The Quiet Earth - Off-Topic

Language Log: Translating leadership, creating verbiage

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:37:08 +0200

Language Log: Translating leadership, creating verbiage
"Translating thought leadership...creating business results"

Wonderful, just wonderful! I've nothing to add to it, actually.

What Kind Of Weather Are You?

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 10:49:13 +0100

You Are Lightning

Beautiful yet dangerous

People will stop and watch you when you appear

Even though you're capable of random violence

You are best known for: your power

Your dominant state: performing

What Type of Weather Are You?

Merry Christmas

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 22:42:29 +0100

Not that I'm religious in any way, but happy end-of-year festivities and a happy new year to all of you.

Databases and Normalization

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:35:41 +0100

Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) use special forms to keep data from being kept redundant: normalized tables. If you're like me, you haven't memorized or completely understood normalization up to now.
If you do, however, want or even need to know how it works and enjoy cat content in blogs, you might want to reference Azundris' Introduction. German version available as well.

Stupidity, Applied

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:21:55 +0100

Isn't it amazing how stupid some people can be? I did get some business cards from an organization I'm member of. They managed to put not one, not two, not even three but four errors into two lines of the cards. And, of course, they did not send me a version ahead to check for mistakes. I now have about 100 or 200 business cards that are worthless. They did cost money, both for printing and sending them across the Pond from the USA. Go figure.

The mistakes were: instead of "Trienter Str." they wrote "Tricenter Str.", the number was changed from "6b" to "66", the city was mis-spelled from "Kempten" to "Kempton" and the region "Allgäu" was spelled "Allgu". I can understand the last mistake as they were printed in the USA and they have no idea anyway how to create those darn Umlauts, but that's about all. The rest is simple stupidity. Oh my.

I have the cards printed locally now. Even though the printer is just around the corner (literally) they did communicate with me by email and sent the preliminary sheets before starting to print.

Evil Is Who Evil Does

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:16:34 +0100

As Germany's best known for it's organizational talent (which always make we wonder whether I really am German, but that's another story), which some also prefer to call bureaucracy I'm very happy to have stumbled upon a nice manual on how to drive administrative officials into stark raving madness.

German only, so if you don't understand the language, I'm sorry, but you're outta luck.

Fachsimpler-Test

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:03:41 +0100

The Fachsimpler-Test is a test by one of Germany's larger political (?) magazines, Der Spiegel (or rather their online counterpart, Spiegel Online). It is a test aimed at helping school students to find out what subject they should take at University.

ToJe, Zugschlus and Thildkröte all took the test and found large differences between their field of interest/work and the suggested subject of their studies. The test should be taken with a grain of salt as we all are slightly older and experienced than we were right after school, but, well, it's quite interesting to see the discrepancies.

Thinking about it the result is not that far off: I am a generalist with a broad spectrum of interests after all.

The Dangers of Inference

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 01:47:15 +0100

Here I am, taking a strong stance about government agencies that collect data and use inference to think about what it might possibly mean. There's no lack of wrong inferring to be done that way, starting from false assumptions about coherence of incoherent data or by simply interpreting too much into too little data.

And suddenly I find myself here, doing exactly the same: thinking F-Secure jumped on the bandwagon of Mark Russinovich's posting at sysinternals for their excellent work of analyzing the Sony DRM Rootkit. Independently, I should say, because that is what they did. They did not, however, manage to make it clear how they got wind of the thing (which they did earlier than Russinovich and were in contact with Sony to discuss the issue). After Mark published his findings, F-Secure thought it was now time to publish theirs, too.

Can't blame them, really. I blame myself, however, for jumping to unjustified conclusions. Ah well, as I said: inference is bad.

The difference a year makes

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 23:03:33 +0200

In 2004 DARPA issued the first Grand Challenge: having fully autonomous vehicles run a challenging (sic!) course. The best vehicle ran into a ditch after 12 km and caught fire.

This year, however, things were to be a bit different: five vehicles from 23 reached the finish. The best one was the Stanford team with a stock Volkswagen Touareg R5 TDI motor. Congrats!

[Links will be added later]

Silly 'droids

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 18:50:34 +0200

Okay, I know it's silly. However, some things I just can't pass...

Drowning

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 09:32:12 +0200

Be advised that this blog might just be offline for some time. We are experiencing heavy rain and the local river, the Iller, has already flooded parts of the area. Downtown Kempten is in serious danger of getting flooded, too.
While we wisely decided to live up on the surrounding hills it might well be that the electrical power company or the telecommunication provider can't guarantee my uptime. I'll try to get some pictures for those curious enough .

Update: So, we obviously survived. For the curious, the local newspaper has a few pictures available.

Google Ads on this blog

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 10:25:13 +0200

I've added Google Ads to this blog down below in the sidebar. It's a test and I'm not sure if I want it yet. However, the advantage of Google Ads is that the text ads aren't annoying and intrusive and it's only two of 'em. I don't even expect them to generate much revenue (if any at all).
Let me know if you think that's silly or if it annoys you (and if so, why).

Thanks for reading - And Now To Something Completely Different™.

Off-Topic: Google Moon

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 12:27:26 +0200

Matching the 20th anniversary of Man's landing on the Moon Google has added Moon maps.

Nothing too spectacular, one would think. However, try to zoom to the largest zoom factor.

The Institute of Backup Trauma

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:08:50 +0200

Thanks to lilit for the pointer to a hilarious commercial ad starring John Cleese of Monty Python fame.
I don't know the featured company nor its products so I don't endorse them. However, I found that video too hilarious not to share it.

Too bad I don't understand lilit's language.

Winn Schwartau Mac-ified

nospam@example.com (Axel Eble) — Fri, 27 May 2005 09:02:48 +0200

In Mad as Hell: Why Over The Top? Winn Schwartau tells about his switch to the Mac.
However, my own experience shows that Apple is pressing equally hard at not having to exchange hardware. When the mainboard (or the internal 128 MB RAM) on my iBook were b0rken (right from the start, it showed intermittent kernel panics that couldn't be traced back to the third party RAM or any software I had installed), they kept running me through test upon test (reinstalling and running a clean OS etc.) until I finally sent it in for a check. They, of course, didn't find anything (as the panics came very intermittently - sometimes three in a row, sometimes none in three weeks) and charged me with their service fee.
I then wrote a complaint and mailed it in (snail mail this time - it shows that I feel it important enough to not only write it but put it in an envelope, put a stamp on and walk to the post office to get it mailed out to which they at last agreed to exchange the Logic Board. It was a major hassle and I'm still waiting for the refund on the service fee I paid for the exchange of the Logic Board itself. So, whenever you're dealing with HW problems, companies usually don't trust your expertise - no matter if it's Apple, Dell, Sony or whatever.

All in all, however, I'm very very satisfied with my Macs.