recommended reading

my mother recently gave me schotts sammelsurium, a very funny book.

in case you want to be a brilliant conversation-partner at your next diner party i recommend that you get that book. it’s a overly extensive list of things one should know. things to know like: the thickness of ice needed to carry you, a car or a lorry, how to tie a sari, a list of european cities with metro, some shakespearean curses, the longest word in english and other stuff to know. it’s a fabulous reading and you should get is asap :-)

oh, and there is also an english version

ps: ecto now has a nice amazon-search included (and can be yours for 30% less until christmas)

google address book plugin

if you liked “my” address book plugin, then you might dig this script posted on osxhints.com.

it enables you do do a quick google-lookup of any person in your address book, with a single click on the phonenumber of the desired person. (and can easily be adapted for other search engines, which might in the end enable me to throw together a “look-up-person-on-tel.search.ch-and-merge-info-with-already-in-addressbook”-script. but that’s another story for another day.

good night.

[via osxhints.com]

offline/holidays

i’m going to spend another week diving and will return on december 12th late in the evening.

don’t expect any update until then, but have a very nice week.

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SUICMC04 movie screening

Trailersuicmc

the first official screening of “SUICMC04 – The Movie” will be held on friday, the 17th december in the bar splendid palace from 7pm to 11pm or so. we will show the movie twice, once around 7.30pm and around 21.30pm.

you’re kindly invited to come, the event is open for all, you don’t have to be a messenger or have helped at the SUICMC04 to show up!

(click on the image to watch the trailer…)

album art in the sidebar [update]

since the upgrade of my MT-installation the integration of kungtunes an my blog was a bit flaky, i got an email whenever my itunes changed a song. this was just too much.

i’ve been looking for another solution to post my playlist on the web, but couldn’t find a good one, until i stumbled over this picture on the (excellent) command-shift-3-group on flickr. in the extensive list of programs mentioned was the itunes watcher. after a bit of googling i found the site and installed it (it’ s bit quirky, since it’s a script which needs to be configured and compiled).

so you can again spy on my musical taste, this time database-driven and quite nice. because the script works fully independent of any blog installation i made a new directory on my part of the server: /music

if you’d like to see what music i listen to, you can watch the 6 last played songs in the sidebar (click on the album to get more info) or just spy on the aforementioned subdirectory.

now i need to go an buy a new backpack.

update: i’ve just seen that the album covers are not displayed with firefox, but work perfectly with safari and IE on windows (my girlfriend uses it.) i will look into this and try to work it out…

i just bought ecto

the client i use to post pretty much all the post here is now an official member of the pieces of software that i actually bought.

i’m more than happy with it and forked over those 18$ to adriaan to help him to go on with the development of this magnificent piece of software. i’ve been using kung-log for a long time, but ecto is just ways better. hence my blog also features a new button on the far bottom:Ecto

gmail invitations [update]

pretty much everybody is giving them away, but in case you still need an invitation to sign up with gmail (google’s 1gb-email service) i’ve got six five three no invitations to give away. they’re all gone, maybe i’ve got some more to give away soon, i’ll post it here…

data mining

Smartspidernext weekend there are elections here in switzerland. i’m not overly politically interested, but i think voting is a must. so i heavily rely on tools to help me make the decision. i’ve already mentioned both of them here (smartvote and votez.ch).

smartvote enables you to generate your political profile, the so called smartspider. and then it matches your spider to all the candidates and proposes you a list of people to choose. votez is another tool, where all the different initiatives are explained with the pros and cons, so that any normal person is able to understand it and vote accordingly.

so, if my political spectrum interest you, you can click on the picture on the left and start to discuss this in the comments. now if i only could have printed out the generated list and dropped it in the box instead of having to write down all the 80 names the whole process would even be more easy.