April 08, 2004
Others would say, "This is crap"
... but Hani writes this:
Reading the 'white paper' justifying keel's existence fills me with regret that I don't have a printer that takes in toilet paper. Had I such a wondrous device, this paper would the the leading candidate for printing on said medium, and I'd rush to ingest as much vindaloo curry as I can to ensure that this printed material gets the usage it so richly deserves.
Priceless.
April 07, 2004
Grammar God? Me? You gotta be kidding
I am a GRAMMAR GOD!
Or so the results of this quiz claim (although I had to guess two times) [via Rainer Brockerhoff]
April 06, 2004
Political Statement
In case your French isn't good enough to de-cypher the last three lines of that label, take a look at vowe's original article to find out more ;-)
April 05, 2004
Business Cards
Sam Ruby explains why has made a point of not carrying business cards:
Prior to the second such meeting (different customer), I inquired as to how I could acquire business cards of my own. My manager at the time checked into it and told me that the expense was denied.
There is only one possible answer: Any company where employees need to "rank" to get business cards is not worth working for. Period.
March 21, 2004
Arguing Correctly
I really like Charles Miller's Rules of Arguments. My favorite:
The ideal attitude to project during any argument is one of calm disinterest.
March 17, 2004
Quicksilver
It took me almost 12 weeks to get through the 915 pages of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver — that translates to 76.25 pages per week, slightly less than 11 pages per day. That's an unusually long time for me to read a book this size, and it was due to the fact that it's a pretty complicated story with lots of different characters, historical detail, colorful language, and many hidden links — a very complex piece of work, and not an easy read.
And after all this time, I find out that it really is only one third of a story. Truly amazing.
I can't wait for the next volume ...
March 11, 2004
Beautiful Draft Chapters
Via Scoble, a link to some beautiful draft chapters of Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence.
March 10, 2004
The Zen Hotline
You just have to read this - superb ;-) [via Rainer Brockerhoff]
March 09, 2004
Identity
I very rarely blog about stuff like this, but Identity is a very, very cool movie. I really like it if filmmakers avoid insulting their viewers' intelligence — and this is one of those plots that just doesn't do this.
Be sure to watch the DVD extended version, which has a subtly different ending.
February 26, 2004
Pardon the Outage
After some struggle with our ISP, innoQ's hosts in the domain innoq.org should now slowly start working again. If you have tried to send me an email, or leave a comment here, and received some strange error message - please try again. If it doesn't work immediately, give the global DNS a few hours more to sync our changes.
February 23, 2004
Help Ms Amanda Clinton
President Kennedy's ex-girlfriend is in in danger - a sad story.
February 12, 2004
Keyboard nuisane
It seems the letter is broken on my keyboard. Given that it doesn't our that muh in the English language, that doesn't seem to be too bad. It suks, though. Fuk.
[Update: OK, after fiddling around some, I have my 'c' back, which is nice. If you're into really strange things, there's whole novels that avoid letters. There's even one (originally written in French) that does not contain the letter 'e' - you can find out more about that here or read my favorite book.]
February 10, 2004
Graham Glass is Looking for a New Car
That's what you get from successfully selling your startup: choices, nothing but choices.
February 09, 2004
Steve Jobs meets Donald Knuth
This is the funniest story I've read at folklore.org yet :-)
Dilbert Rules
There's simply no excuse for not subscribing to the Dilbert RSS feed.
Speed-reading Cory Doctorow
This way of reading books is utterly fascinating [via Joe Gregorio]
February 04, 2004
US Elections - The President Match
Living in Germany, I view this from an outside perspective only and do not really care that much. Still, I find it funny that in this test I took, George W. Bush came to a last place with 18% (after Lieberman with 70%, 100% went to Sharpton. Whoever that is.) I find this pretty funny since I'd be considered pretty conservative in this country. (Test found via Dare Obsanjo.)
February 02, 2004
Bared Breast
I sometimes wonder how anybody can take a country serious where people make an issue out of things like this. Sigh.
January 27, 2004
Weather Chaos - Global Warming
Diego Doval shares some thoughts on weather chaos, which reminded me that I wanted to link to this very interesting lecture by Michael Crichton.
December 27, 2003
Molvania
Thanks to a pointer by
December 26, 2003
IQ testing
Mark has been taking The Classic IQ Test, so I did, too. I scored 136 and also was classified as an alleged Visionary Philosopher.
So does this actually mean anything? I have no idea. The only thing I can remember about IQ testing is that there was some number (68?) that sets the lower boundary as the IQ you need to peel a banana.
December 24, 2003
Merry Christmas
A Merry Christmas to all of you! What are you doing reading this, anyway? Go and spend some time with your family ;-)
Lord of the Rings III
The day before yesterday, I saw The Return of The King, and I have to admit I share Tim Bray's opinion.
I definitely think it was the weakest of the three, and I really can't see any obvious explanation for changing the original story — especially since it doesn't benefit action-wise.
While Tolkien's Frodo is a noble, admirable, real hero, Jackson's is a total loser.
I also had to remember that a friend of mine told me some time ago that Gollum has about 200 different facial expressions, which sadly, is about 198 more than Elijah Wood.
Anyway, all three parts taken together are definitely a great achievement, and of course there was no way I could have not watched it.
December 08, 2003
The Internet Helpdesk
You just need to watch this short video of The Internet Helpdesk. And I need to stop laughing some time in the next few hours. Seriously.
December 04, 2003
English - ze second language of Germany
One of ze nice sings about us Germans is zat we are extremely fluent in Englisch. Listen, for example, to zis gentleman talk about ze nice city of Dortmund.
(Found via Dirk Hesse's rather cynical, but excellent and often outrageously funny Ligne Claire weblog (German))
November 25, 2003
Death to Spammers
Cameron Purdy commented on a CNN .com article about a programmer who threatened to kill and torture spammers and now, inexplicably, faces jail because of it.
You have got to appreciate the spammers sense of humour (emphasis mine):
He said his firm does not send spam but blamed a rival firm which he said routes much of their unsolicited bulk e-mail through Russia and eastern Europe. Mackay said such firms gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business.
November 18, 2003
IRC Quotes
Found via Dare Obasanjo:
Top 50 URC quotes. Hilarious ;-)
October 19, 2003
Evanescence
Friday night I went to see Evanescence perform live here in Cologne. Before they started their show, there were two guest acts — revis (don't click that link when you're not alone), which were pretty good, and Finger Eleven, which were, to me, rather annoying (not my style, YMMV).
Finally, about two hours after the official scheduled time, Evanescence came on. To start with the bad things first, they stayed on stage for something like 55 minutes (!), the audience wasn't especially great, and worst of all, the sound was a fucking mess. I'm also not a big fan of live performances where parts of the music - in this case, mostly sound effects and intros, but also vocal background arrangements — are played from tape.
Still, Amy Lee was just great - I very much doubted that she'd be capable of performing on stage as well as on their debut album (which I have been playing almost continuously for the last 6 weeks). Trust me, her voice was every bit as perfect as one could have hoped for. Maybe the musicians did a good job as well, but honestly I couldn't tell, the sound being the horrid mess that I might have mentioned before.
So overall, it was still worth it. Hopefully, some years from now they'll have the option of hiring a decent sound technician and playing at a place that allows you to actually hear what the musicians are doing.
July 07, 2003
28 Days Later
Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, shared a Nobel Prize for studies of cancer viruses, and wrote a review about '28 Days Later'.
Despite a huge amount of seriously flawed logic, I still liked it a lot. My advice would be to not convince somebody who's not into horror movies to accompany you ... unless you want to break the friendship.
June 13, 2003
Prayer Teams
You have to love this:
If you have placed faith in Jesus Christ and desire to help others walk free from sex addiction, please consider joining our prayer teams.
June 10, 2003
Propaganda Made Easy
See The FOLKWAYS Archive Contribution Form to create your own propaganda posters.
June 09, 2003
Back
Tim Bray writes:
See, blogs are better than journalism: you can indulge in childish flames and then retract them right away as required.
And I'm back after a week of being cut off from the Web (mostly, that is), and have been reading his postings immediately after going through my e-mail.
May 23, 2003
Extreme Ironing
Ananova - South African duo win extreme ironing photo contest. Found via VoWe, 'nuff said ;-)
May 02, 2003
Yes
I watched the movie Almost Famous (which is pretty great, BTW) and came across an article by Cameron Crowe that appeared in Rolling Stone in 1973, when Crowe was 15 (just like the hero in the movie). Apart from being extraordinarly well written, I find it funny that it actually is about one my all-time favorite bands, Yes.
About a year ago, I want to see them in concert; and although some might find it strange that they almost exclusively played tracks from the early 70s, this was exactly what I was looking for. They still are among the best in the world.
April 26, 2003
Wankelmütig
Im Zentrum des Armaturenbretts lässt der Drehzahlmesser unter gebürstetem Aluminium ahnen, dass bei diesem Auto nichts wie bei jedem anderen ist: Bis 9000 Umdrehungen reicht die Skala, erst bei 8000 beginnt der rote Bereich.
Es hilft alles nichts, ich muss ihn wohl kaufen.
April 23, 2003
Atheism
You don't have to be an atheist to visit The Atheism Web, but you can definitely find out what the word means ...
April 22, 2003
Below
I just went to see the movie Below, not really expecting very much. I was pleasantly surprised - it's actually pretty good. A medium-strong recommendation.
About
My name is Stefan Tilkov, I am a managing director of a Germany- and Switzerland-based consulting company called innoQ. Although I do quite a bit of administrative stuff, I still try to maintain some technical knowledge. This means, for example, that I still consult in customer projects. Fortunately, the company is still small enough so that this is feasible. My technical interests include large-scale software development, preferably using modern, object-oriented and/or component based techniques, and specifically two subareas - Web services and Model Driven Architecture (MDA). innoQ is a Systinet Solution Partner, and I am also a member of Systinet's Technical Advisory Board. MDA is of interest to me not the least because innoQ develops and markets a product call iQgen, an MDA-compliant (whatever that means) code generator. I run this blog mainly as an experiment, you can find out more about that here.
April 18, 2003
Clancy Reread
I am currently in the process of re-reading all of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels. As patriotic and occasionally too hero-worshipping as they might be, they still are some of the best stuff I have ever read. After the first 5 novels (and about 5000 pages) and 2 more books to go, I'm wondering why the same story fascinates me again and again.
Probably a lot of Clancy's power comes from the scenarios that he creates and that tend to become reality, e.g. a terrorist flying an airplane into the Capitol building (in Debt of Honor) or the question of whether terror can be fought with war.
April 15, 2003
Commercials
Some very cool commercials (found via vowe)
Mail to Nigeria
Just stumbled over this Scam Joke Page ... simply hilarious ;-)
April 14, 2003
No comment
Wired News: Hold the Phone, It's a Sex Toy
Makes you wonder
Wired has a story about the Iraqi information minister, who is obviously becoming an Internet celebrity. I expect it's just a few months until he will appear in the first TV show ... I just can't make up my mind whether this is funny or not.
April 01, 2003
Enten
Heise News-Ticker: Freigang für Enten
March 29, 2003
Al Gore at Apple
Former Vice President Al Gore Joins Apple's Board of Directors - a very cool career change. If he had only become President instead of G.W.B., the world's situation might be very different now - and the current president could be a Microsoft board member ... just a dream.
March 28, 2003
Meetings, Meetings, Meetings
Just got home after a rather murderous business trip - drove 1200km and visited 3 customers in 36 hours. Interestingly enough, all of the discussions link together. In the first meeting, we discussed how to adapt OSSJ to our MDA product, iQgen; in the second one, we had some interesting discussions about to evangelize MDA. The third and final one centered around MDA as well, but led to a discussion of Systinet's products, too. All of them are interested in what the others do, one might become a customer of the other ... Very interesting times.
March 18, 2003
Business Negotiations The Right Way
vowe dot net :: This is the way to settle a dispute, says vowe, and I think he is right ;-)
March 09, 2003
Solaris
I just returned from watching the movie Solaris by Steven Soderberg. Without any doubt it's an excellent work of art, although I'm not so sure I really understood the story ... Is this because I'm not supposed to? Or because I have not read Lem's book?
I have the feeling that the last 20 seconds of the story have been added to make the movie more to the liking of US viewers - without them, it would have felt a lot better. I will have to read the novel after all ...
March 03, 2003
Paul Graham on Nerds
Just came across this interesting essay by Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular. I don't agree completely with his views, but there's definitely a lot of truth in it ...
February 28, 2003
Something Awful - Really
February 24, 2003
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