Finally we have the new logo. Lately we’ve been working on the new design approach, it resulted in skalfa.com relaunch. But we haven’t come up with new logo though, until this day. It comes in different colors depending on the context:

Our CTO instantly labeled it as “dark sunrise”, which I found very true given what’s being worked on deep in Skalfa rooms, and what’s being prepared to roll out to the market.

Our old slogan “Limits Up” is back, too. For good.

Now that it’s half full of unused shortcuts, downloaded files, and temporary documents it’s really high time to turn back to the roots of asceticism. Not that I hardly find my way through all the junk (I find out that I don’t use desktop objects at all), it just makes me feel worse with every single thing I pile on there.

If people are pilers and filers in their nature, I surely am a piler. But I’m a bad piler because I don’t like to use search (what should be natural for a piler), I just look up for stuff haphazardly until I find it. No wonder I don’t always find things this way.

P.S. It’s probably a good idea to clean up my real desk top, too.

I received an email notification about a new CMS.

Not another joomla or wordpress, it’s a simple service allowing to create and edit pieces of formatted text to paste into webpages easily. It surely is a useful service with a great idea behind. Probably it’s going to fly, but I just didn’t like the way it’s taking off. It was plain email spam because I never subscribed to their mailing list. One person commented about that and they responded with a message like “send email to feedback@domain and we’ll unsubscribe you”. Hmm… questionable marketing practice in the world of spammers starting getting into jail.

There are better ways to promote your products. No matter how good they are you can’t just rush into one’s inbox being sure it’s going to be appreciated. Even myspace spam is more tolerable than a good old unsolicited “great news” email. Shame on you.

Finally! It was a long road…

Just added my Flickr photostream to the sidebar. Maybe it’s going to make me upload more pictures and do the same widget for Jebba.

Recently we posted an invitation for development companies to outsource some portion of custom programming for SkaDate.

A couple of days ago I was reviewing the new email and a letter that caught my attention was with “Development team’s response” subject. Since we received several inquiries from small and middle size companies, I’ve prepared to review what they got and for 10 or 15 seconds I was asking myself why I didn’t see any sensible content in the email. It took me that long to understand that it was a poorly crafted spam email that only got the subject right. Too right, I say – that was a piece of email spam that really caught me.

There was a time I thought I had to work constantly to produce more. That’s it, you work more thus you do more. Nice approach but there’s certain human limit of productivity in a non-stop work session, also it’s not really how long you work but how hard you do.

To be able to work and to feel good about the results you need to learn how to take a break, period. To regain better vision, to have ideas coming to you, recharging batteries is crucial even if you may not feel so.

I found out that I can’t really go completely offline. The second (maximum third) day of not working would drive me crazy. Thus I like to go play with short periods of work in between. It’s all for good if you change environment during that. Nothing helps better than going to the nearest resort area and to have an hour or two online (thanks to notebooks and bluetooth). Which I did this weekend.

Question: Would it be most productive to work (and thus live) in the leisure environment permanently?

I hope you’re having a great weekend!

If you plan to run your own business, or already running one; if you look to develop and grow above your head; if you just want more provocative thoughts about life in general, by all means read Paul Graham.

Paul Graham took part in one of the first dotcom era startups that was bought by Yahoo. On top of his experience and common sense he shares invaluable insights. I’m his constant reader.

Last week by pure accident I and Yulka jumped into cinema seats to see the new Stardust movie.

What can I say. First of all, I’m long fed up with all the fantasy stuff going on. In my childhood I read a lot of fantasy books. To the point when every new book seems to be at least unimaginative. In my age I don’t really follow what’s there on the table because growing older I inevitably get cynical and sceptic everytime I see another fantasy movie TV commercial.

Stardust is surprisingly an exception. For some reason the plot is interesting, effects and decorations are well-crafted and you just want to keep it going. Robert De Niro isn’t specially exciting but Michel Pfeiffer shows thrilling playing. By all means go see this movie.

Cool service. What I find especially cool about it is that it allows to do nothing and still benefit. You download a desktop application spying your musical tracks being played and telling the service about them. So, last.fm knows what you listen to and dares suggest something new as well as connect you with other members.

Personally, I only use it as a log of what I listen to. Putting a widget on this blog was really easy and now I have a self-refreshing playlist watch for those interested. For a busy(lazy?) type such as myself it’s really a turn-on. How do you guys use last.fm?

On the business side of things it’s a really smart idea to help people benefit without any noticeable time/emotion commitment from their side. This is very important in today’s chaos of websites trying to win your attention and time. Also, it deals with music, something of the very few things that youngsters are ready to pay for. Thus an affiliate deal with a CD-selling third party really changes financial situation for a company of a last.fm scale. Keep up the good work guys!