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My month of working in Cape Town is over, and I'm fully back to the cold and wet reality of Slovenia. Needless to say it was an amazing ride, packed with ups and downs, and after writing about my first impressions about a month ago I'm slowly ready to present the final objective review, together with the highlights of my trip. The first week I was there was a bit of a struggle, as I was slightly overwhelmed by the culture shock. But after that I managed to adopt the situation and have grown to admire and love Cape Town. Today, sitting at home, I can say that South Africa is a beautiful country with amazing landscape and nature, but at the same time full of cultural contrast and racial inequality, a constant reminder of the things that happened in the past.

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written 7.12.2010 9:16 CET on chronolog
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A lot has happened in the field of share buttons in the past year: Google +1 button for web pages was introduced, Facebook started to migrate the Share and Like buttons, TweetMeme button is slowly getting replaced by the offical Tweet button, etc. Enough to make maintenance of these buttons a pain in the ass. But since social activity is getting more and more important for SEO, this needs to be done, one way or another. To make it easier, I've put together a comprehensive list of different share widgets, together with some explanation, sample code and direct links to full documentation.

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written 6.6.2011 13:05 CET on chronolog
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Lately I've been noticing an interesting trend in local advertising. Billboards all across Slovenia started to display Facebook icons or even links to Facebook pages. Since Slovenia is a few years behind in adopting new marketing approaches, this came as a bit of a surprise, it may have even produced a bit of patriotic pride. Look at that, advertisers have finally started to see the potential in digital and social, looks like we are not that out after all.

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written 15.7.2011 8:58 CET on chronolog
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Brussels is really not your typical tourist destination. Sure, it has Atomium, amazing squares, tiny streets packed with restaurants, great palaces and gothic cathedrals, but sadly lacks some of the personality and the wibe cities like London, Paris or Amsterdam have. Neverheless, the capital of the European Union still has a lot to offer. The twice fried potato chips are simply awesome, but there are two more important things that could make your visit worthwhile: beer and chocolate.

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written 11.8.2011 16:04 CET on chronolog
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I'm left-handed. Which is not that optimal for general use of computers, since they are designed for right-handed people. You use the external mouse with your stronger right hand, which means your weaker left hand stays on the left side of the keyboard, where most of the function keys are. I managed to adopt that. But now a much greater challenge awaits: learning to do the same with the trackpad.

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written 12.9.2011 18:20 CET on chronolog
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I started writing about Facebook and Twitter because I saw these two services as the most impressive players of the social age. I received a lot of comments about the two of them not being comparable, which I disagree. They are the biggest global Web 2.0 platforms (LinkedIn successfully went public and has a lot of users, but it's hardly a platform) and two of the ten most visited websites in the world. They are social trend-setters, both super advanced on technical and conceptual levels. They are a lot, but with the latest sets of patches, they are also becoming a lot alike.

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written 13.10.2011 9:22 CET on chronolog
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I don't know if you saw The evolution of Google search video, which they've published a few days ago. You should, it's a cool movie, portraying the history of search and Google's vision of its future. But something went wrong. One of the punchlines of the video was a story from one of the engineers, who said that next-generation search engines will be able to answer complex questions such as the following:

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written 4.12.2011 16:21 CET on chronolog
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Even though San Francisco is technically not a part of Silicon Valley, it's still one of the biggest technology hubs of the area, besides being the place where I'm situated while I'm on my Silicon Valley tour. It's an interesting city that is slowly finding its way under my skin. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed at first, perhaps my expectations were too high, but that's becoming a thing of the past, I'm starting to like this place a lot. San Francisco is one of the most open, liberal and easy-going cities I've seen so far, which is something that probably had quite a bit of influence on the general development of this region.

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written 11.3.2012 11:29 CET on chronolog
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Visiting Silicon Valley enabled me too peek into the future a bit. Finding out about new technology trends, meeting disruptive new software startups and seeing fascinating new business models that are proven to work. There are even more futuristic products / services than the ones mentioned in this post, but these are the ones that made the biggest impression on me. And they all share similar competitive advantages: using smartphones and other mobile devices, canceling middlemen and supporting cashless commerce.

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written 25.3.2012 18:28 CET on chronolog
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At one point of the evolution of the World Wide Web, somebody came up with this fantastic idea. This person must have thought that the problem of securing your online identity was just solved in a very elegant form: security questions, which only the person who owns the account is able to answer. But there's a problem. Even if security questions worked at one point in time (which I also doubt), they simply don't work anymore, so you might as well lose them. Luckily, most services already did that, and Facebook tried to innovate this feature with "recognizing friends" alternative, but I somehow still manage to find them. And fail using them.

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written 2.5.2012 21:05 CET on chronolog
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In my life, I've visited many parties, events and festivals. But nothing quite beats Queensday, the holiday celebrating the (previous) Queen of Netherlands' birthday. Every April 30th, festivities are taking place throughout the country, but the greatest gathering happens in Amsterdam, where around 700.000 people take over the city. Amsterdam is one of the coolest and most easy-going cities in Europe, worth visiting by itself, but if you want to see something like you haven't seen before, you should do yourself a favor and visit the Koninginnedag.

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written 8.5.2012 18:35 CET on chronolog
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Why? Because changing your relationship status on Facebook is so last year. Because all the cool kids are on Twitter and Foursquare. Because you want to discover all the possible ways of saying something. Because you like to play. Because a tagged picture just doesn't cut it anymore. Because you like to speak ambiguously. Because you want to leave people in the dark. Because you want them to read between the lines. Because you don't intend to make it a big deal, but would still like to tell the world. Because that's simply the newest way of doing it. Tweet my Foursquare check-in, and I'll change your relationship status.

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written 27.7.2012 18:05 CET on chronolog
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I've always been a big fan of the power of the crowds. When a mass of people can achieve much more than a few skilled individuals can. And ever since we've started playing with Twitter's API, I've been think about the possibilities of this magnificent data source. Besides Twenity, we've done a few other Twitter mashups like Twitter walls, but this wasn't enough. We wanted something more - geolocation. Displaying information on a map in real-time. But since there aren't that many tweets equipped with GPS coordinates, we needed to include other services for more diversity as well. Which we did, and Ljubljana Realtime, a social event discovery application, was born.

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written 28.9.2012 14:37 CET on chronolog
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I'm not that fit of a person, about half a year ago I had well over 100 kg. That's when I decided to start running to get in shape. I began with workouts of around 2km, I couldn't do more, I ran out of breath. But each time I went running again, the easier it was. Supposedly you need to exercise at least 30 minutes to start losing weight, which is about 5 km of running. I clearly remember the first time I managed to run that distance, the feeling was overwhelming, and I sensed the ecstasy - when you get the impression you could run until exhaustion. After you hit that half hour mark, you start progressing faster, which made me think about doing a 10 km or even a 21 km run this October on Ljubljana Marathon.

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written 1.11.2012 22:42 CET on chronolog
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Being a manager is not something that's in my DNA. I'm primarily an engineer, a scientist, a software developer. I find it hard to spend time on governing activities that have no direct output, and prefer doing things rather than guiding and supervising how things are done. Some people are natural organizers, others need to somehow learn and adopt that specific set of technical and social skills that help teams operate smoothly and efficiently. While I may have the technical skills of understanding how things should be done, my problems lie elsewhere.

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written 16.4.2013 9:22 CET on chronolog
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