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 :-)

comics to your door (or rss-reader)

b. pointed out a nice service to me (i wonder where he gets all that stuff he forwards to me :-).
tapestry, a service by some guy that converts (some) online comics into rss-feed so you can suck them down with whatever you like.
i’ve still not jet decided if it’s a good thing if i add comics to my daily “keep up with all your rss-subscriptions”-task.
at least i have to spend less time watching ads and other stuff to load :-)

(tapestry should add nichtlustig, the daily perscheid and other comics, too, then i could stop getting comics by mail…)

that is quite an interesting picture

in the paper today: a picture of what would happen if you put all the water on the earth and air in the atmosphere in one sphere above the earth (pdf of the original page). almost unbelievably small!!

update: the pdf is only availiable if you are a subscriber to the archive, which puts you back 60 bucks a year. nonetheless i leave the link, maybe you are a subscriber….

update 2: the linked page has some quite interesting pictures!

polyball

it was lovely, thanks for asking.


the second picture has quite funky colors, which were achieved through a long exposure time and without a flash.

how silly is this

i went to interdiscount because i needed some jewel cases for a gift project.
i thought the cheapest way was to buy some empty ones, because i still have a spindle full of cd-roms back at home.
to my amazement, it’s 30% cheaper to buy 10 cd’s in the case than to buy 10 empty jewel cases.
how silly (but good for me…)

ten empty cases for 15 bucks (left image) opposed to 10 cases with cd’s for 10 bucks (on the right):

uptime

well, my ibook has been up for 14 hours since the last reboot (had to reboot after my first kernel panic; unplugged the bluetoothmodule after update of bluetooth software through software update).
now i go to bed and have a good night’s sleep.

here’s a funky image with my uptime:

the art of rebellion

yesterday i read a review of “the art of rebellion”, today i surfed on their page and instantly bought that book.
looks like a really good book to read (1.5mb pdf-preview) or just simply to look at. i can hardly wait until the postman rings twice…

btw: go to page 7 in the pdf, there you can see invader from france. can you remember where in bern that he put up his invaders? (in the münstergasse and at least two in the matte…)

put on your dancing shoes

next weekend nina and i go to the polyball which is the biggest decorated and themed ball in europe, there are supposed to be around 10k people.
the theme is “kitsch as kitsch can” so i thought i buy these trashy funky dancing shoes which should go really well with a classic suit.

yes, they’re golden and i’m probably gonna wear them only once, but hey, they did only cost 19 swiss francs :-)

small update

now you can also see the last five or the last 30 songs i listened.
through some code from b. (he said: “es ist etwas hackisch geschrieben, aber dafür sagt es auch “1 day and 1 hour and 1 minute ago” und nicht “1 days ago”” after fiddling for 3 minutes…) it displays the date/time in a nice format.
now you can spy on me my musical taste even better :-)
have fun:

spamcop

i use spamcop daily to report my spam to the relevant people, it’s an excellent free service (although sometimes a bit clumsy in accepting spam…), but this doesn’t really look good…
i wonder how long it’s gonna take until they take down the free service.

the singing web

following up my entry of yesterday evening here’s a link for all of you to enjoy: a website that takes the words you want as an input, converts them to a song. that song consisting of sampled words of some other songs.
i at have at least three of the words from my example in my own library.

rhytm – rhythm of the dancer from snap!
true – digital love from daft punk
fun – perfect day from lou reed (the other ones cannot be found on ITMS…)

hmm, that could become a contest, post your song to recognize in the comments! (you can send the song to your email to get the direct link to it.) or do you recognize more samples than i do in my song?

[original link via boingboing, but the text is mine :-)]

new feature on this blog

i was reading some more about trackback some days ago (which still is a bit too much for my puny little head to fully get the point).
well, the thing is that some guys proposed to the trackback abilty of movable type to post songs from winamp, then another guy followed up with pretty much exactly the same for itunes (btw, also quite good for window…).
the approaches used a special applescript which i could not get to work (even with the help of l33t b. :-)
after hours of debugging and timeless rebuilding of my blogs index files i googled for another solution, which comes in the form of kung-tunes (clearly a sibling of kung-log, which i rely on to maintain my blog).
the solution is actually not any different than with the applescript, but kung-tunes has a GUI which i found out to heavily rely on.
but there was even some more debugging needed and quite a long discussion over fire with berni, which led to the final result (with again some l33t coding snippets flying through the ether) to the new category on the sidebar.
you can now see what five songs my itunes played in the last few minutes. including links to the ITMS (where you can only buy the song if you are in the us of a-land, but a preview is availiable from everywhere) and cover-art from amazon (if available).
an interesting point of view if you want to know what rocks my socks.

if you want only to see the songs, and not read my babble all day long, then you can click here, there sits the file that gets included into the sidebar through some php-magic.

resources:

now there’s only one problem: as i have quite a buch of swiss music. amazon is not very good at finding these covers. maybe there’s a way to retrieve the covers from cede.ch, but that’s a task for some other day.
and with the ability to post all the played songs the creation of an online habi-hitparade or a “this song was played least”-page seems not too far off. ah, i look forward to all these cold winter evenings :-)

good night!

oh and by the way: i’m listening to Xtremes from the album Billy Bear by Stress while typing this entry, which is a cd you have to buy if you haven’t jet!