Jan´s Blog Spot

No, this is not about the crisis in the .com world, but a site that is actually called www.despair.com – they do posters and loads of other things you can print on.

The theme is their very own (and slightly sarcastic) take at motivational posters as you can see by clicking the above link. I love them and in case your sense of humor is anything like mine, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy those. For those who are fans the TV show “How I Met Your Mother“: this is where Barney got his office decoration from. Thanks to René for pointing me to that site.

And then the internet wouldn’t be the internet if you couldn’t take parody one level further. There is absolutely no arguing with this (click for more..):

Couldn’t agree more.

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In case you are impressed with your iPhone’s user interface and/or liked the movie Minority Report and the way Tom Cruise’s alter ego John Anderton interacted with his computer system by simply gesturing in the air you might also be interested in watching this video that I stumbled upon today – it’s about the work of Jeff Han and his company PerceptivePixel :

The interesting thing is that this was recorded February 2006, i.e. ready almost one year before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone’s “new & revolutionary” interface. I’m really interested to see what will become of all this.

And while we’re that the subject of Ted Talks: there is one related video about images and new ways of handling them, IMHO also well worth watching.

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Well, it’s almost three months now since I left my old job, and among the most amazing things that happened during that time is that this has actually become a reality:

So in about five weeks it finally is “Goodbye George Bush”, this time for good, i.e. with or without W. I know this isn’t really a scoop, but after seeing this video I wanted to share it, since even I must admit that he had his moments:

Top 10 George W. Bush Moments on Letterman (thanks Ernie)

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Just a short note since there is – once more – a new version of WordPress, featuring a brand new admin interface, in case you have your own WordPress I’d highly recommend the update. This time not only for security reasons

Other than that the dear spammers finally made it – I activated the Akismet spam filter for comments, since someone finally did it and found a way around the simple math question your required to answer to post comments here. So in case you do post a legit comment that doesn’t get approved for a while, please let me know and I’ll look into it ASAP…

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Times are a changin’ or as the Wachowski brothers put it: “everything that has a beginning has an end” – and that is not only true for the Matrix trilogy. After about 2900 days my time working for Lycos-Europe/Pangora is officially over and it has already been two months since my last day at the office. It has been a very interesting and moving experience that I would not want to have missed. I learned a lot and met many interesting people, quite a few of which I am happy to count among my friends now, but after almost eight years in my first job, it finally is time for something new. I’ll let you know as soon as there are news on that.

So it is “Goodbye Pangora” and of course all the best for the future to all the colleagues in Karlsruhe, London, Milano, Paris and Yerevan, it has been a pleasure meeting and working with you all.

As for the last few weeks: I decided to take a sabbatical until the end of the year and so far I’m having a ball! I’ve been out and about to go see a few places you usually don’t have the time to go and see, including California, Tokyo and Australia. So many incredible places to see, so little time. Picture proof to follow shortly…

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Disclaimer: if you don’t use WordPress yourself (or don’t even know what it is), don’t bother reading this post, it’ll be a waste of your time. You have been warned…

Still here? Good. So here goes:

Whew – it’s been a while, but contrary to all rumors I haven’t abandoned my blog, and just finished updating to the latest version of WordPress, as I was told there were serious security issues with the older versions. So, for everybody who’s still using a version < 2.6.2: the good news is that upgrading wordpress has become a bit simpler than before, and the bad news is that it still isn’t fun.

But still one hint for people like me who don’t always RTFM: one of the things that might be trouble is that you need to either recreate your wp-config.php or add a few lines (see wp-config-sample.php for details…).

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Just a short note on two videos on YouTube that friends sent me the links to and I kinda liked: The Death Star’s Canteen in the Lego Men enactment and the (slightly longer) original version by a totally drag Eddie Izzard on stage. Seen it five times and still think it’s hilarious. (Thanks Astrid!)

And even though it is already kind of old and most people who read this will probably already, once again for everybody who speaks German: ‘Virales Marketing auf dem Todesstern Stuttgart‘, hanoile… 

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Just a short note on three sites that for one reason or the other caught my attention over the course of this week and are IMHO worth checking out:

Number one is a project called “Songbird” which is a browser-mash-up-itunes-ripoff-and-a-few-things-more, done by a few apparently pretty creative people who also got a few thingsrght about web design, i.e. I really liked the site.

Then there’s one of those “someone’s finally done it” things, a free skype-compatible client for the iPhone. As far as I’ve been told Fring has been around for quite a while, but the beta-client for the iphone seems to be pretty new. Your phone needs to be jailbroken to run the app, which fortunately no longer is a big deal. 

And finally number three, which is work related: my colleagues working in the German office launched a new site, which I was quite happy about, since it includes a few ideas and features. It is called Decido (to be found at www.decido.de) and so far only available in German, but if you have a minute check it out – constructive criticism is of course always welcome, feel free to leave a comment…

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For those who don’t: D-Fens is the “middle name”/pseudo of the character Michael Douglas plays in “Falling Down” (ou bien “Chute libre” pour mes amis français ), which is a movie I liked a lot. To me one of the most memorable quotes in the movie is in the scene where D-Fens unpacks some sorry excuse for a burger, looks at it and then at the picture the burger joint had put up to advertise it: “Can anybody tell me what’s wrong with this picture…? …anyone?”.
(In case you don’t remember it, the original clip is available on youtube)

Well now – about 15 years later – Frank (who recently exchanged maps for answers) pointed me to this page, that kind of asks the same question. Good one if you ask me…

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Seriously. And no even if I’m pretty sure that many people beg to differ, I must say that math can be very good for your peace of mind.

And here’s why: apart from the update to the latest version of WordPress, I changed one more thing in this blog – if you want to leave a comment (which you are of course more than welcome to do) you now have to answer a simple math question. This has become necessary as lately pretty much the only people entities using the comment feature here were frikkin’ spammers spam bots. The good news is: ever since the ‘did you pass math’ plugin is active, the number of comment spam attempts has gone from 5-10 a day to a sleek zero…

So, in case you’re also using WordPress, I can only recommend installing this…

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