Number of Google references to Star Wars joke, Revenge of the Shit

[Morten er meget fornærmet over at han ikke har sendt en kommentar til classy.dk om de 16.300 hits der var i morges. Undskyld du ikke gjorde det Morten.]

Hvis man ikke har hørt det endnu, og hvis man ellers husker dagen, så gør jeg da gerne opmærksom på at Danmarks Radio sender landskampen mod Sovjetunionen på grundlovsdag i anledning af 20-året for hvad der den gang var 80er-landsholdets finest hour.

On top of a busy work schedule I just managed to find the time to read Robert Evans' autobiography "The kid stays in the picture" this weekend. The reason: It was extremely fast paced and quite entertaining, so I swallowed the book in one sitting saturday morning.
I think it would be wrong to call it well written. Evans' attempt at selfdeprecating, fast talking, street smart language is eventually too formulaic. Lots of ass, lots of cojones and a particularly annoying form of self Q&A that goes something like this made up sample:

Settled? Sure. Worth it? Probably not. Memorable? You bet.

Resolve: Fuck'em. Fuck'em all.

Well it actually blew pretty much as badly as the first two films or more precisely, as much as Attack of The Clones. All acting is entirely wooden, which makes Anakins plight and catastrophic choices completely unbelievable. No horror there. Obviously, slaying of little children always works - but really, even the gruesome fate of the Jedi comes off empty.
The film could easily have been 30 minutes shorter. Just eliminate all the wooden acting. It does little to no good.

Jeg så først reklamerne i et sommerhus i Sønderjylland og var helt overbevist om at den nye dansk- og/eller sodavand Aquative var lavet af et lokalt sodavandstapperi, men nej - det var såmænd Carlsberg. Alt i og omkring produktets navngivning, indpakning og markedsføring stinker.
Lad os bare starte med det fuldstændig mislykkede kunstord Aquative. Man skal tænke

Aquative...Aqua...Active Vand for sportslige friske mennesker som mig!!!

Ideen er så dårlig at folk har fået den rigtig mange gange før, og som om det ikke var nok ligner både mærkatet på flaskerne og TV reklamer noget der er lavet af marketingassistentens lillebror der "kan noget med billeder" fra sit kollegieværelse i Hjørring (eller for den sags skyld Hillerød).

Telefonen ringer lørdag formiddag. Danmarks Statistik. For tre uger siden fik jeg et brev om en trafikundersøgelse som jeg ikke kunne deltage i fordi jeg var bortrejst. Den har indhentet mig. Jeg lægger normalt på når det er markedsundersøgelser, men når det er Det Offentlige må man jo hellere svare.

NN Vi vil gerne høre lidt om din dag i går.
Claus Hvor lang tid tager det?
NN Det kommer lidt an på hvad du har lavet.
Claus Går det hurtigere hvis jeg bare fortæller dig at jeg ikke har anvendt nogen transportmidler i går overhovedet ud over mine fødder.
NN Nej, det skal vi også have med.
Claus OK, Skyd.
NN Du hedder Claus Dahl og du bor på Albert Cathrinesgade ?
Claus Ja. Ja.
NN Har du kørekort? Har du haft kørekort? Selvstændig eller lønmodtager? Hvor meget tjener du om året? Hvor mange timer arbejder du om ugen?
Claus Nej. Nej. Lønmodtager. XXX-tusind. Mellem 40 og 60.
NN Vi tager lige midt imellem på 50. Hvor arbejder du - hvad hedder gaden?
Claus Rejsbygade
NN R. E. J....
Claus R.E.J.S.bygade.
NN Hvad er din stilling
Claus Software developer [fortryder med det samme den engelske titel. Af mange grunde.]
NN S.U.F.T....
Claus Eller prøv med IT-konsulent. Eller udvikler.
NN Jeg skal lige se hvad jeg har...
...
Claus Prøv med udvikler. Noget med IT.
NN Software sælger. Software distribution.
...
Claus Prøv med IT-konsulent.
...
NN Jeg leder her... indretningsarkitekt. sælger...
...
Claus Prøv med IT-konsulent - eller måske udvikler.
NN K.O.N.C.U.L.E....
Claus Prøv med IT.
...
NN Nu har jeg den....
...
NN EDB-konsulent.
Claus Sådan.
NN Hvor langt er der fra dit hjem til dit arbejde.
Claus Et kvarters gang. Halvanden kilometer.
NN Halvanden kilomet. Hvornår tog du på arbejde i går og hvordan kom du derhen?
Claus Til fods. Omkring klokken 8.
NN Så du var der omkring 8.15?
Claus Ja.
NN Hvornår tog du hjem fra arbejde?
Claus 23.30.
NN 23.30. Gik du ud igen senere den dag?
Claus Nej.

To sager fra den forløbne uges politiske liv er mindre end heldige for det danske seriøsitets- og respekt-parti Venstre.

1. At det skulle være et problem at miljøministeren mener noget om miljøpolitik, således at Connie Hedegaard ikke kan få lov til at holde sig til planloven i den berømte Bilka sag kan vist kun være et figenblad over den egentlige beslutning: At tvangslovliggøre det ulovlige byggeri i Horsens fordi der sgu aldrig er nogen der har taget skade af et stormagasin. En af regeringens eksperter i dårlige undskyldninger, Lene Espersen, får lov at tale uden om den realitet om nogen dage.
   
2. At kategoriske udtalelser om det modsatte skulle forhindre en politiker i at bøde på venners tidligere forsyndelser modbeviste Lars Løkke Rasmussen i samme uge med Furesø aftalen. Som man vil huske afviste Løkke Rasmussen, da Farumskandalen rullede, at ministeriet havde nogen penge til at dække det kraterstore underskud i Farums kommunekasse. Men der var altså alligevel en lille milliard i form af en brugt flyvestation og et direkte årligt tilskud.
   

If it doesn't work all the time it just doesn't work: This week I was on a business trip to Romania and when I got home I found out that I had inadvertently made the entire trip carrying my swiss army knife. I have walked through 4 metal detectors without anyone noticing. At one of the detectors there was a huge container filled with all kinds of scissors and nail files that people forgot to take out of their hand luggage - but my knife has been with me in cabin luggage on all flights.

Control mechanisms are always abused when civil rights guards go out the window: What on earth does bittorrent have to do with Homeland Security? If this press report is correct that they were in fact involved, there are two possible explanations for the use of Homeland Security staff in taking down bittorrent trackers. Either "Homeland Security" is just a marketing exercise - and these are simply law enforcement professionals doing what they've been doing since before 911, or - the more chilling interpretation: Homeland Security is growing into a Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Very 1984.

[UPDATE: Maybe the real story can be inferred from this report. Somethign along the lines of "We've built better surveilllance technology as part of the security effort and now we might as well use it for other purposes as well"]

Inspired by a recent trip to Eastern Europe I would like to point out the nice, but sadly expired, pun in that the capital of the former communist dictatorship of Romania is called "Book/Arrest".
And a pun near miss: Why on earth didn't the Hungarians call they airline MagLev instead of just Malev?

What are the odds? Man sidder i sin mors sommerhus og læser Trolddomsbjerget, i hvilken optræder lægen Dr Krokowski. På TV-Syd, TV2 regionen på de kanter, dukker en vejlensisk kickbokser samtidig op iklædt en T-shirt der reklamerer for - Krokowski.
Iøvrigt fandt jeg i jagten på et godt hyperlink til Manns roman følgende uvurderlige sammendrag af verdenslitteraturen. Her er Manns små 900 siders idéroman i sammendrag:

Hans Castorp visits Joachim Ziemssen in Haus Berghof TB
sanatorium in Swiss Alps and decides to stay; active Dr. Behrens, Settembrinin, and
Peeperkorn vs. decadent Leo Naphta and Dr. Krokowski; sees vision of temple with
two hags; leaves in 1914 but WWI has begun

1805-1820; Napoleon invades Russia 1812; Natasha Rostova is engaged
to Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, who struggles to find meaning of life through intellect and
calmly accepts death, but marries rake Anatol Kuragin; after war, Natasha marries Pierre
Bezukhov, who finds peace in living under wisdom of peasant Karatayev

Vacation over (with a vengeance), and to boot the bloody Mozilla foundation also destroys the Firefox 1.0.4 install on my home machine. Bloody, fucking, brilliant. Avoid the 1.0.4 release like the plague - wait till they unfuck it later on. There's so much wrong with this release, not the least of which was somebody's less than brilliant decision to make "Danish version" the small print default dialogue based on my locale settings. I never use any software in localized versions. They always stink. I suspect the inadvertent localization is what wiped my settings as well. Horrible update, quite simply.

Med et par måneders forsinkelse er det blevet tid til vinterferie her på classy.dk - Ses om en uges penge.

Hvis man troede man skulle til Irak, Iran eller Kina for at se politifolk anvendt til at bekæmpe ytringsfriheden, så troede man forkert. Man kan bare tage til Puteaux, en by i nærheden af Paris. En bloggende modstander af bystyret har dels oplevet at blive forsøgt spontant arresteret af lokalt politi, og dels har bystyret bevilget 28000€ til at sagsøge ham (og et parisisk dagblad). Meget lidt imponerende for Frankrig.

That chip you're about to have implanted with an interface directly to the visual cortex now has a power source.

Sigh. The Firefoxians must really, really hate me. Not only did the install completely fuck up. They broke "open everything in tabs, not in new windows" again. I absolutely really, really hate this. I've tried the usual settings but nothing works. Could someone please remind me what secret hack I'm forgetting when I want nothing at all to open any new stinking windows, except my own personal self going to the file menu and asking "Open a new window".
Found it.

Dansk fortsættelse: Oversætterne af Firefox er helt sikker velmenende, men for helvede for nogen kedelige, dårligt skrivende geeks. På engelsk står der mundret "Tabbed browsing" i settings. På dansk står der "Fanebladsbaseret internetsurfing". Det hjælper jo ikke at applikationen er oversat til dansk når det sprog den er oversat til er fuldstændig rædselsfuldt. Det er dårlig, dårlig "Jusabilligti".

The 1.0.4 Security patch for Firefox bungled the auto update completely. I was left Firefox less to a degree where nothing but a full removal of all earlier copies of Firefox and removal of all my personalized setup helped. On top of that when I finally was able to install, it installed the Danish version even though that's not what I wanted (I most certainly did not click any "localized version"/"Danish version links.

The only good thing about this is that I got to redo my Firefox plugin configuration, and boy, the non Firefox browsers are in trouble if they don't get with the "extending the browser with javascript" idea.

Slogger has improved by leaps and bounds. When I first installed it, it bungled your harddrive by storing all files in a big pile (incredibly slow after a year of browsing) and bungled Firefox search history. Now it does neither, instead it has logging profiles for easy integration with whatever personal search option you're using - including background integration with no less than three web based personal search solutions: Furl, Spurl and Yahoo My Web (gotta love the innovation speed in diverse, competitive environments unhampered by patents)
What used to be a hack now simply works, and you don't even have to store the index any more. Nice.

And then of course Firefox users enjoy the marvels of Adblock and the final solution to simple extensibility, Greasemonkey. The speed with which these innovations are changing Firefox from a viewer for web pages to a de facto application platform (without the hype inherent in that name, mind you) is just staggering.

The case of Greasemonkey is an interesting example of collaborative revolution.

1. July 12 - 2004: Allmusic.com completely botch up their website redesign
   
2. July 19 - 2004: Adrian Holovaty unbotch the site with a custom site-specific Firefox extension.
   
3. December 2004: fFrst version of Greasemonkey in Mozilla CVS (Any pointers on actual 'first public version' would be great in the comments, thanks)
   
4. May 2005: - Hundreds of customizations available.
   

To think that allmusic.com far from destroying something actually ended up creating this revolution. Talk about unintended consequences!

I absolutely buy the part of Joe Kraus' Hackathon post that says that short focused bursts with a focus on actually shipping is how the really good stuff gets done. The problem with hackathons is that they are not, in my experience, truly sustainable, reproducible events.
My personal experience with Hackathons come from doing maybe 10 of them, either alone or with 1-2 co workers. This has been possible where I've worked due to trusting or hands off management - either way works if you have geeks of quality on your staff.
Management of that kind is a prerequisite, but it is not how hackathons get done: You need an itch to scratch. Good ways to find itches are "stuff is cool", "stuff is really, really late and really, really necessary" or just that you genuinely have an itch to scratch.
The problem with hackathons is that if you try to run a hackathon as a "process" without that itch, you'll get nowhere fast. A day off the map with less than 100% motivation is just a day off the map. I have tried, and I have seen colleagues try, to falter because the itch we felt wasn't genuine, which meant that the hackathon wasn't the focused energy boost it's supposed to be, but just a day with an undefined task and a tight deadline.
But when it's good it's good. I think all the really essential core ideas in our product has come out of sessions like hackatons.

The copyfight goes even more Orwellian: Microsoft wants to spread the meme that "intellectual property theft" is done by Thought Thieves. Glad you unintentionally brought up 1984, Bill - but you might want to read up on ThoughtCrime before you apply it to defend a policy that tries to limit what people can freely say.

In Shakespeare's play The Tempest Prospero, the main character, plots to hinder the union of Ferdinand and Prospero's daughter Miranda, not out of spite but because

I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.

A lot of stuff gets done in a particular way on that motivation. It certainly happens in software.

Den længste umorsomme webadresse jeg har set længe er http://www.lohjanseudunmielenterveysseura.com/. Det er overhovedet ikke sjovt. Det er bare finsk.

The search intensity coloring on Google search history is not graded for power users...

So the automation of the tag hack is done, tags followed here. Suggestions were followed, so tags are now named tag_ something not deli_ something. Updated daily (which might be a too low frequency for some of these tags). I'll clean this up, autodetect tags from RSS feed links and share the tracker script in a little while.

But just as I finished I saw the error of my ways: I should have just made an XSLT of the RSS feed, and let Google crawl the result of that. That would be autoupdated and google would scrape it for me. Must fix.

En idag sjælden kombination af ordet troværdighed med en animeret gifjava applet kan man finde her, hvis ellers man kan blive færdig med videoen om visuel kommunikation der består af billeder man ikke kan se på grund af massive mængder af tekst og et lydspor der ikke har noget med billederne at gøre.

[Update: Bemærk rotationsretningen!]

(via Eat My Shorts)

So someone at Google should obviously blog the outage. Excellent occasion to show that the blog is not just plain old marketing. But then again, maybe it is.

Raveonettes er eneste 4-stjernede review på forsiden af Rolling Stone i skrivende stund.

(Titel credit: Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show)

So I was working on GPack, extending Mail::Webmail::Gmail and otherwise reverse engineering GMail when I suddenly lost all contact to all Google properties. Of course I immediately donned my tinfoil hat and started protesting this kind of nuclear counterattack from the evil eye of Google, I mean - they should be able to handle a little criticism, but it appears I was not exactly alone.

Google's web accelerator is easily the most controversial "enhancement" to the current technological infrastructure of the web since VeriSigns abominable Sitefinder. Web apps are breaking left, right and center due to overzealous prefetching. Reports aren't in yet on the extra bandwidth cost for content providers incurred by same prefetching. And furthermore it seems the application itself is a mess, sending different people the same cached session dependent cached pages from webapplications.
[UPDATE: This problems may only be a problem by appearance, as reported here]
As is written down all over the place, the broken webapps are probably not coded in true RESTian fashion but breaking them seems to be a violation of the 'liberal in what you'll accept, strict in what you send' philosophy that keeps the entire internet running.

This wouldn't be so bad if it was just happening to a few people, but this is backed by Google. It's like if the biggest automaker in the world promised all customers a free exchange of their current car with a Hummer or some similar "I Own The Road" gas-guzzler. A nightmare.
Alternate fave analogy: It's like Mr Burns planning to block out the sun so his nuclear plant will make more money.

Nej vi er ikke i en moske på Nørrebro, men derimod i en baptistkirke i North Carolina. Ifølge præsten der er Bush Guds kandidat som præsident.

Gapingvoid: The market is for "Flow" is larger than the market for "Hierarchy".
I think the important thing to say in answer to that is this doesn't mean that the market for Hierarchy isn't exploding as well.

If I don't stop to worry too much about what Gapingvoid's line means then I think you can say it's why Doc Searls has a point that we need a broader definition of 'capable' than merely IQ. Flow isn't what they teach in school. They teach hierarchy.
Unfortunately, another thing Searls is close to doing is subscribing to the "All the hard things have already been done anyway" argument. This usually goes something like this "Tech is over. You need people who can apply and communicate the pre-existing smart things in the world - the future belongs to the storytellers".
This is extremely untrue. The world has never had a bigger market for razor smart people, and they are actually doing things they wouldn't be able to do if they weren't razor smart. In the technical fields the numbers are unmistakeable: if you were clever in elementary school, you'll do better in secondary school and then you'll do better at university and it's just not true that the skills you're graded on at university don't translate to performance later on in life. IF you're in the business of being razor smart, that is.

What is true is that there are other routes to being capable, and another market for another kind of capability than razor smarts, and that the market for these other kinds of capability is also growing rapidly, possibly even faster than the market for razor smarts. It's also true that the business of razor smarts is in much higher danger of being outsourced to low-vage countries than the business of flow and communication. Communication is high touch you can't very well do it from afar.

Sam Ruby gør os opmærksom på at idag er den amerikanske haiku dag (5/7/5). Vi kommer til at vente to måneder på den danske.

Major news in Longhorn: A Red Screen of Death. Is that a communist Red Screen of Death or a republican Red Screen of Death I wonder?
Or is it quite simply a Masque of Red Death?

As previously mentioned I wasn't impressed by backpack. Other people are, mainly because of the email integration. To me that feature is much better when just emulated with GMail. What you get is a responsive AJAX interface, spam and virus filtering, lightning fast search, tons of storage and a price tag of $0 per year for as many pages as you like as long as you stay under 2GB of total storage.

Here's what you do - it's just 2 easy steps

1. Create a label on your GMail account called e.g. gpack
   
2. Create a filter for email to you+gpack+securitytoken@gmail.com - set label gpack, remove from inbox
   

"But GMail doesn't provide public permalinks to messages", I hear you cry.
This is why I'm working on GPack, a miniature email backed wiki implementation. It support textile formatting and automated updates when your GPack is updated via email. It'll be done real soon.

A short while ago I commented on Infoworlds adoption of del.icio.us as a watershed moment in killing the ridiculous notion of "deep links". I am unsure if this was foretold in that mightee prophecee of The Web 2.0 known as The Cluetrain Manifesto under the banner "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" or if indeed the concept of "deep links" was an attack of an advancing expeditionary force from Fort Business, striking back at the hyperlinks laying siege outside the firewall, only to fall unavoidably when finally the Free Army of the Links brought unto the Fort the mighty war machine of The Tag?

Og månedens klart bedste blogpost er en serie af 3 om hvorfor politikere som John Kerry (og Frank Jensen) ikke kan vinde.
Den bedste: Learn to say Ain't - hvis de ikke tror på dig, ikke har lyst til at høre på dig eller simpelthen ikke kan lide dig kan du ikke vinde.
Og nr 2: Senate Quicksand - om hvorfor man ikke kommer til at ligne en god leder ved at have været et værdsat medlem af en gruppe med et problematisk ry i mange år.
Og endelig konklusionen, nr. 3: Svar på indvendinger af samme type som Mogens Lykketofts "Vi havde vundet hvis fagbevægelsen havde støttet os og medierne havde givet os en fair behandling". I fik en fair behandling. I får den idag. Hvis vælgerne kunne lide Mogens Lykketoft havde de stemt på Socialdemokratiet i langt højere grad end de gjorde.

Bemærk også at det her med om folk kan lide dig ikke handler om at lave "en Sprunk-Jansen" (hvem glemmer nogensinde den detroniserede Lundbeck kejsers "Min kone siger jeg er en god elsker"), eller om at få smartere tøj (nej det var ikke Gucci tasken der vandt) eller om at 'dumme dit budskab ned'. De skal kunne lide dig - ikke noget du gør dig til. Det er jo ikke fordi vælgerne ligefrem synes Anders Fogh virker som en god kammerat de godt kunne tænke sig et slag kort med nede på havnen over en stille bajer. De tror bare på ham. Og det kan de godt lide at gøre.

Bonus link til selv: En tidligere post om Lykketofts katastrofale talent for at connecte.

Incident to the previous post, you might enjoy Larry Wall interviewed here on perl as a glue language and perl people as glue people (no it's not a glue-sniffing pun), multi paradigm aware integrators of things.
As I thought about that it struck me how very apt the term 'glue language' is in the case of perl. Often when you're trying to stick things together with glue you find that the glue ends up sticking to you instead in a big mess. Perl does that sometimes.

In usability and software design there's an informal design meme called paving cowpaths which is a kind of retroactive design philosophy where you nail the design down late after observing how people actually use what you're designing and adapting your design to that.
Some frown on this as a kind of 'undesign', others embrace it (and others yet again would combine the two by calling perl 'undesign')
There's an incident apocryphal story on how a university campus was built without footpaths. Instead the designers just let people walk and only later paved the natural paths people had worn into the campus lawns. As is typical of this kind of urban legend various people add various actual universites to the story to spice it up.
Jon Udell mentioned this fact in a recent blogpost and I went looking for any true story I could find and it turns out there actually is one. Peter Merholz has the good post on the subject. First off, a delightful collections of photos from a campus that actively tries to prevent this kind of design, but in the comments a solid reference to this book in which Cristopher Alexander - father of pattern languages - apparently tell the story of actually doing this when building a campus for The University of Oregon.

Det er mere end min køkkenblog har brug for, sådan rent powermæssigt, men Orions nye 98 servers cluster kan faktisk være i mit kosteskab, og trækker ikke mere strøm end man kan klare med en enkelt sikring derhjemme.

Det er en skam at prisen ikke er fulgt med ned - maskinen koster 500.000-600.000 kr, hvilket er nogenlunde i størrelsesorden med det det ville koste hvis man skulle lave en langt større, mere strømslugende udgave selv af ca 50 pentium 4 processorer. Det er 4-5 gange så meget som prisen for en IBM Blue Gene maskine per GFlop.
Med hensyn til GFlops/Watt så er ydelsen ca 0.1 GFlop/Watt for hele systemet (100 GFlops mod 1500W). Vi er et sykke vej fra hjernens efficiens og også et stykke vej fra Blue Genes efficiens som er ca 0.2 GFlop/Watt. Et almindeligt PC system med Pentium processorer ville bruge måske 5KW for den samme ydelse.
Afhængig af hvordan man anslår hjernens beregningskraft så er dens efficiens noget i retning af 10.000 GFlop/Watt.

(Alle Blue Gene facts fra denne pdf)

While I can see the point of Basecamp ("The simplest thing that could possibly work" for project management), Backpack seems utterly pointless. It's an "almost wiki" where each wikipage consists of multiple data items, combined with a TODO list. Pages have access controls and there's a simple email=>wiki update feature where you can do an edit to a wiki page by sending an email.
Augmented wikis are done better elsewhere.
Parts of the application simply shouldn't have been released, since they are clearly not done yet. The "email this page" feature is horribly implemented. First of all - to email a page you have to use a special "email key" as the address. Having a hard to remember email address to keep track of outside your personal organiser application kind of defeats the purpose of an organiser, no? There are simpler and better ways to handle the security issues of email, e.g. the way JotSpot does the it. And when you do send an email to a page, what you get is an embedded subject line, which links to a page with this inviting look. Incidentally, I did not set up this page to be public. Access control just isn't working yet for embedded email.
There's no easy to find search for your data. I thought GMail had made that mandatory for this kind of application.

The most impressive thing is the hype/content ratio on this project - almost enterprise grade. The hypefest here really tested my gag reflex.
But the worst thing is actually this: I don't think the 37 signallers realize they just created a "me too" product of the worst kind. There is nothing new here that isn't in several open source packages and/or one of the other social software products. No convincing extra simplicity, no fresh new UI ideas.

Tech jobs obviously aren't safe any more. Off-shoring has commoditized this kind of work. You need something extra. But now, shockingly, it turns out that even entrepeneurship is not enough - indeed you can buy it at low prices on Ebay.

Fantastisk revue af rige New Yorker kvinder der spiser fantastiske frokoster, går med fantastiske hatte og har fantastiske navne som Barbie Bancroft, Fe Fendi, Monica von Zadora-Gerlof og Bambi Belaguernniere.
Ivana er der også.

En lille mellemnote: Nummereringen passer ikke helt, men idag passerede classy.dk 1500 posts. et par uger før bloggens 3 års jubilæum. Det er noget med 1.5 posts om dagen i 3 år.Uhyggelig tanke egentlig.

Idag fra TV2 nyhederne, ikke tekst TV, og så er det jo nok med vilje og tæller ikke rigtig:

Nægter mishandling
Tilstår tortur
Himmelhøj pris

Denneher kunne også have heddet: "Gamle mænd i nye biler", eller alternativt "I Kia spiser de hunde".

(og jeg er paranoid nok til at tro jeg sendes hemmelige budskaber)

The NY Times carries a story on the pompous, self righteous jerk who gloatingly takes credit for Microsoft's backing down from supporting an anti-discrimination bill.
He sounds like a completely horrible person and a perfect example of all that is wrong with conservative "god fearing" christianity, wielding his faith like a blunt weapon in a crusade that sounds more like it's about furthering himself than his faith.

Det ser ud som om Reboot bliver større end sidst, hvor det godt nok også var en noget lukket forsamling. Incl speakers er der allerede omkring 100 tilmeldte og der er stadig over en måned til arrangementet løber af stablen. Af dem er omkring 90% mænd. Trist. Så kunne man jo ligeså godt tage til linux konference.

Overvægt øger risikoen for senil demens ifølge New Scientist.

As a counterpoint to the previous post, clearly the layers on layers remix culture of the 90s and naughties has provided something new. My personal pet example is the Charlie Don't Surf T-shirt. It combines a picture of the serial killer Charles Manson with the Apocalypse Now movie quote. Axl Rose used to wear it on tour.
To get the full effect of that T-shirt you really need to be up on your pop culture: You need to recognize Manson and know his name. You need to recognize the movie quote. And then you need to ground both of these quotes on a drug fuelled early 70s pop culture and recognize the wild disconnect in the two references.
A lot to ask of drunk rock fans.

It is extremely unsurprising in these anti-elite, revisionist times that a book is coming out with the thesis that low culture is good for you. By low culture is meant stuff like video games and television. There was a long excerpt of the book in NYT recently.
I am as great a fan of televison as anyone, and I watch a lot of it, I grew up on it, along side all the books and all the music. In spite of that, I have to say that the argument given seems wildly self serving.
First of all the characterization of numerous shows as "complex therefore good" is extremely superficial. '24', 'ER' and even 'The West Wing' is every bit as formulaic as lesser shows. Watching these shows you're constantly 'gaming the formula' instead of just enjoying the show, simply because the formula is so limited that you have plenty of spare time while watching to just study the shows as formula. Maybe the first season of a show is new, but it rarely goes beyond that.
Second, the assertion that "information rich" is better is obviously bogus. I think it is pretty clear that you don't get smarter watching modern day satellite or networked news shows with an anchor in the foreground and 2-3 info areas of the screen constantly updating you with competing facts. You're getting tons of information, but none fo that is of high quality. Information isn't knowledge and it doesn't induce smarts. In fact some studies suggest it has as negative an impact on intelligence as smoking cannabis.

It's a shame really, because the "TV is dangerous" argument is even more ridiculous.

If one were to give a succesful argument that television and games make you smarter it would have to be another argument, namely that these new media gives you access to tremendously efficient new means of communication that foster new modes of thought. Some examples: In Denmark most adults undere the age of 50 speak some kind of understandable English. I am willing to bet money that school is only part of the explanation and that years of native language english absorbed through television is the real reason.
Similarly, video games have fostered an expectancy of being able to influence the action, instead of just being a bystander. Clearly this is a good thing.

Software udgaven af undgå mængder.

Here's a story on the chilling effects of DRM. Microsoft wants you, the consumer (and that's what you are, not a user), back in the box. What you have is more interesting television, not a general purpose computer. Granted, it's a partisan view but free culture has never been more important.

It's difficult to distinguish the conspiracy theories from the legitimate problems here, but just as government budgets rapidly decaying into bankruptcy may be construed by some as a deliberate attempt to undermine social security and 'big government' so one understands that viruses, spam and science fiction nightmares like botnets, armies of zombie PC's taken over by organized crime, may be construed as the excuse needed to introduce widespread crippling of the rights you have to your own computing equipment,
It may simply not be in Microsoft's interest to combat viruses effectively as long as the virus threat can be used to bootstrap total DRM onto the Windows platform.

It took 36 hours, but my Google tag search seeding worked. I can now search for johnny within tag 'googlehacks'.
Time to get busy with the automation of the RSS seeding.