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?
nice cv.
if mr. gueniot doesn’t get a job with that cv i don’t know what he must do to get one! brilliant! [via powerbook_blog]
cleaning mood
altough it was my free day, i had to get up early today, because we got a new fridge, so i thought it’s about time to do some cleaning. after i’ve cleaned out my closets and thrown away a bag full of junk i started to catalog my dvd’s (call me obsessive) with the excellent dvdpedia (which i bought rightaway for 18 bucks). so you are now able to marvel at my collection of 106 dvds. actually at least two of them are missing, ghost in the shell and the crow, but i forgot to whom i borrowed them. but this is never gonna happen again, because dvdpedia has a neat “borrowed to…"-feature which integrates nicely with address book.app on os x. if you click on the image on the left, you can download a three-paged pdf (300kb) of all the dvd-covers which i exported with dvdpedia.