i just bought ecto
the client i use to post pretty much all the post here is now an official member of the pieces of software that i actually bought. i’m more than happy with it and forked over those 18$ to adriaan to help him to go on with the development of this magnificent piece of software. i’ve been using kung-log for a long time, but ecto is just ways better. hence my blog also features a new button on the far bottom:
gmail invitations [update]
pretty much everybody is giving them away, but in case you still need an invitation to sign up with gmail (google’s 1gb-email service) i’ve got six five three no invitations to give away. they’re all gone, maybe i’ve got some more to give away soon, i’ll post it here…
data mining
next weekend there are elections here in switzerland. i’m not overly politically interested, but i think voting is a must. so i heavily rely on tools to help me make the decision. i’ve already mentioned both of them here (smartvote and votez.ch). smartvote enables you to generate your political profile, the so called smartspider. and then it matches your spider to all the candidates and proposes you a list of people to choose. votez is another tool, where all the different initiatives are explained with the pros and cons, so that any normal person is able to understand it and vote accordingly.
picture of the week 48
i’ve not taken a single picture this week. because of this i’m nuzzling in my archive and found the pic below. it was taken on my vacation in vienna this march. it’s the wall and a chair in a restaurant.
my 0.5% chance to win a million
maybe you’ve seen the ubiquitous ads for the american express bluecard, promoting the link win-a-million.ch. since my credit card provider offered me to switch to blue for free that’s what i did and i also checked out the bluegame they made to promote their new credit card the game consisted of 5 levels, most of them were - mildly said - trivial. i know a guy from nothing.ch, the crew behind the programming of the bluegame (we play ultimate frisbee together). in the training on thursday we talked about the bluegame, because he saw me in the high-score list. i told him, that i thought the stuff was really easy and i only stuck to it, because i thought the later levels would be a bit more demanding. he told me funny stories about people who called, because they could not sign up for the game, or weren’t able to log in to it, and other peekaboo…
oopsie!
this is by far the funniest set of pictures i’ve seen in a loong time! [via joi.ito and urs]
moveable type upgrade
as you can see in the screenshot on the left, my moveable type installation is now upgraded. i think this should help with the flooding comment spam. the whole upgrade process seemed to go really well and painless, but things might be flaky in the next few days while i configure stuff and tweak the settings, so be aware…
comment spam/firefox
the comment spam on the blog is slowly getting out of control (but will be stopped as soon as i can install the new version of moveable type, which will happen soon). although mtblacklist is an indispensable piece of software, which is blocking a huge amount of comment spam i have to delete some spam from time to time. one comment spam i’m not gonna delete is the last comment here, because i thought it’s well funny: a team of microsoft engineers - the IE Team - tries to sue me, because i installed firefox. ha!
picture of the week 47
the picture of this week is especially for raph and dom from velocite which seem to be avid readers of my blog :-) it shows a bunch of messengers at the veloblitz on saturday evening. the veloblitz was one of the first messengers that started in switzerland (among the first ones was the velokurier bern) and they had the fifteenth anniversary this weekend. from left to right you can see raphael feiss from velocite, stefan p. frohlich from flash, randall from flash ans some other messenger. i truly apologize for the bad picture, but the batteries in my camera were so empty that was literally the only picture i took that evening.
picture of the week
just a quick note, ‘cause i’m late. this was the best picture i took last week. it’s the view from the kitchen window of my parents home. nice, innit?