The Coriolanus attitude

politics

The political right is quick to point out that the US military fighting in Iraq is defending liberty. The argument has the under current that the efforts of brave men and women of the military don’t get appreciated by those ‘liberals’.

Along those lines one could argue from the other side:

All those people favoring the bible over science should maybe stop using the products of pure science? Like computers. The Bible has been around for thousands of years. Progress only started after science got pursued. Cherry picking scientific views seems an american attitude.

googlebomb that man!

politics

Bill Napoli Senator in one of those Dakotas ( I flew over that every month or so) truly deserves to be googlebombed. And then some.

Rumsfeld and his interpretations

history politics

Donald –Iraq is just like post war Germany– Rumsfeld now says that it is the media that is making this all up.

fake miniature

art confessions of a pixel pusher

portland

The image is of the real thing. Interesting what a some added lens blur does to our perception.

is BlogsNow evil?

BlogsNow free of any reason


right now the rank number seems to indicate that right now. I hope I go back an update this once the number has changed.

somebody is trying to give up memetrackers altogether

I sometimes I wish I could do that too. Tricky to check if the spam filters need a tweak by looking at the results and then not to click on something that people blog about right now.

youtube vs google video

internet

compared here

The bigger question is, when youTube.com will have burned their funding on Bandwidth. Since google has more money than god, they could care less. But youTube.com has some VC money pushing it. Which is nice. But at some point yahoo has to buy it in order for the thing to go on …

/. 0 – mac mini 1

Apple internet

Being slashdotted used to be every webmasters dream and nightmare: That one popular website linking to your obscure site would bring you those fifteen thousand clicks of fame and mostly take your webserver with it.

Things have changed:

This page runs on Apples cheapest computer that they offer. It got the ‘link love’ a couple of hours ago, yet it seems unharmed. There are a couple of reasons for this: The page is static html. The connection is able to cope with the load. A mac mini is actually quiet able to handle lots of web traffic. I don’t think that it has anything to do with the fact that slashdot has lost it’s bite.

canon service sucks

daily life technology

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.

quick links

misc

ping get’s it’s pong

the pope get’s a pod

Brown bites back

A looser is loosing it

And the AC 130’s are going back to Iraq.
They, of course, have only one purpose: to spread democracy in the middle east. That’s how you spread democracy, right?

LTO labels

confessions of a pixel pusher marketing

A tape robot is kinda nice. Sometimes. In order to operate on several tapes you need to have labels.
In the case of the Exabyte Magnum 1×7 LTO robot it turned out that one sheet with 20 labels did cost 29 US$.

That is highly ridicolous. The fact that such a 10,000% markup scheme can exist is almost depressing: I don’t even want to know how many corporate drones order sheet after sheet from these people. And then it get’s hidden in some IT budget.

Don’t do that: LTO barcodes are simple. They are the ‘Code 39’ kind. I had to print them out with a scale of 122% (not
sure why and or if that was needed). It ended with L2, so I did that and the robot was very happy eating those selfmade labels.