Damn, Mookie tagged me. Well, why not. Seven things weird and/or unknown about me: When I was 8 years old, I’ve developed an allergy to cats, more or less out of the blue. Which sucked, since I had two female cats at that time, Tina and Nena. (It was the 80s, gimme a break.) We had to give them away, and my room had to be renovated, as I became nearly asthmatic due to the omnipresent cat hair.
As mentioned earlier, Yahoo! decided to shut down its entire Munich engineering department. So since January 1st, I am officially out of a job. What a downer… or is it? After some deliberation and discussions with Dana, I’ve decided to concentrate on the bright side: I have a few ideas for products (read: websites), and now I finally have the time to work on them. I’ve always contemplated building them in my spare time while still being employed, but apart from a few small experiments (which were fun to write but are hardly my personal “next big thing”) that concept didn’t work out so well.
I was promoted. Then I lost my job. But I came to a conclusion, and found new goals. (More on this later.) I had planned on running 250km, then hit that goal in October, and ended up doing 400km. My granny passed away, and I miss her. My faith in the USA was partially restored (the Obama campaign and its success even gave me hope, and I don’t even “count”).
John Scalzi: That said, these are gruesome times for publishing, and a lot of folks are not as well-positioned as I am. Imprints have vaporized, layoffs have begun, and it’s better-than-even odds that a number of authors and books are going to get shaved off of publishing lists. 2009 is also likely to be a singularly lousy time to be an aspiring debut author, as publishing houses consolidate their lists and focus their resources on established avenues (i.
Yahoo! hat am Freitag verkündet, die gesamte Engineering-Abteilung in München zu schließen. Meine Freude war etwas gedämpft, bin ich doch (noch) Teil dieser Abteilung. Meine Motivation, eine neue “Herausforderung” zu finden, stieg dementsprechend sprunghaft — denn ab 31.12.2008 bin ich somit ohne Arbeit (Stand: heute). Um ehrlich zu sein, ich weiß noch nicht genau, was ich machen möchte. Will ich als Freelancer arbeiten? Suche ich mir einen (interessanten) neuen Job? Mache ich eine eigene Firma auf?
Mein Child’s Play-Interview in Trackback auf Radio Fritz war ein voller Erfolg, zumindest in dem Sinne, dass ich mich nicht komplett blamiert habe …denke ich zumindest. Dana meinte zwar, ich hätte allen den Stoiber gemacht — meine “Äh…"-Frequenz war wohl höher, als ich selbst gemerkt habe —, aber ich glaube, das ist okay. Niemand in Berlin kennt Stoiber, oder? Die Sendung vom Samstag gibts auch als Podcast, als MP3-Direktdownload und zum Gleich-auf-der-Seite-Anhören.
Wer hätte das gedacht, mein letzter Post hat Interesse bei einigen Leuten geweckt. Anscheinend war die Idee, Child’s Play nach Deutschland zu holen, doch nicht so absurd. Freude! Ein alter Bekannter von mir, Marcus, hat mich kurz nach der Veröffentlichung angepingt und gefragt, ob ich Interesse an einem kurzen Interview für seine Radio-Sendung Trackback hätte. Natürlich hatte ich – wenn alles klappt, wirds was morgen zwischen ab 18:00 und 20:00 Uhr.
(Dies ist die englische Version eines ursprünglich deutschsprachigen Artikels.) Child’s Play 2008 is on. Gamers in many countries of the world give money or buy toys, games or other gifts for child hospitals and stations and their little patients; partner hospitals in the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Egypt are delighted about all the donations. The Question But where’s Germany? This question popped up in my head more than once during the summer.
(This is a post in German. Are you looking for the English language version?) Child’s Play 2008 ist gestartet. Gamer in vielen Ländern geben Geld oder kaufen Spielzeuge, Games und andere Geschenke für Kinderkrankenhäuser und -stationen und ihre kleinen Patienten; Partner- Kliniken in den US, Großbritannien, Kanada, Neuseeland, Australien und Ägypten freuen sich über vielen Spenden. Die Frage Aber warum nicht hier in Deutschland? Die Frage kam mir während des Sommer immer wieder in den Kopf.
A few weeks ago I was talking with Mike about carefully choosing gifts for our loved ones, about how to select the right things for the right people, so that come holiday season joy would be brought to them. We were discussing this arduous task at great lengths, using big words and long sentences, reflecting the importance of the outcome and the process itself. I believe our conversation started when the phrase “I need some random Christmas crap” was muttered by one of us.
The short story is: not going to happen. I’ll be shutting escaloop down in about a month or so. It was a nice toy and a fun experiment, I’ve used it to get into Ramaze, but I have neither the time nor the energy to work on it any further. I recommend moving over to FriendFeed or Lifestream.fm for all your lifestream needs. I am sure there are many more such services, just look around.
During the last few weeks, I’ve built a couple of pipes I want to share. (“Pipe”, in this context, means an application built in Yahoo! Pipes.) Here’s one of them. Your Most Recent Nike+ Run As I’ve mentioned once or twice in the past, I’ve become a more or less avid runner during the last year. One central piece of my equipment is my Nike+. I don’t run without it. I am a geek, I love numbers.
(This is a rather long piece. It has a point, though… so please bear with me. Danke.) During the last couple of months I’ve developed an increasing interest in the US elections. More or less closely following the news about them, scrutinizing and evaluating their talking points and ideas, I’ve become rather familiar with both candidates, formed an opinion – slowly realizing that I am actually more interested in the politics of a country I don’t live in and an electorate system I can neither influence nor participate in than in my own nation’s.
I was made aware that BetterSearch is currently not working on Google. Apparently, Google changed the HTML of the results page, and BetterSearch doesn’t know what to do. I’ll release 1.22 soon. Stay tuned. Update 2008-08-22: I’ve just uploaded v1.22 to the Mozilla addon site; once it’s been reviewed by the staff there, it should show up here. Update 2008-08-24: v1.22 was reviewed and approved!
I’ve become increasingly annoyed with my blog’s design. It’s …too much. There’s a sidebar, there’s a tag cloud, there’s the archives, there’s whatnots and doodads and stuff. Funny; a few months ago I’ve installed it to make the site more lightweight, and had the feeling I had succeeded. (Take a look at my still unchanged tumblelog to see the old design.) Still, over the last few weeks I felt the urge to further strip it down.
In his thoroughly enjoyable Science In The Capitol trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson (who happens to be my favourite author) talks about a concept called “The Paleolithic Life”; something he also spoke about in a Google Tech Talk on Climate Change (at ~50min in). The idea is that there are certain activities engraved in the mind of every human, which result in joy and happiness. These are the things the paleolithic man did during his waking hours, things nature rewarded him for by making him feel alive and capable and good, thus helping him evolve and aiding his development.
A couple of weeks ago (mid-June) I’ve participated in our internal Yahoo! EU Hack Day. This time around I’ve decided to tinker with Yahoo! SearchMonkey by building a couple of modules (dubbed SearchMonkey apps) during the 24 hours available. In case you have never heard about SearchMonkey: it’s a technology built into Yahoo! Search that allows developers to present their own or other peoples’ sites in a different way (examples to follow).
We bought him a few months ago, and now he’s watching over our garden. He’s sitting right next to the little fish pond. Dana suggested submerging a plastic X-Wing for good measure, but we’re still debating that idea. Thanks to Mike for the picture.
After two weeks of not being able to run without pain I’m good again. I had to find a different route, but after poking around in Google Maps and the surrounding forest I’ve managed to come up with a enjoyable one. The slightly annoying part is that I have to walk ~900m before to get to my actual starting (and end) point. Well, I consider it warming up. I’ve added the distance to my usual 5km, and thus I am now at 7km per run.
Trying to keep track of the last one or two weeks… Running again! Avoiding tarmac, thank God there are many forest roads around. Using light weights on my hands now, too. Fun. The most interesting part of the down period was that I was actually missing my runs, and that I was looking forward to start running again. I think it’s official: I like it. Found out I can watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart & The Colbert Report freely and legally on the web,OMG.
[][2]A week ago, during the day, my left lower back and leg started to hurt. Each step I made stung, and it didn’t get better. I couldn’t think of anything I had done; I didn’t fall, trip or twist my leg. I had just run in the morning. On Thursday the pain was still there, so I’ve consulted a doctor. She told me to stop running on asphalt the pavement, because no matter how good the shoes, the ground in itself is too hard, too solid, too inflexible.
Vorgestern bin ich im Biergarten der Alten Messe zum Mittag. Der Biergarten ist nahezu leergefegt; die Mittagszeit ist eigentlich schon vorbei. An der Ausgabe entscheide ich mich für Bratwurst mit Sauerkraut. Großer Teller, große Wurst, große Portion Sauerkraut. Lecker! Fix bezahlt und einen Tisch gesucht. Ein paar Meter weiter sitzt ein älterer Herr über einen Masskrug gebeugt; mit einem kurzen Nicken bestätigen wir uns gegenseitig unsere Existenz zu dieser Stunde, an diesem Ort.
I ran my first continuous 5km today. My workouts are 5km+ already, but usually I follow a run-walk-run-walk-run routine (2km running, 500m walking, repeat). This morning I just didn’t stop running until I was back home again, 25 minutes later, which means my “just keep going” pace is ~4:50 min/km. Damn, I am proud of myself. Harr!
Quite a hoot! The lady and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Looking forward to the inevitable sequel. Worth the money.
Remember the other day, when I told you about the user reputation features in Twerp Scan? Yeah, good times. Anyways, today I’ve cobbled together a quick Greasemonkey script to display the reputation and voting thumbs on Twitter user pages, right above the “About” portion in the sidebar. Like so: So this means that you can see on a glance whether someone is naughty or nice, right on his or her user page.