Andreas Wacker

Hugh MacLeod about self employment

Are we in trouble when the Onion has a point?

Death is a certainty with daily varying degrees of probability. I wonder if people that twitter think about what their final tweet would be. What google search results they should be remembered for.

Oh, and if you hunt for business ideas, I am sure there is one here. When people believed firmly in the progress of technology, they paid good money to have their bodies frozen. Hoping that tech would catch up. And that future scientists would have nothing better to do then to get them out of the freezer and frankenstein them back to live. Maybe one should offer a ‘digital legacy’ service. Keeping peoples musings, and if Moore’s Law keeps progressing, run some sanitizing filters over them. Of course the next step would be to figure out what you would have tweeted were your thumbs not worm feed. That would be as charming as Polar Express I guess.

Ars Technica has a more realistic and helpful article about the state of death and social media.

With digital technology it is feasible for the first time to keep a vast amount of data around that is related to dead people. How much information do you have about your ancestors? 2, 3, 5 generations back? It thins down pretty quickly. There is no more reason for this. Again: There is a business model here. Probably one that Facebook will pick up. Chances are that Mr Zuckerberg will live longer than many of us.

A boarding pass design

I really like this. Also because it gets to show that we take too much junk in the -after all- man made environment around us for granted.

Boarding passes right now have a format that looks like a computer punch card, which came into being in that size since dollar bills in the days of Mr. Hollerith where that big.
So your boarding pass does not fit anywhere because people used to pay with paper money of that size more than 120 years ago …

While we are at it: The airlines could get an image from me, since I am frequent flier. Then they could super impose it over a QR Code and add a check sum.

An optical scan would reveal instantly if that boarding pass would actually BE for me. Quick: Go and patent that. It might be worth your time. I am busy with other
stuff and would just be happy to see better boarding passes. Among a couple of other things.

via Eric Alba, who referenced passfail where Davin Yoon’s design can be found in the bottom of the page.

A while back I watched Insomnia, I think I found it by some lateral IMDB connection of its director Chris Nolan. It was not bad for most parts. Watching the DVD extras I found out ,that this was actually a remake of a swedish movie with the same title. Since that was the only choice I got the stupidly overpriced criterion disc.

Watching the US remake and original revealed some american movie codes that -looking at them in the light of these films- are just plain stupid. Essential story points got bent. It was not that horrible to watch Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank act in the 2002 version. The original rarely reveals the thesping. People, surroundings and the issues suggested simply feel more reel. All the style, sound design, fog, acting and writing in serpentines to avoid a dog being shot make the US version feel dense, crafted and inept compared to the original.

The swedish film is certainly not without its flaws. But Insomnia is a remake that makes you wonder why there is such as thing a remake.

The wrong Craigslist add can cause allot of damage.

Interesting here I find the people in the truck that rejected to give the owner his stuff back. It would be short sighted to say “those people” and how “they could do such thing”. Fact is, everybody wants to believe in personal gain. Much more attractive than reality it seems. Lottery tickets are the same deal. And such was the Bush Bubble Boom. People wanted to believe that their house made them more money than they could have gained via serious work. They wanted this to be true. After all it was the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. It’s human nature. The Fed and the administration failed to act while the bubble was building. They actually encouraged it with their monentary decission. “The economy is strong” said the man from Crawford. What a moron. Some people got rich. Super filthy mega rich. It was Enron all over again. Just that it was not one company but the whole country. Quiet interesting if just printing dollars as fast as they can will get things corrected. Doubtfully so .

But human nature is also to settle for simple fairly tails instead to look at the grim realities. So let see who will be blamed for the disentegration of american wealth.

The world would be a better place if people looking for a free spot in a parking structure only wait for a car to exit after that car is showing the lights indicating that it is in rear gear. If those white lights are not on yet then you just pass it. Simple.

Anton: “Who is that?”
Me: “Philip Glass”
Anton: “He is invisible to my ears”

Garry Willis writes about Abortion in the LA Times.
He says:


Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons.


There has been allot of hollow talk like “we didn’t know anything about it” after WW2 in Germany. And that is wrong. It also is wrong to try to escape the responsibility of the Holocaust. It is a part of German history. But this sentence suggests that Germans in general agreed to kill Jews. Which is bullshit. Some did. And some built an industry around killing people. Yes, as horrible as that. But to suggest that there was a poll and that just happen to go against one part of the people is simply senseless.

It is pretty strange to open such a piece by invoking Godwin’s Law

Abortition is a tricky issue. Such is Holocaust. Mixing them up in one piece is not really what makes a good start. The article itself rambles around some valid points, and then falls into total pointlessness.

progress has many faces

innovation has no limits

in case you have not been to NY,NY in a while

somebody blogged about productivity

there goes the neighbourhood

Walking Wilshire Blvd. What a neat idea to celebrate 10 years of LA. My ten year ‘anniversary’ was November 1st 2006. Should have done something.

March 12, 2009

A couple of years ago I wrote this post. Putting it under this headline was misleading. I like my credit union (much better than my other bank: Wells Fargo. Well OK, that’s an easy one).

The original post read like this:

I am with that credit union since ten years. And I will probably stay with them. The people in the branch are nice. Since years I wire money. Always the same accounts. It never went through in the beginning. They could not read my handwriting. So I made a pretty version and started to xerox it. Filled in the date and the amount. Things started to work. Then they must have gotten a new middle management moron or just plain lost it: Now they have their people fill in the form, print it and then fax it. Which takes them a while, I have to double check that all numbers are correct and so forth. Stupid really, since they were able to read the forms before. They just loose time. I would too, but I can use the wifi of the nearby coffee shop while they enter the same information. Month by month.
Now the money did not arrive. After 20 minute of call center hell I learned that they now require an additional number: the IBAN number. Another 21 digit number. There are already 50 digits to be filled out for each transfer. Fine. The problem was that they just did not tell their branch that this number is mandatory now. Nor did they issue new forms. Of course the number is already contained on those 50 digits. Wikipedia knows that. I know it now. But the bank, who’s business it should be to know these things, apparently does not. This -unforntunately- is no exception. Every years billions of dollars are being destroyed in endless rows of ugly cubicles by moronic concepts and TPS reports. Since all banks are the same it is hard for capitalism do what it is supposed to do: keeping people on their toes. Make them think, so that they don’t break things.

Muffler Men, 2 Guys and S4 and allot of road

and of course some blue tape.

that would be a Boeing 747

When I saw the headline in BlogsNow I had hoped for Apple picking up the much beloved Connexion system. Just because I want somebody to. Not that it would make any sense for Apple or the airlines. Wishful thinking. Purely egoistical. Free WiFi everywhere. It’s just a matter of time. What I love-love-love is the fact that my ssh sessions which is more or less 35 year old technology applied with safety work on my mac laptop together with it. Apple+ssh+free wife -> Dream come true. I really can work from everywhere. Not just answer email. The blackberry proud can do that. I mean real work, like making things. It is pretty awesome.

I sat in the Yahoo! office complex in LA this morning, free WiFi from Tully Coffee. Some Starbuck’s clone that ‘gets it’: they have free Wifi, as it should be. It was great to have both laptops going, sitting outside, have a Bagel and a coffee. Biggest treat was to see the Yahoo! and HBO worker bees congregating at the water hole during their morning routine and not being one of them.

Apparently Tully coffee makes you ramble incoherently. Sorry.

Many Cellphones have cameras. Wether you want it or not. While I had no problem taking 70,000 images with cheap Canon pocket cameras that then became twexus, I never really used the camera in the Motorola flip phone I am using right now.

I find it amazing how there are no phones that make use of the camera for themselves. Phone and camera share the power source, that’s about it. When I want to call somebody that is not in the address book I have to read the number and then type it. Not a big deal. True. But the camera in the phone could do that for me, right? Either trying to OCR a humanly readable number, or -slightly more involved- read a special barcode that could mean all sorts of other things as well.

sucks to be famous these days.

I will miss Youtube. It’s as close I want to get to TV these days. BlogsNow is crawling back into existence. Slowly. It would only find two links worth mentioning right now. Bothsurrounding the Page meme. I wonder what the Republicans will come with. Maybee bomb North Korea?

Meandering through youTube’s suggestions I watched a bit of Daily Show (there is lots) and finally ended up with a video almost dedicated to Maf54.

flash can be nice

occasionally.

It’s gettting tricky. Flying I mean. I once spent a (paid) week on some obscure island, waiting for the laptop I had to check in to arrive. It was a compaq 286. Yes, I am that old. Since then I say good bye to whatever I check in. When looking for said laptop in Frankfurt they showed me the amount of lugage that got stuck in one week at the airport. Since it had been months since the thing found an interested owner it was kind of pointless. But fun too. Hours and hours among suitcases.

rant inspired by an interesting solution to the check-in problem

Sitting on a patio, view on to the Pacific. I am rarely more than a few miles away from the Ocean when I am in LA. Still, I never see it. Being first I had time to watch the people. Mid aged men, fresh haircuts, overweight, just not enough to risk their marriage, blue shirts and khaki pants. It seemed hard to believe, but none of them seem to have something to do with the others. It was not a convention of one blue shirted company. It’s just what the average person looks like that has Breakfirst at Shutters in Santa Monica. All of them, no execption, have Blackberries. Or is it, that the Blackberries just pick a host that is blue shirted and khaki panted? They have them, and they use them. Constantly.

Interesting glimpse into a strange world it was.

The food is overpriced and not that good.
The view (of the ocean) is. As is the Ocean.
Might try to see it again in a month or so.

The Saturday stroll through those internets. Things I found along the way:

Spinach is bad for you while booze isn’t

Men are smarter than women and coding in Basic is awesome

In politics that are not occupied with an impromptu re-enactment of mideval ages there is Herman Munster (again!) and a President that will fix everything, with, well: Torture if his own Party would only let him

But there are also more substantial things to find, like the Stormtrooper Effect

Business week on so called option ARMs.

I always thought that ‘interest-only-loans’ would be a scary thing to sign.

Those poor people that will loose everything and then some. Many of them probably have jobs that require lots of time and effort to make some money. All they probably wanted to do, is to get ‘in on the action’ during that housing boom that is now so clearly over.

Autoblog reviews the Bentley Continental Flying Spur

Nice read if you like cars. The 2 door cousin “Continental GT” is kind a ‘dime a dozen’ car in some parts of LA. The Warner Brothers parking lot for instance. The price tag hovering between 1 and 2 hundret thousand US$ scheds a completely new light on situation in some parts of the economy.

Glad I read the review, so that I can hold of the purchase until they get a navigation system that can compete with a Camry.

Just got a quote. As a pdf. Which is a great start. Everybody should send quotes as PDFs, not as word documents. That one should be pretty obvious, but sadly it is not. I tell people by now that I will not be able to read their Microsoft Word Documents. They often don’t even know what they have sent. They think that Word Documents are the only way to store text on a computer.

The second issue with attachments is much easier to fix since it happens on a logical level: Name the document so that it makes sense on the hard drive of the receiving end! Don’t send me something called ‘quote.pdf’. Or ‘wacker.pdf’. That might be interesting for you, but not where the document will be used and found: On my drive.
Do yourself a favor and call it: “source.function.date.dpf”. “Function” being “quote” or “invoice” or “memo”. Source is you, so that I know where this came from. And then date. Date I would always express as year-month-day. With leading zero on month and day. This will be recognises as the same date on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific and it sorts files nicely by, gasp, date in any text listing.

But PDF instead of Microsoft Word is really the most step forward into attachment sanity.

coding, tetris, nicotine and lots of other things:

this might explain why

siebzehnter juni

back in germany the first thing to notice was the presence of national flags. “Schwarz Rot Gold” is as omnipresent as the star spangled banner in October 2001 in the US. This time it’s about soccer. Most of the country is delighted that the german team seams to have survived the first round. And that there are three soccer games a day. At a decent time in day.

It’s nice to see this happy kind of flag waving. When I grew up the national flag was something that only pretty right wing people would be seen around. And those are particular disgusting in Germany. There was simply no positive identification with the country.

The 17th of June used to be a holiday: “The day of the german unity”. As long it did not exist the western side devoted one day or mourning and speeches to this thing that we all thought would never be a reality again. It was kind of like a tombstone.

Germans love flags. Not only during those dark days between 33 and 45. The market for advertisement on flags is supposed to be 100 Million Euros a year. (according to the Suedeutsche Zeitung). Commercials in cinemas were 86 Million Euros in 2005. There are easy 20 minutes of commercials before the movie starts.

Der Spiegel writes in its usual way about the flagststyria 2006:
First they find a CDU politician for a stupid quote: “Die ganze Stadt soll ein schwarz-rot-goldenes Fahnenmeer sein.” Basically somebody wanted to make flags mandatory for public buildings until the end of the worldcup.
Then they go on how all those flags are made in China. That not enough will arrive since till the end of the tournament, they claim that aircargo would be too expensive. Then they go on that the car flags that had not been seen in Europe before would be made for 17 cents (too high) and would be sold for 5 US$. They also say that they not really survive the Autobahn. Which is probably true. If they would employ a pocket calculator they could see that even in their way to conservative 30 to margin for something that weights less than 10 grams. it took 3 minutes of googling to find that it would cost you 0.16 US$ to ship those flags to Frankfurt by air. That would explain why there was never any shortage on car flags in the US after 9/11.

Canon makes the cameras that I do like the most right now. As much as they products are great their US service is sucks. A little SD20 of mine failed: The lens is not able to open anymore and i get the dreadful E14 error. Canon says that this is due to sand. One could argue if putting a small camera into your pocket is considered use or abuse. But I did not want to argue. I just wanted to pay the 109 US for the repair. They have in theory a web interface for paying repairs. In reality this is a waste of time. Actually I feel not so good to have given this piece of web-junk my CC info. Despite 5 attempts with two different (and working) CC cards the site was unable to process my request.

The usual problem: Canon makes great products in Japan. Their US service part can be broken around the fringes: Will not put them out of business. Just a shame to see a world clas maker of amazing equipement having a website that works less than that of the muffler shop around the corner.

Not sure when this will happen, but I am pretty sure it will. Unless mankind abondons culture and civilistation for whatever reason.

When the trash can will be picked up it’s contents will be read via the RFID tags that every product will have. Now that makes for ample opportunity. The trash collectors can recycle, locate misplaced things for you and can sell your complete consumption profile to everybody who could benefit from it. From here it is pretty easy to figure out if you should change your diet or drink less. If your trash and credit card records don’t line up then that could mean allot of things.

A garbage truck costs tens of thousands of dollars, the technology needed to implement this will be only a few hundred once RFID tags are every where.

I’d say we better get the NSA back in check before they can wrap their -granted limited- imagination around these possibilies.