December 2003

There were 25 posts published in December 2003 (this is page 1 of 2).

see you next year!


ps: extralineophobia is a definition by pieceoplastic.
ps: i’ve already seen lotr3, but didn’t know when i scanned the pic above, so this one is already done :-)
ps: i told b. today that i’m gonna be offline until next year, and he asked my why.
i spend much too much time on the net, reading all the various pages, and rss-feeds that interest me, but for this holiday season i want to read books, want to watch one of my more than 50 unwatched dvd’s or just lie around without spending too much time sitting in front of that little 12” glooming rectangle.
that’s why
happy 04 everyone!

lotr3: the return of the king

sunday evening i went to see the return of the king, which was really good.
it’s amazing what the guys behind the computer achieved in that movie.
one of the scenes made the crowd in the cinema applause spontaneously: legolas takes down one of those gigantomaniac war-elephants in such an elegant way that leaves you absolutely breathless!
a wonderful, energetic wrapping of real-film with amazing cgi.
if you’ve seen the first two episodes, then the third is a must, if you haven’t you spend most of your time in bed, so it’s no big deal to you anyway :-)

btw: even the guys over at gearbits like the movie.

stealth marketing

take a look at this website for a too-good-to-be-true robot, the NS-5.
those of you that read or used to read Isaac Asimov novels will get it at the first look that this page must be in some kind related to him, because of that little saying in the bottom left corner: “3 laws safe”:
and when you perform a WHOIS-check on who registered the domain irobotnow.com then you see that the whole thing is probably a marketing campaign to make you want to see the upcoming film by 20th century fox, i robot.

i want to see it!

i’m a really big fan of asimovs stories, if you’ve never read one, then go and grab i, robot or the foundation trilogy or any other book of him. they’re quite good on the science-fiction part, but even better on the philosophical part.
he wrote a lot of stories turning around the three laws of robotics , which imply really interesting situations on how robots could interact with humans, hence the “3 laws safe” is quite a giveaway :-)

[original link via gizmodo]

update: macslash is covering another aspect of the NS-5 campaign.

todays fun link

it’s been a while since i posted a funny link, so here’s the one that also fits into holiday season: how far can you throw santa?
i managed to throw him 249.1m at the third try. give it a go, you have to click once to start the game, and another time to charge the slingshot. but don’t let go too early or too late :-)

windows vs. os x

take a look at these screenshots:

windows os x

why the hell did no–one tell me that my page looks shite with a windows-browser?
today i was at school and wanted to show someone a link i had posted somewhere here and then to my amazement habi.gna.ch lookes a bit like the “eyesore of the month” on a windows-machine.
well, it think there need to be tweaked quite a few bits and pieces in the css :-). and the sidebar (first set) looks quite ugly with these blue lines around the buttons, i think i should also change that, to prevent burnt retinas…
the funny thing is that the page looks nearly the same with safari, opera, camino and internet explorer on my machine, so who would have thought that it looks that different on windows.

bacteria and fungi remixing songs

want to listen to remixes of well known songs by bacteria and fungi?

have no idea what i’m talking about?
then give the molecular media project or nanosounds a visit and listen to samples of songs which were distorted by a layer of fungi, bacteria and other stuff on the surface of the cd’s.

the remix of pink floyds comfortably numb (750kb mp3) is especially mindbending! and also quite funny to watch are the psychedelic screenshots of a james brown DVD remixed by titanium dioxide.

[via sonntagszeitung] (the good old fashioned sunday morning breakfast-table paper version).

abba

you might or might not know that i also work as a bar-tender at the theater an der effingerstrasse. last friday we had the traditional x-mas diner with all the people involved there (these here plus some from the bar). $
this year we were at a really excellent restaurant, the bachmühle (the mill at the brook) in niedermuhlern (which got 16 points from gault millau, which is quite remarkable).

this story starts really boring, but wait for the funny part: the chef de service (on the left) at the mill told us that – after finishing his apprenticeship to become a hairdresser – he used to be the butler of anni-frid lyngstad.
you: who the f… is that? that’s not funny at all! this story is boring!
me: she’s one of the abba-women! yes, ms. dancing queen1).

when he told that story, we first could not believe it all, but markus (one of the bosses of the theater) confirmed that story. and believe me, we nearly couldn’t stop shouting money, money, money1) or take a chance on me1) or mamma mia1) each time kjell entered the room.
that was an entertaining evening!

oh, and by the way, ueli and kjell are a couple, both together have an “i look gay-factor” of 216, ueli himself has a ilg-factor of 1, while kjell gets the remaining 215 points :-)
(from my heterosexual point of view, the only thing ueli could be called is metrosexual…)

1) ITMS links, they only work, if you got itunes on your machine (be it either a may or a pc)

the parliament has chosen

holy shite!
this time i really need to think about moving to another county!
the parliament renewed the federal council this morning.
and guess what: they chose to substitute a ruth metzler with the (too far) right-wing blocker chregel blocher.
as much as i do not really like miss metzler it’s quite sad that we now have a new council that is too far on the right wing of the political spectrum and has a woman less than before (not that 2 out of 7 was a real representation of the 51% women in switzerland…)

new section on habi.gna.ch

as i’m still looking for a phd in the near future i keep looking for stuff that interests me, medical laser physics-stuff. (i really really reallylove being a messenger, but like kevin bacon says in quicksilver: “you can’t get old on a bike”)
this offer on telejob.ch looks quite promising.
i sent the contact person an email, asking for some more information on the offer, and thought maybe he also wants some more information on me, so i decided to start with an new category on habi.gna.ch – my cv.

needs to be filled with information (which will hopefully happen soon…), for the moment you can only download my diploma thesis (a 2.5 mb pdf-file), if you’re interested…

btw: quicksilver is a really great movie if you dig messenger-style stuff, want to have an eighties flashback and just watch an old movie. i nearly couldn’t believe that kevin bacon (yes, mr. hollow man!) is riding a fixie throughout the movie, and riding it really good, it’s something really hard to do with style…

becoming famous (or not)

becoming famous:
some days ago, inari posted a comment to one of my posts. i asked her who she was, because i neither recognized the name nor the email-address. then i got back quite a nice reply, saying that she goes to a school of visual communication and is working on a project on web-logs.
for that work she now analyzes my blog; i already feel weird posting stuff here knowing it will be analyzed :-).
but nonetheless, it’s really nice if someone you do not know tells you that your blog is nice, and that you can be part of a project on web-logs.

one of the questions she had, was where i learned to blog. i never visited a course on blogging or something like this, but i’m used to blog trifles of my daily business since quite a long time:
my experience in blogging started more than three years ago with this first post on IAM:

2000/10/17 17:49
just too late again. wanted to go to bed early, but then booted the pc
and there iam. doddled around in photoshop and then logged into the
net, and where did i land, shure on bme. then saw shannons new feature
and just had to test it. but now i’ll go to bed!

some thing to note:

  • already three years ago i went to bed much too late (the timezone of bme is canada) :-)
  • iam.bmezine.com (aka IAM) is a close-gated community created and maintained by glider, the creator of quite a massive online-resource on bodymodification.
  • my iam-page also has quite some really personal stuff, which i posted there because i knew (and with the command **IAMONLY** still know) that the entries can be read only by “complete strangers”, which makes it really easy to post everything.
  • blogging is fun, is kinda like writing a diary, gets you back some old memories and can be done really easy, you just need some web-space where you can run cgi and movable type (or only some web-space and blogger).

(or not):
last week rolf siegenthaler called me, he was looking for some models for an ad-campaign for swisscom fixnet, then i sent him some pictures from me, but the advertizing agency (probably contexta, as they do most of the stuff for the swisscom…) did not choose me. well, there will be no more pics of me on the streets :-)