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January 28, 2005
Mmmmmh, del.icio.us!
I really recommend you use this: Finally a cool way to have your bookmarks available everywhere and browser independently:
del.icio.us
MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam PluginYou can see I categorized this link with three Flags to make sure I find it in all the contexts I could be looking for it. With an easy URL you can look at all my bookmarks now:
to Blogs Spam Freeware by istrebitjel ... on 2005-01-28
del.icio.us/istrebitjel
Another advantage is that it fully supports RSS. So if you use Firefox you can use just add the Feed to your Bookmarks and you are done ;)
Go check it out!
Posted by marco at 4:22 PM | Comments (1)
New Strategies for Surviving and Thriving at the Office
I just witnessed a presentation by Julie Morgenstern about her latest book called
Making Work Work : New Strategies for Surviving and Thriving at the Office
Mergenstern offered some interesting advice and while admitting that the general workload has increased over the last years she mainly blamed email and the instant reply culture for inefficiencies during our workday.
As a remedy she suggested to not read your emails as a first thing in the morning and only read them at preset times (like every 1 or 2 hours). I'm pretty sure this doesn't work for me. Too often do I get important stuff that needs to be taken care of right away via email. In other companies all the really important things get communicated via the phone, but I'm glad that's not how it works here. We even use Instant Messenger (which she despised entirely, because it rouines your routine): I still like it. It is way less introusive then a telephone call and most of the time I can help someone or get information within two sentences.
Other suggestions made more sence to me:
If you shorten the time in the office everyday you are more likely to turn down the not so important requests you get. I'd like that - I can't say no ;)
Or tracking down the things/people that constantly come in to bring some extra important work, that really doesn't need to be done right away and deal with them appropriately.
I surely going to flip through her book a little more and we'll see if I can't get a little more organised ;)
Posted by marco at 2:20 PM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2005
Too much time and bandwidth?
Click here for a LotR-Picture ;)
Stolen from Elfgirl.org
Posted by marco at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2005
Google does it again
How do they do it? They just keep on adding cool new features...
This time they brought us the Google Video Search:
Google constantly monitors the American TV program and you can get a snapshot of the program at the time your search term was spoken! How cool is that? :)
Posted by marco at 1:04 PM | Comments (0)
Not much to see
Inspired by Mon's Multimedia Message I decided to take picture of the view from our office at the moment:
Caption: In me of such way how much hidden one sees the city - one the interior of the fog.
(This is what you get, when you translate "I can't see the city - it is hidden in fog" into a lot of different languages and back with
Lost in Translation)
Posted by marco at 12:53 PM | Comments (2)
January 21, 2005
Shiver Me Timbers
From Take our word for it:
Do you have any idea what the phrase shiver me timbers refers to?
It's a mock oath ascribed to sailors, though it appears to be a comic embellishment of a slightly different oath, my timbers. The latter dates from the late 18th century, while shiver me/my timbers is first recorded in 1835: "I won't thrash you Tom. Shiver my timbers if I do" from Frederick Marryat's Jacob Faithful. Apparently Mr. Marryat invented the phrase with an eye toward avoiding his readers taking offense at stronger words. It's also possible that my timbers was invented, for it first appears in a song: "My timbers! what lingo he’d coil and belay."
A shiver, is literally "a splinter". Hence, when timbers are shivered, they are broken into splinters. A curiously similar word is shake, a fissure that forms in wood while it is still growing.
The phrase shiver my timbers was purportedly adopted later by cricket to refer to the scattering of wickets.
Posted by marco at 6:52 PM | Comments (0)
Spam is not the answer
Spam is not the answer to anything. Especially if you are running a legit business. That's why I am answering all German Spam-Mails where I can clearly tell who the author was (I am using TFFFFF as the German template for that).
But this time I was really amazed: I received an unsolicited email for a Content-Management-System called xnetcreate. The sender was net-DESIGN - Der InternetPartner and they replied promptly to my nice mail. They claimed the unsolicited mail came due to an error in their Newsletter program. That's one of the lames excuses I've ever heard - how come my email-address is in their system, when I never had any dealings with them? The only answer is address-harvesting and that's illegal already (if it isn't it should be!).
That alone would be funny, but it get's even better: In the footer of the "We are so sorry we spammed you"-Mail there is a link to a webcam in the office of net-DESIGN! So take a look, if you want to see a spammer in it's natural habitat:
net-design-WebCam
Addendum: Today I got another "We are sorry"-Mail, which was sent to all that have been spammed. Strangly they still blame somebody else (which they do not name) and say it was a technical problem. And no explanation whatsoever how my email-address got in their list in the first place...
Next Update:
Today I received another response - this time from net-DESIGN's attorney! This is the first time someone properly answers my TFFFFF ;) You can download the PDF here (in German).
I am curious if this is a special treatment for me, or if other people also get that nice letter ... e.g. Jan.
Posted by marco at 2:17 PM | Comments (1)
January 20, 2005
International Online Shopping
One advantage of the global village: You can take a look at all the stores and compare prices. This works especially well if you compare the prices at different branches of the same store... like Pricenoia does.
In the above example you can see that in Germany ordering this book from Amazon.com is still cheaper then from Amazon.de.
Also very impressive is this application called MAB:
"Mab is a Rich Web Application to search products on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de and Amazon.jp sites"Because it uses Mozilla's XML User Interface Language (XUL) Mab only runs with the Mozilla or Firefox Browser! Check it out (Click Remote on the Mab site).
All of those sites use Amazon Web Services AWS - so they not only do it out of their big hearts ;)
Posted by marco at 4:13 PM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2005
Board Game Geek
This is a website recommendation:
Take a look at BoardGameGeek.com. You'll find more then you ever wanted to know about Boardgames. Especially handy if you have misplaced a manual or want to get informed about which game to buy/play.
If you register you can take a look at the games we own (haven't put in all of them, yet):
Our Games.
Posted by marco at 4:20 PM | Comments (0)
January 5, 2005
Tsunami Impact
No question about it, the Tsunami influenced the lives of millions of people and I think it is important to help them if you can afford it (donate via Amazon.com oder auf Deutsch).
But I guess nobody thought about poor Unilever who will now have a little problem marketing their Axe Tsunami Body Spray/Deodorant:
But what do you expect if you name your product after a natural disaster?
Posted by marco at 2:50 PM | Comments (0)
January 3, 2005
Happy New Year
A happy new year to everyone reading this ;)
Here is a picture of the fireworks shot from the Space Needle in Seattle, WA:
Posted by marco at 6:18 PM | Comments (1)
Little Bavaria in the Rockies
Yesterday we went to Leavenworth, WA - The Bavarian Village!
As usual on the weekend we left home rather late... so we got some beautiful sunset pics in the mountains:
But since Leavenworth was nicely lit it was even better to look at in the dark:
The funniest part for us "Real Bavarians" was to spot the many things there that where not at all authantic (like Cowboys or kangaroos). But we had an almost authentic Schnitzel at King Ludwig's. One wonders what you can buy at "Parkhaus Gifts", which translates to "Parking Garage Gifts"...
Also interesting: "Das Sweet Shoppe" - Do they think just because you put a German article in front of "Sweet Shop" and a PE on the end it's going to be "Bavarian"?
Anyway we had fun there ;)
Posted by marco at 5:48 PM | Comments (2)