Category: Contemplation

I recently switched to a new mobile phone with SymbianOS. Nothing spectacular. It was cheap as I was extending my contract. It is a Nokia 3230. The user interface really has serious issues (which I think is amazing for a multi-million dollar company like Nokia that does not sell phones only by their external look).…

Mark Bernstein about the ignorance of US mainstream media to world events: The CNN front page headlines include, among the top 6 stories:“Jennifer Aniston photographed kissing Vince Vaughn”I don’t follow the news much. Is there some reason Jennifer Aniston shouldn’t be kissing Mr. Vaughn? This simply made my day 😉

Interestingly there is a whole armada of things keeping us under pressure: you got to be more productive, faster, better organized, and so on. The computer has not only enhanced our productivity: ubiquitous computing also means there will be no excuse to be unproductive (except when you »deserved« a break)? There are already many people…

So, you’d think that the job of an computer graphics animator would involve nothing but sitting in front of a screen and clicking little icons and buttons all day long? Well, looking at these folks I think the curricula may need some tweaking for the required skill sets… 😉

Marco Kalz complained about a missing comment feature. So, Marco, especially for you: Comments! I did not want to implement a comment feature myself, so I use the free Haloscan service to add comments and trackbacks. The drawback of this is, that comments may get lost once I want to quit the service.

I am in the train back to Cologne. I am thinking about, what I was seeing and hearing the last two days at the Campus Innovation conference. The conference theme was trying to bring educatiors and administration closer together in context of e-Education. Talking about the different sessions would make this a very long post.…

I seems I am making a slow move to Plone. I just replaced a static Manila-driven homepage of me with a Plone site. After working on a Plone skin for a client it seems creating a design for Plone has become less of an obstacle. The main problem I have is lack of time: there…

Too late!

YES! My DSL connection was just upgraded to 6MBit/s downstream. It’s amazing that these speeds are available for consumers for affordable flat rates. I remember a comment made by Derrick De Kerckhove in the final panel of a 4th doors of perception conference about »Speed« in 1996: No body is complaining about the television being…

Several weeks now without any update here. Why? Well, too many reasons to list here. I was too busy on the one hand – on the other hand I did not want to blog just to remain »active«. I know I ignored one the »post early, post often« rule for running a successful blog. I…

I lost the wiki on this site due to hackers. I didn’t have a recent backup so I am trying to recover as much as possible from Google cache. The wiki wasn’t a wiki anymore anyway: i needed to close it for public editing due to spam bots. The best solution I have seen for…

I really like this weblog of Clark MacLeod from Taiwan (he is very much into sound and interaction design). In addition to common blog post keywords. He categorizes his posts in three domains: work, life and play. I think this is a good way to separate social roles and personal motivation in blog posts. I…

My server was hacked and the provider decided to completely eliminate the whole system without confirmation. Lot’s of reconfiguration and updating needed. Most functionality is gone. Comments are lost. The wiki as well. ARRGH! Shouldn’t a provider call to negotiate further actions? This is really weird.

Google has upgraded the invitations in Gmail. I now have 50 invitations left. And it appears to be the standard for all users. If you want one please comment here (click on the date above). I won’t send an invitation if you don’t state your real name and your personal website. Update: Comments closed. No…

So the semester is almost over. I end with a much bigger base of new slides from recent lectures that will probably make the future lecturing task much easier. I had never the chance to use a former presentation 1:1 for a new one: there is always a need for update and improvement – but…

I had my wiki locked for anonymous editing to get rid of spammers. Only one or two pages were editable because I wanted people to be able to work on them. I was hoping that spammers would turn down if they can’t find an editable page ad hoc. Not so. In “return” they did not…

This Wikipedia page is very interesting: While the tsunami wave of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was by far the deadliest ever recorded it was by far not the highest: that was recorded 1958 in Alaska and was created by a land slide inside a small fjord (LItuya Bay) causing a wave to reach high…

My provider was unable to charge my credit card properly – but even after admitting it his own fault last week my server was locked down yesterday. So I had a downtime of one day. Sorry.

After getting comment spam for a while I found my wiki pages were spammed as well: someone added hundreds of links obiously to tune the page rank algorithm of google. There does not seem to be an easy way to deal with this issue. So I needed to disable open wiki editing (which equals not…

It has been quite silent here the last month. I was very busy and blogging had to be suspended for a while. This will change soon – there have been a lot of things going on. Here’s what is up next: 1. Election in US: a very bad decision to re-elect Bush. But it seems…