found that somewhere

misc


Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.

“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.�

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!� she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?�

“Five thousand dollars,� the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?� the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!�

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.�

Nice story, probably not true. Who cares.

last century

history

Culture has survived things like this.
I would think it’s pretty much unkillable then.

strandbeest

free of any reason

Mr Strandbeest is back
I usually like my job allot. Sometimes, rarely, but sometimes I would like to do something else.

change name: no you don’t

Apple OSX

Apple’s XCode comes free with your operating system. It allows you to compile code. But is it a decent Development API? I highly doubt so. I don’t spend 50 hours a week with it. I hope nobody has too. I wasted the last thirty minutes of my life trying to find a way to rename a project. Just giving it a new name. Not more not less. I truly sucks. This is probably not a bug, just some ridicolous user interface disaster. XCode. It truly sucks, and, isn’t that a coincidence, there is no real alternative to it.

what happens to radio

history media

Seth Godin asks what happens to Radio

Well, first of all, Radio has survived lots of new media. It has changed everytime. Radio plays did not survived radio’s struggle for survival though. Which is a real sad thing. I grew up with those little gems. No, I am not a million years old. Radio plays were a blessing of the german government funded radio stations: They just kept the same kind of program structure they always had. In the seventies we had at least three radio plays a week. Since nobody nobody listened, the authors could get away with allot of stuff. And my parents thought I would be safe if I listened to the radio. Better than TV, they thought. Little they knew.

But that is the past of Radio.

Another personal radio experience was moving to LA and therefor into the reach of KCRW in the mid ninetees. Ear opening, back then. Twelve years of radio in Munich had almost killed my interest in music before that.

KCRW however got supplanted by podcasts. It’s still a decent station, but podcasts fit what I want to hear much better. And, even if my podcast mix contains some NPR, I still prefer the leech from my shuffle: I pause as I like, resume where I left things off, and I mix my shows the way I like it.

So there is no more Radio in my life.

Somebody should start a podcast with Radio Plays though. I have an idea what to play on August 14

google command line calculator

internet

Since years I used the ‘bc’ unix command line calculator. Nice for copy paste jobs, better than a push button calculator, since you can see your calculators. Of course pretty stupid otherwise. I am sure there are advanced calculators around. Those that I would always forget how to use. Speaking of, ‘bc’ needs you to set the decimal precision before something like 5 / 3 gives a result as usually expected. Every couple of month I am trying to find a way to set scale = 4 in a default environment etc. Never had any luck.

Today osxhints – which comes up first for most unix searches these days – I found the Google Command Line Calculator

It’s very very nice. Written in ruby which comes with OS X. Commandline, but that’s what I liked.

pictures

internet photo

The internet discovers Candida Höfer.

weird news

free of any reason

Maybe the people
that got canned from AOL for the “Data Valdez” mishap found a new job to promote movies. While other AOLers dig for spammer gold. Calacanis is probably orderer to lead the shovel pack for obvious reasons.
While youTube hopes that Paris Hilton will save them it turns out that Osama was/is a Whitney Houston fan. Probably just a stunt by the CIA to get him out of his cave. The best one sofar.
not only Dell has problems with Batteries catching fire. The first Maglev trains hoverd in 1971 in Germany. But nobody wanted to buy them. Then the Chinese did. Now they are not so sure if that was such a good idea. Munich will get one eventually to connect Airport and City Center. If it should get build.

update: it seems as if the snakes in a cinema story is one of these things that wrote itself.

hiltoutube

internet media

The internet is a funny place. You can make things that make no sense, and they can exist for a while. YouTube for instance. I love it as a user. By now I have given up to frown about the horrible quality. For most of the youTube content the visual aspect is secondary. Flashvideo has won the format war. For years people were writing about quicktime, windows media and real player. Looking at every move of one of these formats. Predicting this or that. Along came flash video and it was all other. No self respecting internet video site would choose something else. No pundit had seen it coming.
It looks worse than anything, and people don’t care, since it looks good enough. Apple lost this one.
YoutTube is trying to find money now. They turn to Paris Hilton. Maybe Paris’ dad sells a Hotel every Tuesday to come up with youTube’s bandwidth bill? Seriously, it might be a rude awakening for youTube to realize that they are able to recoupe 3% of their operating cost before they start loosing audience since the ads get in the way. iFilm had an alright selection, but they never became a youTube. One of the reasons were rather pesky ads.

The content that youTube will continue to be there. But I still think that youTube is a bit like Napster 1.0: Something that works really really great, but that is built on non existing conditions. Napster 1.0 ignored copyrights, and youTube ignores the fact that bandwidth costs money.

macbook wifi: what gruber said

Apple media

I hope, really hope, that Mr Gruber never catches me when I do anything wrong.

His 6335 words about the story of the Macbook wifi exploit say all that needs to be said. And those words aren’t pretty. Yet needed. After Gruber the record is probably set straight.