March 2009

Polish Television

Last night I spent a couple hours watching Polish television on Onet.tv Platforma.  They have mostly clips on specific themes or topics but a few full shows.  I particularly like the "Podróże" section ("Travels").  There was a full episode of Podróże.tv (a travel channel) about Egypt and another showing a Klub Podróżnika ("Traveler's Club") in Kraków, where a guy was giving a presentation about his time in Kurdystan in Iraq.  Very, very interesting!  You can also find shows/clips on news, weather, cooking, film, music, games, etc..

Until now I've had a lot of trouble finding Polish television online.  A friend of my pointed me to wwiTV.com, where you can watch streaming live television from around the world, but I didn't have much success.  Many of the channels don't work and I just couldn't find a time when anything good is on!  By the time I'm home from work, its really late in Poland and there is mainly "adult programming."  I watched news on the religious channel for a bit, but that was pretty much all.

While I mainly like to listen to audio books, there are people who swear by the tv method of language learning.  Maybe it will help, maybe not.  But it is fun!  And on the occasion I feel like watching television, why not do it in Polish?

Lingwo.ws: Now without the delusions of grandeur!

I'm in the middle of an intense refactor of the Python implementation of Lingwo.ws.  Its mainly based on experience I had using the Perl port at work (oh yeah, over the summer, I ported it to Perl so we could use it at work).

Since I've began this project, I've learned alot about REST and building APIs.  One of the main things I've discovered is that I'm not the only one working on this.  Not by a long shot.

Here are just a handful of other REST + JSON specification in the works:

Blogging is hard work!

Dude, how hard can you be blogging?  You haven't written anything since October!!

Not entirely true.

I've written plenty! What I've failed to do entirely is finish anything. I have got to be the slowest writer on Earth. At least maybe in Midwest America.

It may (or may not!) surprise you to learn that I have 31 unpublished articles saved in WordPress. Some of them are very apropos responses to other bloggers or events that happened at the time which now probably make absolutely no sense to publish! Some are things I'd still like to say. But all of them are just sitting there waiting for another X revisions before I'm happy enough with them to let the world read.

Why does it take me so long to finish writing? I may never know.

But this just me popping up to say I'm still here and I'm going to make another valiant attempt to get some things published.

For real.