Curiouser and Curiouser!

Effective small talk through listening

There's an art to good small talk -- especially at business functions. Rather than just exchange pleasantries, you can gather information and create new relationships. The key: Avoid the canned nod-and-smile approach. Most people will notice if you run on auto-pilot, pretending to care when you're really indifferent or distracted. Instead try to listen and learn.

Here are a few tips for strengthening your small talk skills:

1. Know what to ask - Come prepared with 2-3 open-ended questions (i.e. "What brought you here today?")
2. Focus totally on the other person - rather than being concerned what you are going to say.
3. Keep moving - take the opportunity to connect with as many people as possible.
4. Listen for common ground - if you find something you both relate to, that establishes a common bond.

[Source: Investors Business Daily]

Snapster

Some Dangerous Thinking from Cringely. A very interesting scenario put forward by Mr Cringely to outflank the RIAA. Well worth a read. I, Cringely | The Pulpit... [Dangerous thinking]

Sign me up for a share in Snapster!

Getting at meanings

Classifier4J. Nick Lothian tracked back with his checkin of the latest version of Classifier4J. This is definitely worth looking into for Java projects. libots is still interesting because it's in C and could be wrapped for Python or Ruby.

Nick also has a cool hover trick for the background of the blog entry that your mouse is over. [Ted Leung on the air]

I'm really enjoying reading Ted's blog.  He's got some great developer content and, since I am not doing much Java development these days, it's good to be able to keep up with new projects & innovations in this area.  In particular, right now, I am very interested in text classification - getting at meanings.

Scary referrers I have known

Hmm.... in my referrer logs I see a number of people coming to me via iaea.org which I was a little surprised to find was the International Atomic Energy Agency!  What have I gotten myself into...

Montagnana

I'm visiting Paolo and Simone.  At the moment I am working with Simone on W4.  I'm staying in Montagnana which is a lovely town inside medieval walls.

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