Jan´s Blog Spot

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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Well – nothing big, but there are moments when knowing more than one language can come in handy and choosing a brand name would definitely one of them. Want proof?

Here ya go:

There is for example an internet startup that could actually become a search engine that means serious competition for google as the people behind it are former google brass. The knack: the name is “cuill” (they pronounce it ‘cool’), which is basically fine, but maybe not as cool in France where “les cuilles” means “balls” (yes, balls as in testicals and not just as in ’round things in general’). Anyway – I’ll be sure to check out their site as soon as they go live…

Another thing that is completely different, but in the same ranks is a new brand of deep frozen diet food here in France that I did of course also have to check out even though I usually try to avoid things that are dubbed ‘light’ or ‘diet’:

…and yes, they also do chocolate ice cream – at least that’s what I still hope it was (although judging from the taste there might be more truth to the name than I thought)

In case they plan to expand to the German market I’d strongly recommend a change in names.
[In case there's anyone reading this who doesn't speak German: 'Kot' is German for 'faeces' (or 'feces' for you Americans).]

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Hey! Only just over five months and already there’s movement in my blog again. I finally spent the time to update WordPress to version 2.5 and must say the admin interface has improved (What? You couldn’t care less? Well, thought so. Back to business then…).

So all that rests is to do as Christian asked and start writing again – for starters: the next thing that happened after the last entry was “30 puissance 4″, i.e. Antoine coming back from L.A. to celebrate his 30th bday. And as the evenings motto was “La vie en rose” (life in pink) it looked something like this:

Sten and Antoine en rose

And now, a few months later, it looks like Antoine’s trying a new look (rumor has it that the launch of tomshardware.com.mx is imminent…).

Other than that there’s plenty of things going on over the last few months, including concerts, more strikes (hey – this is France after all…), vacations and new toys – more on this right here, rsn…

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