« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
January 30, 2006
Ringtone: ...a far more effective killing machine
The weekend brought, among other things, a new ring-tone for my cell phone, spoken by Andreas. Andreas is German, but I think he gets the Austrian accent just right. (I bet you know what movie that one's from.)
Posted by dr at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 23, 2006
...not
As reported on national news, I have failed my attempt to win £85M in the
national lottery. Stay tuned for news on another try.
Posted by dr at 8:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 20, 2006
Lottery Win
For the first time in my life, I bought a lottery ticket today. Statistically, playing the lottery is about the worst thing you can do with your money. The expected win is always going to be much lower than your investment. But I guess that's not how people see it, and the human mind tends to be bad at (directly) dealing with probabilities anyways.
My lucky numbers are 08 15 34 35 42 - 02 03, and 04 27 33 36 37 - 07 08. The jackpot is around 85 Million Sterling.
What would you do with 120 Million Euros? I guess I would buy one of these for us and then get back to work (for some time).
Posted by dr at 4:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 19, 2006
Birdseye View
In case you ever wanted to know, and I'm pretty sure you never did: this is where I spent my teenage years. You see a satellite photo of a part of Mainz, Germany, a small city (and state capital) in the most densely populated central area of Germany (near Frankfurt). I could walk to school in about 2 minutes, and because of that, I was always late.
Posted by dr at 11:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 18, 2006
Apple Maniacs drool over new iMac computers - why?
Computer freaks these days go nuts over the upcoming Apple hardware. For the first time, Apple is using an Intel chip, which mainly allows them to provide better performance in their laptops.
People post videos of an old next to a new Mac booting, and they time all sorts of crazy procedures with the new machines.
I read a few performance analyses (for instance, MacBook Pro vs. G4 1.67 PB) and I can't help but wonder whether we all live on the same planet. Seriously: how often do I encode music with iTunes or a video with Quicktime? Do I run 10 Photoshop filters on my RAW camera data all day? Do I use my £1500 Powerbook to play whatever frame-rate-demanding ego shooter?
To those millions of prime time TV news reporters out there: read those analyses. To you porn artists, go drool over a machine that encodes pink colors faster than ever. To those game fanatics, go buy a big Windows machine now! Freaks of the world, go and brag about your new machine that starts up in 35, not 40 seconds.
What I'd like to see is a machine that starts applications without delay, be it The Gimp or Safari. Something that renders web sites immediately. A box that doesn't make me wait when I use Spotlight searching for an e-mail among my 60.000 e-mails of the last years.
So what really counts to me is real-life performance. I rarely see that published, and honestly, I don't have exactly high hopes for a dual-core machine to be much faster here. Maybe the faster bus will help. Let's see...
Posted by dr at 9:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2006
No Woman, No Call in Bangladesh
A while ago, researchers with a knack for headline-making stories at the London School of Economics dug shallow and compiled a list of the happiest people on earth. Guess what, it's the Bangladeshis, a comparatively poor nation.
Bangladesh is getting modern: the introduction of cell phones drives some of the cultural change. Turns out, calling it modernization is a vast exaggeration. The other day, mobile phone operators were ordered to stop offering free nighttime phone calls to protect the morals of the young.
What happened was that teenagers had started to "form romantic attachments", and parents complained about "vulgar talk". As I've learned, attaching to another person romantically is discouraged. Arranged marriage is the deal there. Humans being kept from looking for mates, hey, that's not merely a matter of different cultural standards.
Sometimes it's hard to reconcile the news. How can Bangladeshis be the happiest people on earth? Then again: no woman, no cry.
Posted by dr at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 9, 2006
Nemo, Casanova and Tuna
My new roommates: Nemo (orange, in front), Tuna (back) and Casanova (with moustache, right).
Posted by dr at 9:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 7, 2006
A new image - streamlining the public Dave
If it's a political party or a multi-billion-dollar corporation, when it comes to representing themselves in public, everyone carefully streamlines what the public gets to see about them. To some extent, individuals can do that with themselves as well, and it's obviously infinitely easier to make sure you look good on your own than to make sure a bunch of egotistical management hounds and sleezy PR jerks look good together.
So the other day, I tried to streamline what I have on the web. That's not easy. A bunch of domain names and websites are scattered all over the place, starting from my very first www.davids-welt.de, registered in 1999 or so back when I was in Germany. Visually, it's even more difficult. I have a normal homepage, with CV and publications and a bunch of technical goodies for people to download. Then there's the blog that you are reading just now. There's a photo blog called The Big Trip with photographs from my travels. I also have one or two non-research web publications, among them an old and fairly well-linked study about the German dramatist Heiner Müller.
Reorganized and slightly streamlined, the visible structure is nice and simple. The blog(s) are on davids-world.com, the homepage is david-reitter.com because I intend to keep that name for another couple of decades, and the old German stuff remains on the .de domain for now. Everyone is redirected automatically to the new destinations.
There's a new common visual element. It's "David looking at the world from different perspective". Or simply, my picture stylized and rotated by 180 degress. See also: upper left corner.
The technical structure behind all this is almost too complex to be true (see diagram). I guess that's what happens when you want to spend minimum money and have maximum technology. Leaving out the details, I'd like to point out my cool new web host, Nearly Free Speech. They allow me to do all sorts of tech stuff, but only charge me for what really costs them money: bandwidth and storage. They're one of those "don't be evil, be fair!" companies that I've come to appreciate. And you get support from the guy who's actually in charge - no more e-mail support-by-templates. More about them another time.
The question remaining is how much we need to streamline our electronic business card. The thing is: I'm not a streamlined person. I wear masks, like everybody. So my web sites are always going to be slightly chaotic. Slightly.
Posted by dr at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 1, 2006
It's always darkest before it goes pitch black.
A happy new year to you. I hope you'll make your dreams come true... Remember, "You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination and and endless supply of expendable labor".
That's a smart quote from a calendar I got for Christmas, my funniest present this year. Published by E.L. Kersten, management consultant turned critic and author of a successful book about Demotivation. (according to their official story, at least), the calendar sums up Kersten's mantra, beefed up with historical bits and pieces.
By all means folks, be motivated for 2006. I promise to enjoy working harder and procrastinate less. However, that's not as easy as some $2000-seminars of motivation gurus promise. E.L. Kersten: "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes ot motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."
Posted by dr at 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack