Outside

How do you know it’s election time? Election time = poster time!

Most of those posters are pretty lame and they do not bother me. But some really make me think. Is it really useful to tell the people that climate protection looks different? Or that democracy looks different? We all know that driving to our place of work in a car is not climate protection and being stuck in a traffic jam isn’t either.

But what is the alternative? Telling people to boost public transport is fine, but how? Talking about a prohibition of SUVs in Vienna’s inner districts is fine but kind of the wrong signal for workers in Graz, who are manufacturing SUVs to pay for the lives of their families.

McAfee is still not able to opt me out from their Avert Dat Release Mailing list. I wrote the first email to their customer support on the 6th of December, nearly one month ago.

I’m subscribed to some mailing lists about parallel programming and MPI (which I needed for my bachelor thesis). People on these mailing lists are great, helpful and the whole experience is just dulled by the actual mailing list. Here’s why:

• You will get tons and tons of emails once you are subscribed (you’ll only read ten percent of it because you have dozens of other mails in your inbox)
• You will never be able to gain knowledge about the subject from past conversations because they are either not searchable or hidden behind monthly archive links.
• Even if you’re actively following a conversation, it’s difficult because your mail program will not put them in the right order.
• Did I say that you get loads of email?

• My website seems to be blazingly fast at the moment. Could it be that the move of the cluster which I’m on to a new data center is the reason for that? Hope that it stays like that.

• It sucks when Google is down (I think I’ve used that clause already on this blog, it sounds so familiar). Nearly everything I do in the web starts at the top right of my browser window.

• Movable Type is Open Source! I remember the day when I switched from MT to Wordpress because they started charging money for their software.

• I’ve written some wonderful code today. More on that some time later.

Since I have a Macintosh I don’t care about my McAfee virus scanner on my XP machine anymore. If it updates it’s good but I’m not afraid of viruses anymore. Which got me to the point of wanting to cancel my subscription to the AVERT_DAT_Release mailing list. Opting out seems to be so easy, just send a blank email to defined address. But McAfee won’t hear me and does not answer my support requests.

McAfee, can you hear me?

…especially when I have a subscription and pay good money for my newspaper. Although I like Nespresso advertisements in general, too much is too much - and too black.

I’ve never watched Big Brother or any other real life soap. They featured dull people who hoped to get some fame, publicity and maybe money.

But at least since Tumblr has started, I found some interesting Tumblr’s. I do not say that all people who’re using Tumblr or any other form of weblog or “what’s happening in my life” wanna get famous or do it just for publicity, but some are clearly streamlined to draw some interest. Which is fine. It’s not so that I pay money for it or I can’t switch away from it.

It’s merely appealing to read about some really smart guy living in New York, founding a kick-ass web service and leaving it all behind, including his girlfriend. Every day, every post, is like a two-part TV series where the real action just stops, the screen fades to black and you read ‘To be continued…’ and you have to sit in front of the TV at the exact same time a week later to see what will happen next. God damn, how I hate that thing.

One problem with really good software is that when it fails, you’re really lost because it worked like a charm and you never looked for alternatives. Luckily it’s not about Word, which you really need to write Word documents, it’s about TeX, which only requires a texteditor to write it (can generate it later, the deadline is still far away).

I somehow rearranged my workspace today so that my LCD is now in front of me and my notebook resides on my right, which makes working a whole lot more comfortable.

Problem is that I have to use my old keyboard again which is pretty loud and just doesn’t feel right. So I gonna buy an Apple keyboard as soon as I’ll be home again (gonna leave for Corsica tomorrow morning). I checked Amazon for prices (I know, there’s the Apple store) and stumbled over a little detail which bugged me for some time now: The typeface of the search field.

Have you noticed that most parts of Amazon’s website use a sans-serif type but the searchbox uses a fixed font, which is, at least on my WinXP box, Times New Roman. That makes the whole thing look a bit ugly and old. Any plans to change this, Amazon?

I started reading Behance about three months ago when I discovered an article titled Tip: Surround Yourself With Progress (which is a great tip, by the way, gonna do it for the writing of my bachelor thesis).

Anyway, today I discovered a neat little icon at the bottom of an article at Behance which I find really creative and motivating for the author: The Appreciate button. It basically does what it says, click it and you gonna appreciate the article - looks like some sort of mini-Digg. I very much like the idea behind this, seems to be a reasonable method for me, who can’t stand all those Digg buttons on blogs.