t understand in bold, because it would make a nice visualization of what I mean. But I forgot to bring the book today.

I was considering if I would be able to impress people with the fact that I finished reading; even better, I could say that I liked it so much that I’ve read it twice. But my friend told me noone would believe this; she, for example, endured only 20 pages, and not even the original version.

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