Andreas Wacker

Last century we bought 3 full size Samsonite Oyster suitcases. Back then you had to put some stickers on them to distinguish them from all the others that people had.
That changed. Now there are all those black soft textile bags on the belt. I never understood why.

Those suitcases are simply amazing. They have traveled ridiculous miles by now. Life is tough if you are luggage. I can not imagine what kind of treatment they have gone through. They always worked.

I was very saddened when he lock broke on one of them. I don’t think I want any other suitcase. Rimowa seems to be en vogue. But I feel that they would not work better and probably look pretty beat up within a couple of months. I also don’t like if my luggage tells the world “Hey - check this out - I have money - stealing here is worth the risk”.

But as it turns out Samsonite did not only make awesome products, their service rocks as well:

I emailed them, asking if I could order a spare lock. They asked for my address and will send me a replacement lock for free.

I love it if things work right. I think this kind of service is truly inspiring.

Me loves my Samsonites!

At7T now

vs

Nextel 5 years ago

Yeah for OptOutPrescreen. Takes less than a minute to have five years of no credit card offers in your mail box.
Unless they are not who they say they are and half of Ukraine is gonna have a big party now with my social and other info. Well - luckily https is still pretty safe,
and so is google showing the site as the first hit, as long one is careful.

I was expecting the Opt Out process to be tedius. Turns out it wasn’t at all. Nice. Now let’s see when the letters top coming in …

looks like Munch got it right (there are clips inside of the slideshow)

I made a map of the current ecoli outbreak in Germany.

There is actually also a german version: Ehec Karte Deutschland

On the carton of orange juice it reads “low in saturated fat”. Orange juice, fat?? WTF. What are they thinking. How many people ever considered OJ to be fatty? Pretty clear which country you are in when you read this kind of ‘nutrition information’.

Switching machines I realized that I had to re-install webmailer. This wonderful preference plane lets you launch any web based mail program whenever your default mail application would be launched.

I have used it for years. Thousands of times. And it always worked.

And I failed to appreciate that. Going through our lives our attention is where we need to act or avoid. The broken and annoying stuff is what we notice.

All the well working things that surround us go naturally under appreciated. And, since people have piled up allot of technology and culture in the last couple of generations there is actually a huge amount of that.

If a thousand items worked and one does not, that one will be all we think about.

brand feedback

via Eric Alba.

Nielsen numbers suggest that about one third of HD TV sets actually display HD. I wonder how many sets are still set to the store default mode: It is set as bright and vibrant as possible to make the units “look good”. But it kills the picture.

It is a tragedy: Back in the day of analog TVs it was allot of work and engineering needed to get that electron beam create a pretty and truthful picture. Today it would be easy. The whole pipeline is digital. A majority of households could enjoy unprecedented image quality. LCD and Plasma panels are impressively stable and predictable. But -no surprise there- people don’t care enough. Neither do the makers of the sets.

In a better world the sets could inform viewers about the input resolution. They could ship with a little set up tutorial (all acted out, and understandable) playing from a couple MB of memory somewhere in the set. The store mode would mention that it is active during power up. Remote controls would make sense. A Bluray player would come with a demo / promo / set up Disc that shows how wonderful the format can be. What you can do with it, and why Samsung,Sony,LG,insert-maker-name-here is awesome.

… and a couple of other things? Whatever it is that Paul Buchheit is doing today, luckily blogging is among it. Specially since he seems to think about what he writes.

“you look great in your profile picture” the mail said. When I realized that I actually checked the link (not by clicking it obviously) I had to laugh about myself. Never thought I’d derive some fun out of spam and the way I happen to look.

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.