Jedi Stamps. Apparently the “Jedi Shipping and Mailing Master” wants the collective opinion about the stamp you want to reign above all others. Really. [via Darth Vader] Late to the party. ADS kids, listen up! What can I say, yes, me too. I still don’t fully get Twitter—I still don’t understand the total awesomeness everyone is so excited about; or the working business model behind it, for that matter. We gots mail!
I am amazed how on some days a song can make you grin like an idiot and even boost your confidence, while on other days the same song doesn’t do anything. The human mind contains strange mechanics and some weird code. By the way, the song triggering this musing was Captain Sensual by Groove Armada.
Quote of the day. Today by Beryl. Wise words, for those of you who don’t know or may have forgotten: Do not pour your heart, soul, and life into your job. When the job goes sour, you may have nothing left. That said, I really like my job. But it’s not my life—and that isn’t a contradiction. Schöne Worte. Dana über das, was ich tue—programmieren, gern auch kreativ.
Last night, while looking around our living room, seeing all the furniture, the floor I put in, the wonderfully big windows, and my wife sleeping on the couch, I realized that I’ll probably never find a finer place in the world.
Ever played flOw? Then you might be able to relate. Clown car. Seriously, it’s not. (The image is safe for work, the type of humor might not be.) Haven’t laughed that much in a while. The Daily Show. My favourite TV show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, is part of the program of the new German Comedy Central. Now here’s the kicker—you can watch every new episode on their website.
Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot gibts jetzt endlich auf DVD. Nachdem wir über Monate hinweg vergeblich versucht haben, den Film im Kino zu sehen, und immer irgendwas dazwischen kam, hab ich zugegriffen, und wir haben ihn uns am Samstag mit Popcorn auf der Couch angeschaut. Urteil: Großartiges Kino! Sehr lustig/absurd. Anschauen/kaufen. Die DVD hat sogar deutsche Untertitel, also steht dem Verstehen nix mehr im Weg. :) Respektsbekundung auch an unseren alten Freund Sepp, der auch dabei ist (als einer der Stammtischler).
Outlook vs. DST. This is what happens when you try to schedule a meeting to handle the DST changeover in Outlook. PS3 Home. [via the always excellent Antigames] Sony’s planned Home service looks pretty rad. Now let’s see how much of the glitz they can pack into the final product, eh? YPLAA. YouParkLikeAnAsshole.com is a site with a real purpose. Period. It even has notices you can print out and attach to offending parked cars!
Hail: The Return of the Sun is a well-done ad/movie for solar power. Watch it, it’s pretty cool. I saw the ad in a cinema the first time, and I found it quite good. Staying with the topic energy & efficiency: When Dana and I moved to the new house, we made it a point to use CFL bulbs wherever possible. Now, after taking a long, hard look at the various doodads sitting around the TV, which are burning energy in standby mode all day long, I’ve decided to introduce a master/slave extension lead to the mix.
Right, I remember! Did I ever blog about being interviewed (“mentioned” would probably be the better term) by the guys over at the Yahoo Publisher Network blog? About Planet Yahoo!, of course. Hilarious how I completely forgot about this… April 30. There’ll be an ARG to stimulate the Collective Intelligence to deal with the idea of an oil crisis starting end of April. I must say, I love the idea. There is apparently such a huge demand for ARGs, why not use this raw potential to do something worthwhile?
Description vs. person. defective yeti on match.com discrepancies. Well summed up. Tables suck. Depending on the context, of course. The topic came up on one of our internal mailing lists, and Chris answered with a link to Why tables for layout is stupid, which is a really nice URL to hand out the next time the issue is raised. Great artwork, too! Go luck. Blog nirvana. Valleywag came up with an interesting heatmap.
YUI hosting. Nate on Free Hosting of YUI Files from Yahoo!: Coinciding with this week’s release of YUI version 2.2.0, the one year anniversary of the YUI open-source release, and as announced at the YUI Party just moments ago, we’re opening up free YUI hosting from the Yahoo! network to all YUI implementers. If you’re using YUI for your own project, we’ll serve the files for you — gzipped, with good cache-control, using our state-of-the- art network, for free.
The good fight against blog comment spam continues—I’ve added HashCash to the mix after noticing the Akismet plugin catching up to 250 spam comments per night. Let’s see whether with HashCash this number goes down; after all it is supposed to stop bots, so the comments shouldn’t end up in Akismets queue in the first place. If you have problems posting comments (if you want to comment here for whatever reason… can’t think of anything at the moment), drop me a line.
Yeeeeeeeeeaaaah. TheToddTime.com – it probably helps if you’re a fan of Scrubs. And crazy. Quote of the day. Once again it’s something JR said. Again, the biggest problem with social networking sites is that they were created by people who don’t have friends. The quote itself is both a bit inflammatory and highly hilarious, I agree, but the rest of his posts makes perfect sense and also reflects my point of view pretty much 100%.
Ich liebe den Münchner Personennahverkehr. Nirgendwo sonst in Deutschland sieht man alte, distinguierte Herren mit einem “Ich hasse Euch alle / Früher war alles besser / Zu meiner Zeit…”-Blick, denen Konfetti auf der Halbglatze klebt. Gut, man sieht sie vermutlich auch in anderen Teilen Deutschlands, in denen Karneval gefeiert wird (alle verrückt), aber hier fallen sie auf, weil sie die Ausnahme sind. Hurra!
Quote of the day. From a rest-discuss post about JSR 311: Java™ API for RESTful Web Services [thanks, Hendrik]: This is like asking Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to write the Democratic Party platform. “Bionic Seniors: Gerontomageddon”. Robotic suit to assist easy movement for Japan’s elderly—my initial thoughts: I want one. The company is called Cyberdyne and the suit is named HAL. You do the math. “Suit, I need to sit down.
I had the pleasure to watch hordes of co-workers, past and present, struggling to get through their days without going insane. The lot of them are capable people, but they appear to waste a lot of time (and nerves) by not asking the right questions when it comes to technology. And I am talking here about developers and non-developers. Also, before I go any further, let me clarify one thing: I am writing this not to tell people they suck, but to share some personal findings and experiences about common pitfalls and how to get around them.
The other day I had to move my desk to another room, and thus was cut off more or less entirely from the rest of the Y! engineering gang. My homies, my posse, noone around! Mein Leben! Anyways, during the day I was chatting with Mike, who didn’t have to move from the other room (because he is cool). “How you holding up?”, he asked. “Okay, but I’m lonely… SEND HELP”, I said.
Vor ein paar Wochen hat ein “Discount-Bäcker” in Trudering aufgemacht. Ich vermutete, dass es sich um einen “keine Bedienung, niedrige Preise”-Laden handelt, war mir aber nicht sicher. Gestern abend sitz ich im Bus, auf dem Weg heim, und seh' durchs Dunkel das erleuchtete Schaufenster. Letzteres mit einem neuen, handgeschriebenen Vermerk. “Kaffe + Crosso 1.50€”. Was zum Teufel ist ein “Crosso”? Und “Kaffe”? Huh? Verwirrung. Heute morgen hab ich dann mal reingeschaut und mit der Chefin geplaudert.
Quote of the moment. Simon on SEO, SMO and TLA’s: SMO, or “Social Media Optimisation” — digg spamming now has its own TLA. Real life recursiveness. Best warning sign EVER. A sign warning about itself. Classic “WTF?” moment. This is deep. On Mistakes. Glass Maze: Mistakes were made—an angry, yet polite, essay on political semantics. So if a guy’s ever caught cheating on his wife, say, he could tell her: “Yes, intercourse with someone other than you may have taken place.
Swinging big. Yahoo! Pipes is live! Go play around with it. It’s really good stuff with almost limitless possibilities. I didn’t work on it personally, and I’m speaking from an end-user perspective. Jeremy Zawodny, Tim O’Reilly and Ed Ho (one of the Pipes developers) described the product in detail earlier today already, so go read. And play. Have fun! Awesome job, esteemed colleagues. And now the weather. Quote of the day [via Beryl]:
Oiy. Microsoft announces interoperability between CardSpace and OpenID: On the heels of the Windows® CardSpace™ general availability launch in Windows Vista™, Microsoft demonstrated momentum with industry partners that are working to apply this technology to help consumers realize a more confident online experience. This includes the announcement of collaboration on use of Windows CardSpace with the OpenID 2.0 specification. Through the support of the WS-Trust-based Windows CardSpace experience, consumers can take advantage of increased security against phishing attacks without adding complexity to their identity management experience.
Technorati WTF. Technorati launches their WTFsystem. I see the possibility of serious abuse, but we’ll see whether I am too paranoid. Anyways, the short summary: Know something that’s hot? Explain why! This is your opportunity to write a quick explanation for the buzz around a popular subject. No blog required! getElementsByClassName() in Firefox 3. Native, built-in! Because John said so. Get your URLs straight. A good explanation why everyone should be using disambiguated URLs by (of course) Mr.
Friday I finally got my new machine delivered to my doorstep: 24’’ iMac, Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 7600GT. First impression: it’s huge. Really huge. “A couple of smaller iMacs are orbiting it!”-huge. But very shiny. My 20” Dell flatscreen is still sitting next to it, looking small. The transition from the Mac mini to the new box was uneventful, almost too easy, if there is such a thing. Next I moved a few gigabytes of porn data over from my PC, the 250GB drive took it with a mere shrug, as expected.
Today is the day Vista is launched by many happy faces at Microsoft. (The World stood still for a very short moment… it blinked, shrugged, and continued to spin, feeling indifferent.) Today is the day I placed an order for a new machine. It will be big, and I will be very happy the day it’ll arrive—this Friday, if all goes well. No real connection between these two fantastic events. By the way, one of them excites me to a degree I can’t really communicate, the other… eh… not so much.
Vorhin im XXXLutz-”Restaurant”. Kellner: “Was darf ich Ihnen bringen?” Carlo: “Ich möchte das Tagesangebot, die vier Weißwürscht mit ‘nem Weißbier.” K: “Nein.” C: “Was?” K: “Nein, möchten Sie nicht.” C: “Möchte ich nicht?” K: “Nein, die sind grauenvoll. Ganz ehrlich. Wenn ich Sie die bestellen lasse, dann seh ich Sie nie wieder. Bestellen Sie lieber irgendwas anderes, dann kommen Sie wenigstens vielleicht wieder.” C: ”… Okay, ich nehm dann die Berner Würschtl.