So, let’s see… DING – Graun reached season 50! Then I’ve had a very nice conversation with a human priest or warrior (?) named Ptalaphose about the future of the Alliance. I met a friendly Night Elf priest named Avaa which in Felwood. Our paths happened to cross a few times again. A overly pleasant lass. She invited me to run a few Zul’Farrak errands together with her and a few of her friends.
It’s great, get it now. (If you don’t believe me right away, then take a look at the Between Interval site. There you can listen to the whole album for free; that’s right, 75 minutes of ambient pleasure for your ears. Doesn’t cost you anything. Nothing, nada, bupkis. Then, if you like it (and if you, like me, like a healthy dose of ambient music, you’ll love it), you can buy it as DRM-free, high-quality MP3 files for €5.
We had tickets for the U2 concert here in Munich last night, and we had a blast. Great concert. Bono saved the World two times, I think. :) Unsorted impressions: too much rain (1.5 hours, we were soaking wet), Keane as warming-up band, I stood in line for beer for 45 damn minutes, public transportation was overloaded (‘twas like Woodstock without the music), nice symbolic slogan (“CoeXisT”), too frickin’ loud.
We went out to watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith last night. Despite the mediocre reviews the flick is receiving, I have to say, it was a two-hour fun ride for me. Pitt and Jolie seemed to have fun in their roles, and it showed. It was a thoroughly enjoyable romantic assassination comedy. Recommended if you’re looking for silly, funny, romantic and not-overly-deep summer movie.
So, over the last few weeks I have posted almost no entries. What can I say, my life was wicked and weird. We went to Ireland, that was great. Still married, which is awesome. Planning to learn Spanish for no particular reason. Learning Ruby and Rails and dusting off my Perl skills. Then of course, major point, I wasn’t really happy at work anymore. I tried to keep my mouth shut about the office, which is a clever thing to do, methinks; still sometimes, the unhappiness showed.
Herzlichen Dank an die kreative Seele, die beim Versuch, unser Moped in der Tiefgarage aufzubrechen, eine Feile ins Zündschloss steckte und dabei abbrach. Herzlichen Dank dafür, dass ich das Ding in gut eineinhalb Stunden wieder herausholen durfte. Herzlichen Dank dafür, dass ich das in der prallen Sonne machen musste, um überhaupt etwas sehen zu können. Herzlichen Dank dafür, dass ich dabei das halbe Moped auseinanderbauen musste, um überhaupt irgendwo heranzukommen.
I need a license for my new Firefox extension, but I can’t find anything that I like. Here’s what I am looking for: The freedom to run the program for any purpose The freedom to study and modify the program for personal use The freedom to copy the program I don’t want users to have the freedom to redistribute modified versions of the program, specifically because there are links to stores etc.
Got this from a co-worker today, think it’s great. :) The Washington Post’s Style Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners: Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
A few of you have done this already, so it’s my turn now. :) 1. What did you do in 2004 that you’d never done before? Driving on the left side of the road for four days straight. Yes, I’m talking about our trip to Ireland. 2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I didn’t have any resolutions. I don’t think you need the “magic of the new year” if you want to accomplish something.
So, we went to IKEA today, to buy a simple picture frame. When we left, we had bought this: In all fairness – we were eyeing it for about a year by now… and until one month ago, it cost €789. Then they lowered the price to €599. When we went there today the price tag said €299. We never had a chance, they got us. It’s 2.15m long (that’s ~613 feet or something, metric is so much better), real leather, and damn comfy.
My baby sister Claudia married her longtime friend Tino this weekend. Yes, we were invited. :) I’ll skip the part where we fought against the Gods of the Autobahn on Friday (car crashes, construction sites and car crashes within construction sites along the road, took us ten hours to drive there) and how we got almost no sleep the night before and get right to the wedding day. We drove to the town where the church is, Rossla.
By now I’m thoroughly depressed when I think about our aforementioned management blogs. Today I had to learn a few things: There were no new comments on the blog entry. There was no new blog entry, not even a small one mentioning the staff meeting where the blog was explained. The staff meeting where the blog was explained was a real h00t since the two managers (our vice and one of his quality management managers) were opposing themselves to a great deal.
Caution, rather unstructured rant ahead So, our internal company strategy is now mainly focussed on quality management, which, sadly is a topic long overdue. Not enough people, not enough time, to many fucking jobs in a day, the usual. Plus, an in-house communication which seems to come straight from the deepest depths in Hell. One of the more capable managers was promoted vice CEO earlier this year, and our CEO tagged him with the honorable job of straightening out the internal processes – communications, inter-department processes, everything.
Fun fact: Google muß passen bei dem Wort “Multigeschwindigkeitsklitorisstimulator”. In your face, information machine.
Writing software is getting harder and harder. The more you learn, the harder it gets. It’s not about the code (as Drew noticed earlier – his article got me thinking quite a bit, actually), it’s about the mind, the architecture, the wish to do things well right from the start. I’m there. While I was hammering down rather silly but working PHP code for G-Blog.net as it stands today, I’m advancing much more careful in my development of the new version.
Pure elegance: print [self.entries[a] for a in range(len(self.entries)) if (viewingUser == self or not self.entries[a].isPrivate)] and print [entry for entry in self.entries if (viewingUser == self or not entry.isPrivate)] Built-in privacy on data model level. Live and learn. I love this language. I want to thank Morn for the nice pun I used as title. Update: Teh Mornster has flexed his mighty Python-Fu by showing me an easier way (second line).
20 Stages of Perl to Python Conversion :: ASPN Mail Archive :: python- list: 20 Stages of Perl to Python Conversion See a reference to Python being compared favorably to Perl. Think to yourself, “another stupid little language that thinks it’s better than Perl.” Ignore it. Repeat many times. After seeing some reference to Python, decide, “what the hell, I’ll have a look.” Take a look at the language.
What the fuck is wrong with them?! So, our little scooter is broken, the lights burn out every 10 klicks. It’s less than a year old, so this problem should be a warranty case. I bring the scooter to the damn shop, and they refuse to answer my hypothetical “warranty yes/no” question. Fine, okay, they don’t want to answer that question as long as they don’t know what’s wrong. I can relate.
After building community sites for a while by now I think I have grasped the social dynamics blueprint of community sites to some degree. For example: most community-centered sites are starting out small (naturally), then gathering a relatively small loyal following (#1), then gaining momentum (#2), attracting more and more regulars (#3) and – after a while – die (#4). The circle of life, so to speak. But the devil’s in the details.
Okay, so you want to use SpamBayes on your mail server in order to enjoy working with your webmail or IMAP again. Here’s how to do it. Your DH mail account needs to have shell access. Install the latest Python in your $HOME directory. Install SpamBayes (I recommend the CVS version as the official/stable builds wouldn’t install for me) as described in the paragraph “Procmail” on the linked page. Using your webmail interface or IMAP, set up the following new folders: Spam, TrainingHam, TrainingSpam, Unsure.
Little follow-up to my last work post – now I am comfortable with giving away details. So, we got the new boss, restructuring the tech/server/CMS department and our web/production department. So far, so good. Luckily, “restructuring” (in this case) doesn’t mean “lay-offs”; instead, a few new people are coming aboard. The departments are getting reordered big time, they are actually trying to introduce a higher degree of structure, people are shuffled around and so on.
I hereby proclaim the new official term to describe the casting show / petridish cloning boy/girl band “music”: ProstiPop. “Prosti” as in “prostitutes”, “pop” as in “pop music”. It’s not that far fetched if you think about it. They want fame and money now, without much work (face it, kids… one or two months in a “talent camp” is nothing compared to a life full of devotion and hard work), they are willing to sell their soul as well as their bodies/looks (as in “they’re just puppets, Jim”) for media coverage, and they are fine with the idea to not have old friends as band members but complete strangers.
Big restructuring is going on in the office. For the first time in two- and-a-half years I have the feeling we’re moving. I’m not fully sure yet it’s forward we’re going to - at least not in the short run; in the long term, we probably are, yes. (There are still a couple of people we need to get rid of before we can get up to full speed, I think.
I’m a Bloglines user for, what, exactly 4 months by now, and it just crossed my mind that it is more or less my central one-stop website. I read my daily news with Bloglines, I read my blog subscriptions with Bloglines, I read most of my comics with Bloglines, I read my geek/programming news with Bloglines, I read my gaming news with Bloglines. And best of all, I can do it everywhere I have a browser with web access, and I don’t have to read anything twice or to install.
I’ve been toying around with Dean Allen’s mui funky Textile for a while by now, and finally, as I’m approaching a certain state of development in G-Blog.net v2, I think I have a use for it. It’ll most likely be the formatting gizmo of choice for the next version of this very site. Anyways, while the original version 2.0 beta is great, it’s somewhat annoying to have as part of an object-oriented framework, since this version is basically just a number of functions.