Eli Bendersky's website - I got an email from some Natural Languages graduate student asking me to code a small program for him. He said he found me through my website which features a lot of programming stuff, so he figured I know my way around code and can do it for him, as a favor.Now, it's not the first time I get such requests, and my usual answer is "my hourly rate is ...", but it was a clear Saturday morning, the sun was shining and I felt generous. Besides, the program was trivial (generate random sentences built from 1-4 parts taken from text files). So, 10 minutes later I sent him the (Perl) code, adding a short paragraph on how to download ActivePerl and run it. He replied with a big thank you - it was quite nice doing a favor to just some random person...
- I found out that one of the users of my ESMS program is blind. The admin of the league he plays in told me that the guy is using a text-to-speech synthesis tool to prepare his sheets and "read" match reports. He says that ESMS' being text-based is a big help for him, since he can not enjoy graphical interfaces.This really feels nice. Helping disabled people is exciting for me, I contacted the admin, asking him to find out from the user how I can help him even more, with special tweaks so that his life with ESMS will be even more pleasant.
random call for help, disabled users
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