I've been in love with computer animation since my VIC-20 in 1984. "A Gentlemen's Duel" is a bit more sophisticated than the animations of that time, and a lot funnier:
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIPGXc7EjF4])
You don't need to do the math: I've lost 7 kg so far. The secret of my recent weight loss: mountain hiking burns lots, lots, lots of calories! Just make sure you refill at least as much is needed to keep upright. :-)
Carolin and I loved the hiking so much that we decided to do some more over the summer. We're living right in Black Forest after all, so it really isn't hard to find a slopy way to use our new hiking boots for some hours. We won't climb summits, but we'll enjoy nature, spend time together and burn away unnecessary weight.
For the first time after the mountain tour, I went running this morning. I had to take a short break after 15 minutes, but I'm sure to be in shape to keep running for half an hour soon, even in the hillside. If my knees don't act up. Update: I just found RunningMap and immediately documented my route
So, everything is fine on the health front. Bye bye, belly fat!
First, there was Twitter And it became the first networking tool I really used intensively. But it also became my micro blogging platform that has a negative impact on my blogging frequency to this day.
Then, the Facebook hype started. I knew Facebook since I started having contacts in Ireland because Facebook and Bebo are the biggest social platforms for students there. But because my college times are 10 years gone, my interest soon vanished. Over the recent weeks, it was rekindled, though, with Facebook taking the world of non-students by storm. Heavily connected to the world of German early adopters via Twitter, I watched everyone proclaiming their Facebook account. Still, I resisted. Did I really need another distraction, especially if this new social time waster is a walled garden that doesn't allow peeks from the outside? Furthermore, on XING, I already am a member of a business networking platform.
Well, I couldn't stand the virtual peer pressure any more. I now have a Facebook account and started build my friends list.
Of course, I found a way to rationalize this step: Facebook will be my international networking platform where I can foster my contacts all over the world. This way, it will be a fine complement to Twitter.
As the Ninja says: I'm looking forward to friending you soon! Yee-Ya!
Today is Sysadmin Appreciation Day, the day where you're especially invited to tell your IT crowd where they're doing a good job. I'm embarassed that I forgot it myself, so I'm not in the position to criticize all the colleagues at my workplace that forgot it, too. Of course, I made an entry in my calendar, and dear customer department (you know who you are), you better do, too. Also, if you need some inspiration on how to show your appreciation of our hard work, find some useful hints here.
For the german users that have a catholic education: Find the melody to sing the headline of the article on Heise Online in "Gotteslob", no. 258.
This is great! The scale now displays 95 kg. It's in the upper area of 95 kg, but let's not be overexact. I wasn't exactly 100 kg when I started fatblogging, so I can claim to have lost 5 kg of body weight so far. I have to admit that I dreaded weighing myself this time, because I hadn't been that strong lately when it came to sweets. But seeing that I reached 95 nonetheless, I feel extra idiotic because I could have achieved even more weight loss by not caving in to my cravings.
Apart from sabotaging my fatblogging success, I managed quite well to separate the intake of carbohydrates from the one of fat. I really haven't changed my diet drastically, I just try to rule out food that combines fat and sugar/starch. This doesn't affect my breakfast, because I use to have sweet breakfast with bread, honey and jam. I don't like eating sausages or bacon this early anyway. By having my muesli with fat-reduced yogurt, I bend the rules a bit; I think I can afford that. For lunch, I have to be a bit more careful. Our company restaurant usually mixes noodles or potatoes with meat and a sauce made of oil and starch -- totally off-limits. If there's noodles with vegetables, I ask to leave the sauce. Today, at the Chinese restaurant, I chose the buffet lunch, which gave me the opportunity to take some meat with vegetables and hot sauce but no rice. So, in summary, there are two alternatives: first, carbohydrates from rice, potatoes or noodles with vegetables and, on the other hand, fat from meat, sauce etc. with vegetables. With a bit of looking around, those aren't too hard to find.
My running progress is steady. Today, I ran my route for the last time divided into three parts of 9 minutes running and 2 minutes walking. Next time, there will be only two halves with 14 minutes of running and a short walking break in between. That's actually the last phase before running 30 minutes in one go! Unfortunately, the weather has been really bad in the morning most of the days lately. If there's just slight drizzle like this morning, I don't mind. But I don't like risking my health by running in the pouring rain. I hope that the sun will fulfill its summer duty reliably again soon, as I'm slowly getting into summer shape!
I've been a Genesis fan for at least 20 years now, unfortunately I wasn't there in the early years when Peter was still with Phil, Mike and Tony. I've never had, or at least taken, the chance to go to a concert, but I've watched the video footage of several of their tours. When my friend Jürgen made me aware that Genesis was coming to Hannover in June, I immediately got tickets.
So last Saturday, I took the train to Hannover to meet Jürgen at his sister's place. Isabel, who is also my ex-girlfriend, lives in Hannover -- a convenient coincidence. Unfortunately, Carolin wasn't able to find a lift. Paying more than 200 for the train ride would have been over the top, so she decided reluctantly to sell the ticket and stay at home. When I left on Saturday morning, I didn't mind her staying home very much, because we had had a bit of an argument at breakfast.
After meeting up with Isabel and Jürgen and having some ice cream at one of Hannover's best ice cream parlors, he and I made our way to the AWD Arena, Hannover's football stadium where the concert took place. There were people all around the place that helped you find your way, very nice. We had been sitting on our seats (yes, I seem to be in the age where one appreciates not having to stand for 4 hours in a row) for about an hour when the band finally came on stage -- and the rain started to pour down. We had a glass ceiling above us, but the people on the field who had no rain coat, no tarp and no umbrella must have got awfully wet.
Genesis started with the theme song of their tour, "Turn It On Again", and I was immediately amazed of the sound and their stage technology. Before, only the two elliptical screens on the far left and right of the stage had been used for video, but now I realized that the whole stage background wall was one huge video screen! Even before saying his first words to the crowd (or should I say "to the Krauts"?), Phil Collins made everyone smile by sporting a sweater of Hannover 96, the local soccer team. He held his introduction in German, which heightened the spirits of the soaking wet audience another bit. One could tell he wasn't happy with the weather, either.
But after their third song or so, the clouds disappeared and the sun came out again. From this point on, our mood got better and better, everyone was having fun. Oh, and talking about the people -- this was one of the rare events apart from family reunions where I didn't raise the age average. In fact, there were only a few teenagers in the audience; probably most of them accompanied their parents (and thus created the opposite situation of a Robbie Williams concert). It was funny to watch a father in the row before me getting more excited than his seventeen year old son beside him and his wife.
When they brought on "Hold On My Heart", I realized that I was missing Carolin and how stupid our morning argument had been. So I just called her number on my cell phone and let her listen to the whole song. It was too loud to talk, but there was no need for words, anyway.
Genesis played a nice mix of songs, from classics like "Home By The Sea" over "Land of Confusion" to the encore "We Can't Dance". Experiencing their older songs live for the first time made me realize that Phil Collins just isn't Peter Gabriel. Peter simply has another vibe around himself, and Phil's interpretation, while really not bad, seemed to me almost like cover versions. This feeling was especially strong over their last song "Carpet Crawlers" which they ended their gig with after more than 2 hours of nonetheless great music.
I enjoyed the concert very much and I'm glad that I had the opportunity to witness Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks, completed by Daryl Stuermer and Chester Thompson, turning it on again.
Update: Jürgen sent me a link to this video slide show with photo impressions from the concert. Thanks!
When I started using my iPod for running, I bought the Sennheiser OMX 70 headphones because they're made especially for athletes. They have adjustable clip-on earphones and are sweat- and water-resistant. But over time, I discovered two problems. First, they're not as rugged as they should be. A few weeks ago, one of the cables got twisted and tore open right at the earphone. And yesterday, the grip of the plug got loose.
I already had a replacement, because there's a second issue I had with the OMX 70: because the earbuds hang outside over the ears, not inside the ears, they don't irritate them -- but they irritate the people around me on the train if I turn the volume up too much. And I hate being an annoyance that people have to ask to please turn down my music.
That's why I bought the AKG Acoustics K 324 P in-ear headphones. They were advertised as having a great sound and effectively blocking outside noise. And that's true. When I made my first steps outside with them on, I almost walked into a car because I couldn't hear it coming. (I normally rely quite heavily on my hearing when I'm in traffic.) If you press them slightly into your ear canal (and there are three different sets of rubber buds to fit many ears), outside noise gets almost completely blocked, and on the other hand, the music only goes into your head, not into the environment. And when I apply a bit more pressure, I even get the feeling that there's a kind of suction that keeps the earbuds tight in the ear.
There could even be an effect on battery life, because while with the Sennheisers I had to fullly turn up the iPod when I was listening to a podcast in traffic, the AKG earbuds get really loud already at the half setting.
After the first day of using the K 324 P as an Environmental Stupidity Shield on the train and in the office, I can really recommend them. Let's hope they last longer than their predecessors.
When it was time to upgrade my work laptop to a newer Linux distribution some months ago, I decided to install Kubuntu 6.06. I've been using the "Dapper Drake" release on my web servers for more than half a year now and never had any problems. The combination of Debian tools and Ubuntu application repositories is awesome.
When I realized on Friday that some applications only come in packages for newer Ubuntu versions, I decided to ditch the Long Term Support release and try to upgrade to Kubuntu "Edgy Eft" 6.10. At first, I wasn't sure if I'd regret starting an upgrade on an Friday afternoon, but soon gave in to the challenge.
Having a really big pipe at work has its advantages. After issuing the apt-get dist-upgrade, it took exactly 3 minutes and 31 seconds to download the 1002MB of upgrade packages. Installing them took about an hour and went without a flaw, but when the system finally rebooted, I got a mild shock that my encrypted home volume (that I didn't take the time to backup, of course) didn't get mounted. A little web search revealed that the kernel options "quiet" and "splash" prevented the passphrase necessary to decrypt the data from being displayed. Removing both options from /boot/grub/menu.lst took away the pretty boot splash screen but the problem, too.
My desktop looks a a whole lot more shiny now. I could finally install Firefox 2 from the official repositories, and when it first encountered a Flash applet, I was surprised to be able to download and activate the plugin successfully with just one mouse click. I was used to having to do a manual download and installation. As easily, I replaced GAIM with its successor Pidgin, so my online life has an up-to-date foundation again. WiFi and Bluetooth continued working without a change.
This upgrade went even faster and more smoothly than I had expected. You just have to love Ubuntu Linux. Knowing myself, it probably won't be long until I make the next step up to "Feisty Fawn".
I still don't fully get that fatblogging concept yet, but at least it really seems to work: I'm now down to 96kg. And that's all I expect, so I wonder if I should waste my time trying to find out if it's fatblogging frequency, entry length or another factor that makes me lose weight. We'll see if the secret will eventually be lifted.
On the jogging front, I'm now at five 5-minute running segments, each followed by a minute of walking. I'm doing quite well -- although I have to run slightly uphill, I often miss the breaks, running 6 or more minutes. Following the advice in my running guide, if I feel like doing more, I run longer than the half hour in the plan, instead of increasing my speed. The weather is great at the moment and it feels really good to do my early morning route under the rising sun, in fresh air and the quietness of just nature and me.
Nutrition-wise, there are rare phases when I just can't resist buying my beloved fruit gums. But many times, I realize it's just my weaker self trying to take control, and I fight it successfully. Separating carbohydrates from fat sometimes is a challenge, since neither our company restaurant nor the restaurants in the neighborhood offer many dishes that don't mix noodles, dough or potatoes with oil or fat. My best bet always are salads (sometimes with turkey breast or other meat, but I always leave the bread untouched) or completely vegetarian dishes. Since those can be delicious, too, I don't mind the diet change.
So, everything is fine on the weight loss and fitness front. And hopefully, the motivation I gain from this success will result in a self-energizing circle!
Flickr seems to be concerned with the morality of us Germans:
Note: If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so wont be able to turn SafeSearch off.
Well, we're glad censorship is more or less history in our country, thank you very much!
My Flickr Pro subscription ends in July. If this censorship won't be removed, my subscription is certainly not going to be continued.
Another kilo has vanished! Should I test if, in fatblogging, weight loss is proportional to entry length?
It's almost as if my mind is losing weight with my body: the Günter book made me realize that my weaker self has much more control over myself than is good for me. But since I learned about the dangerous interplay between carbohydrates, fat, Insulin and glycogen, I choose my diet much more carefully. I eat wholemeal bread instead of croissants, low-fat cream cheese instead of camembert, and fruits instead of sweets. It's a really liberating feeling to wrest more and more control from Günter, my weaker self. The 10 Euro for the book were one of my best investments this year.
Today, I ran a different route that has a fewer inclination and everything went according to my buildup plan (now three-minute runs with one minute of walking in between). I found a beautiful way along a little brook under trees, only three minutes from our house! It's slightly uphill, but very managable. Since there aren't many people out at 5:30, it's just me and nature. Maybe I should leave the iPod at home.
Hey, this fatblogging really works! I've lost 2 kilos, just by writing the first entry! This is great.
I surely don't want to compromise that success by eating the wrong stuff, so I started to collect information about nutrition. And I experienced a revelation: on my way home, I come past the supermarket we always shop at. When I saw its sign today, some well-known cravings for sweets set in. I hesitated a little, but then gave in and bent off in direction of the shop. Just when I reached its doors, though, I realized that it was my weaker self that was driving me there. And, thanks to a great little book I just read, I now know the name of my weaker self: Günter So I gave Günter the mental finger and turned around to get home for some fat-reduced yogurt with fresh strawberries.
My morning run wasn't a full success, though. I had to admit that I'm not in the shape yet to run uphill for minutes. And Freiburg just isn't quite as flat as Philippsburg. Must be tectonics or something. Or maybe just the Black Forest. I'll look for a less challenging route.
A freely elected totalitarian government is something new, after all.
(Su-Shee 2.0, translated from German)
Many bloggers are overweight. That's no surprise, since sitting in front of the screen all day and living from pizza and coffee has never been regarded as a recipe to lose weight.
Now, a new weight loss plan is gaining ground among bloggers: Losing weight by writing about it. Yes, it may seem like a strange concept, but it seems to work with many, so I'm willing to give it a try. It's time I do something to shrink my belly, and it gets me a new topic to blog about.
My starting weight is 100kg, and I guess that's about 15kg too much. I guess I'd look at lot better with 85 kilos. Let's see how blogging my weight every few days will help me reach that goal.
On another note, I also started running again. It's embarrassing if climbing the stairs to our flat makes me breathe more heavily than a marathon winner. (I won't get into other situations where it's much more enjoyable to be in a good condition.) I'm using the starter plan of MyJogging.de again to get myself into shape: over the course of six weeks, I'll always run for half an hour. But that half hour gets broken into growing intervals, starting at two minutes of running followed by one minute of walking.
Trying to run in the evening after coming home from work won't be very successful. It's too hard for me to get going when I'm tired and digesting a lunch. So I decided to get up at 5:30 in the morning and start the day in running shoes, followed by a shower and a nice little breakfast.
I don't want to flood my blog with entries, you know, so I'll simply report about my running progress in the fatblogging entries. Mens sana in corpore sano. Let's work on that second part.
If you've been following my blog for a while then you know that I'm very interested in using Skype on my mobile phone. But so far, they broke all their promises to release a Symbian S60 version of the Skype client.
It seems it needed a third party vendor to step in and deliver: Fring Fring is a free communication software for S60 that you install on your phone. It then connects to several services if you enter your account credentials. Apart from Skype, there are also Google Talk, SIP and as the most recent addition, Twitter For Skype, Google Talk and Twitter, Fring also offers a chat function to exchange text messages.
The Fring client connects to their servers which in turn make a connection to Skype, Google, Twitter or the SIP contact you want to talk to.
So far, Fring works quite nicely on my Nokia E61. The voice quality over Skype is acceptable and by enabling me to also send instant messages from the same application makes Fring my single mobile communication hub. The only thing I'm afraid of is how running Fring will drain the phone's battery. But I'll see about that.
HulaLena made me go on a trip back to my childhood by asking some questions about Sesame Street
h3. What Sesame Street character did you find the coolest?
Lefty the Salesman ("Schlehmil"). I found it hilarious how Ernie always thwarted his attempts to sneakily sell an O like it was something forbidden.
h3. Whom didn't you like?
The grumpy "Herr Bödefeld" from the german insertions.
h3. Can you recite a song from Sesame Street? Which one?
I know the title song by heart, and both my brother and I still love to recite Hey diddle diddle, the cat has a fiddle, the cow jumps over the moon
h3. What tought you Sesame Street?
One of the most important things a teacher needs to know I learned from Grover ("Grobi"): you have to really make an effort if you want to teach people things. "Near... (running to the back) Far! (running to the front) Near... (huff huff huff) Far again!"
h3. When did you watch Sesame Street the last time?
I'm afraid that must be two decades ago. But I still like to watch The Muppets, especially the movies, e.g. "The Muppets Treasure Island" ("Not bad for an amphibian, hm?").
I pass this Stöckchen" on to "Carolin!.html and Kai
I never used Gentoo myself, but I'm hearing every now and then that Gentoo users tend to switch to Ubuntu once their learning curve flattens and the compile cycles become increasingly annoying. "I want to do work with my system, not on my system", some switchers say.
I've been using Kubuntu on my ThinkPad R52 laptop for months now and I'm totally satisfied. There are no complicated or time-consuming procedures to install new software. I just do apt-get install, and that's it. And from the "universe", "multiverse" and "medibuntu" repositories, I can get all the applications I need.
The same goes for my web servers. With Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I have everything I need to run web, mail, chat and other services. Thanks to "Long Time Support", I won't have to do an upgrade to a newer distribution version for years.
I've been a SuSE Linux user for many years, but now I guess I could become a Ubuntu Linux user for at least as long. And since I passed the "Learning Linux" phase long ago, I may never be inclined to try Gentoo...
The folks over at WebWorker Daily asked for a picture of my work space. No problem, here's where I work when I'm at home:
I also put a larger, annotated picture on Flickr
Alex, the Chief Happiness Officer, put a great illustration of the rat race we're always tempted to join in his blog. It was a revelation to me that I've been one of these rats during the recent weeks. Steadily getting more work, watching my to-do lists grow, trying to stay organized, failing in some cases, hurrying to correct those situations, losing focus on the important things and getting frustrated from missing the feeling of accomplishment. And all the while losing more and more energy, thus worsening this vicious circle. Now I know why they called that successful racing game "Burnout".
I decided to break the circle today. I wanted to concentrate on some topics that I should have finished long ago, without getting disturbed or distracted. That's why I decided to work from home today. Here I have everything I need -- a computer, a cup of tea and tranquility. The ideal environment to focus on the tasks at hand.
I started work half an hour early because I didn't have to commute and finished many tasks over the course of the morning that I tried to do all week in vain. But instead of feeling pressure and stress like on the days before, I feel more energized with every entry I'm able to cross out on my to-do list. I'm actually looking forward to the things I get to tackle after having some light lunch.
When you don't succeed, trying harder is not always the solution. Often it's trying something different.
Unvariedly, I’m all for a speaking interdiction in trains before 10, at least on work days.
Markus Kniebes, deep-resonance
Kamps[1] is the IKEA of bread.
Don Dahlmann, Irgendwas ist ja immer
fn1. A big bakery chain in Germany
Om Malik just published his three tips over on Web Worker Daily But while I found the new Twitter Mobile website a nice compromise for small screens, I don't think RSS feeds are the best alternative. Having to subscribe to every single one of all my Twitter friends' feeds is just too much effort for me. I think you should rather look for solutions that work with your original friend list.
Here are my suggestions:
First, there's always the IM channel. So, if you own a smartphone that has some Instant Messaging Software available (AFAIK that's at least true for S60, Windows Mobile and Palm), you can receive and send tweets this way.
And if you really want to get fancy, get a specialised Twitter software for mobile phones. If your phone is J2ME capable, you could try out Twitteresce, for example.
At the moment, I use Twitteresce and the Twitter Mobile website in turns to find out which suits me better. What's your favourite way of accessing Twitter when you're out under the big, yellow, evil ball?
Over the years, I've collected several principles that I find important for my management work. I consider myself a successful leader and my success is based in part on those principles. I tried to write down every recurring theme that you can find in my thinking and acting as a manager. This list is the result.
h2. I lead by example.
h2. I depend on my team.
h2. I use my resources efficiently.
h2. I set goals for myself and my staff.
I'm certainly not perfect in adhering to all of those principles all the time. But I take them very seriously. If I find something missing from the list, I'll update it.
And I'm interested in your thoughts -- what are the secrets of your or your bosses success?
I don't give much about the whole hoopla around the cracked HD-DVD code. Kevin's reaction actually was the only right thing to do: By taking sides with the Digg mob he will either be the Knight in Shining Armor or the Martyr for the Cause -- a hero in both cases.
But what's really interesting is the many creative ways people spread The Code. Take, for example, the Wired Code Photo Gallery
I also like Geoff Smith's song (and not only because of Cali's bouncing around):
Force by sheer mass doesn't impress me much. But creativity always does.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Noone knows that better than successful internet services. That's why there are clones of Slashdot (I developed one myself in 1999 -- my first weblog), clones of Digg, and now clones of Twitter, too.
But there's a line between imitation and outright plagiarism, and this line certainly has been crossed in my opinion when German Twitter clone Wamadu not only copied Twitter's functions and looks, but also the complete Twitter API Documentation Even if you don't know German, the headlines alone give away that Wamadu's equivalent is a blatant copy.
Where Twitter's documentation ends with
This document is authored and maintained by Alex Payne, an engineer working on Twitter at Obvious.
the Wamadu texts finishes
Dieses Dokument wurde von thorsten, einem der wamadu-Programmierer erstellt und wird auch von ihm aktualisiert.
Someone should explain to "thorsten" that there's a thing called copyright. And maybe, other things like ethics and self-respect.