Another idea for geolocation-related service. C’mon, I give it out for free!

1. Using GPS-enabled communication device, defining zones - “Home”, “Work”, “Parents”, “Tesco over the corner”
2. Assigning each zone some tasks:
   
   • “Home” -> “Pay the bill from nPower”
   • “Work” -> “Talk to boss about holidays”
   • “Parents” -> “Ask if they’ll take our cat for two weeks”
   • “Tesco” -> “No sugar at home! How can I drink coffee now?”
3. Well… start walking! As soon as you get into one of the zones, your GPS enabled device will blow up with a burst of reminders.

Few issues though, one of them - constant checking of GPS location may be too battery-consuming. Possible workaround - do a geolocation of several levels:

1. Most rough - GSM-based positioning
2. If we understand, that we’re somewhere in the area of one of the zones - try to use wi-fi geolocation
3. If we’re really close to the zone - do a beep
4. If wi-fi positioning isn’t available - use (A-)GPS.

This way it may save awful amount of battery power while still providing good positioning.

Anyone up for doing such thingie? :-)

Still thinking about the education, MSc and all that kind of stuff. On one hand, I’d really love to go and obtain a degree not only because of degree itself, but to put all what I know into some form of system before it gets too late (and I finally forget everything I studied for almost 6 years). On the other hand, not much courses I’ve seen are of real interest for me (do they really think they can tell me something about database design? or about “C++ and object-oriented programming”? then I can only recommend them to go and think again).

For sure you haven’t seen many people with three or more hands, but in this particular case, on the third hand if I’m allowed to say that, is the price of this education - Natalie’s studying now, although her employeer pays 50% of her education fees. Ah, forgot to mention - for overseas students fees are normally 4 to 6 times higher (and I am just that - overseas student for chaps at unis). which doesn’t help at all. For example, the one I’m really interested in is £7764 p.a. - and it’s not the cheapest one.

Finally, on the “fourth hand” (OK, let’s admit I’ve created a four-handed monster here), if my dear employeer agrees to pay for me (hypothetically) it practically binds me and grounds at where I work for next couple of years. Not saying that it’s bad (I can’t be fired in this case either), but should something go very wrong… (but they won’t pay anyway, so nothing to worry about).

Recently I’ve realised how much am I obsessed with \LaTeX - while it’s not that easy to use as, say, editing TWiki, it has it’s own benefits:

1. Most important - you can edit everything in your favorite editor, and not on the web page. It means a lot to me :)
2. Second thing, which arguably may be more important than the first one - you can check in \LaTeX source file to CVS, SVN or whatsoever. So, when you see some code which is 5 years old, and it is totally impossible to find the twiki page which descibes how it works - ./doc directory is likely to be there, as well as ./src - which makes life significantly easier
3. And finally, it just looks good. I mean, you don’t do anything to make it look good and readable just because this is the way it works, you don’t need to mix up text and HTML, you just convert it to PDF and you can read it.

Of course, you can’t use \LaTeX for everything, as for rapidly changing documents, discussions and stuff like that Twiki is certainly way to go, although for something which you write once and it won’t be changed until next major refactoring of the functionality (such as - description of the algorithm, mathematical model underneath it, etc) - there couldn’t be better solution, I guess.