Ohne nennenswerte Kommentare, da meine Meinung zum Thema ja hinlänglich bekannt sein sollte. Fledermaus stoppt Brücke, zumindest vorerst. Obwohl mir dunkel schwant, daß dies nicht der letzte Akt des “Dresdner Brücken-Dramas” sein wird, hoffe ich, daß dieser erneute Aufschub(?) noch einmal die Möglichkeit für Stadt und Land bietet, eine bessere Lösung, einen besseren Umgang mit dem Thema zu finden, als in diskussionsloser Sturheit auf dem jeweiligen Standpunkt zu beharren. Nicht, daß es an Alternativ-Vorschlägen und Möglichkeiten zur Diskussion fehlen würde…
Ungeachtet dessen bin ich so frei, in Anlehnung an Herrn Kantel die “Kleine Hufeisennase” zum äußerst würdigen Google des Tages zu befördern - verdiente Ehre. ;)
Read today in some places including heise.de: It seems that Acer president Lancri has severely attacked Microsoft and Vista, blaming this latest incarnation of the Windows operating system to be disappointing as neither PC sales have increased due to Vista, nor customers actually have stopped requesting Windows XP to be installed on newly bought machines. The same time, it seems there’s a bunch of users gathering to sue Microsoft for the obscure Vista Logo marketing campaign not at all certifying “windows-ready” hardware anymore (whatever that meant earlier…).
No matter what to think of that: I am amused reading this, looking at the fact that most if not all of the “wow” offered by Vista as well as the new Office is more or less pointless in a corporate environment (given that, around here, even while dealing with Windows XP one of the first things to be done is to turn off the incredibly ugly candy-colored default skin). Being a corporate user, who does need “Windows XP Service Pack 3″ packed mainly with a new GUI while having most of the interesting features announced in advance being crippled or removed when the system finally was ready? Who needs a system that is missing some essential, fundamental new features talking about usability in everyday work? Not me, that’s for sure… so I only hope that those competing with Vista will know how to benefit from this situation.
Well, what do you know… I’ve been tagged by Kelly with the Thinking Blogger Award, an honour I barely can accept, looking at these poor doings of mine around here. However, I really feel honoured… Thanks, Kelly. :) So, it seems the rules here are quite simple:
- If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think!
- Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme or blog that you enjoy.
- Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.
Well… My reading-list is rather long, and I am not sure there actually are too much “all-time favorites” among them… and, then again, probably adding Kellys YogaCoffeeOutlook again (which it surely would be worth it…) seems to be likely to end up in an endless loop, so I’ll keep myself from doing that. However, let’s try and look at things… Here we go:
- netzpolitik.org, driven forth by Markus Beckedahl and a bunch of others, is one of my primary sources of information on pretty much everything in relation to politics (both on a national and a global scale) and technology. Usually, this is one of the read in the morning, along with some other more general news sites.
- ‘Showering Naked’ is the blog of Maria from Seattle, a kind and witty person spending most of the time there writing small (fictitious?) stories, moments of real-life captured in a few short sentences. I really enjoy her style of writing, inspiring…
- The same, though in German, applies to Ariadne… maybe also, even though not just because of making me remember the good old DeLorean again. Always worth a visit.
- GoodMath for fueling a certain arcane interest in the Haskell language again which I deemed incredibly useless back at University and am just learning to enjoy now that I don’t have to anymore. :)
- khaos, a Dresden guy like me with quite an interesting point of view on everything and nothing, having more or less the same topics I use to write about, and sharing some similar thoughts, even though sometimes he seems to be way more into sarcasm than I am.
Being supposed to mention just five, I’ll stop here now, looking across my reading list to see whom to mention the next time, they’re too many possible candidates after all. But probably there are things worse than that…
So. Finally done that, once again. Getting wordpress updated, I also managed to get some other things done along the way:
- Initially I thought about completely remodeling the visual appearance of [z428], just to quickly figure out that I always sort of come back to where I already am so I guess both structure, layout and colors aren’t all that bad. So, there are just minor visual enhancements mainly intended to make reading this site a little easier.
- More major change: Translations. Not just by reading Markus write about the polyglot extension I thought about keeping translated versions of my posts here as well, but so far I couldn’t really get used to polyglot. By now, I took a dive into jLanguage which seems to be right what I need - easy to get started, easy to use, and doesn’t require messing with the page templates to actually display anything. So far, so good. :)
Now, only thing left to do is some cleaning-up, especially getting that dreaded del.icio.us plugin to work again. But I guess you can’t have everything instantly… :)
PS: I almost forgot that now there also is an icon in the address bar for all those who want to bookmark this site (or read the feeds… :) ).
Finally managed to get the link-list, coupled with del.icio.us, to work again, after the wordpress plug-in doing right this job seems to be badly broken lately. Thanks to Franziska Mälzer for providing a good solution to that very problem, as well to schmidtl for pointing me there. By now it’s just a little more work to be done to make it “look good” (i.e. prevent long URLs from breaking page layout). Here we go again… ;)
Reading through “One No, Many Yeses” by Paul Kingsnorth (which has been translated to German using the completely stupid title “Global Attack” and a cover image that reminds me of some science-ficton B-movie rather than a book on globalization), I got aware of the Buy-Nothing-Day, an idea which is both simple and yet difficult: Just try to spend one short day, 24 hours, without spending money on anything. I’m sure it never will really work out after all, it never will reach more than just a few insiders knowing about it, because perhaps the idea of consumption, of spending money on things we don’t need and can’t afford (remembering a quote I read on a toilet wall some time ago) just for the sake of keeping the economy running has been planted way too deep into our minds and hearts throughout the last decades, perhaps (looking at how we tend to celebrate holidays like Christmas or Easter) this is the culture ours has transformed into, at the beginning of the new millennium.
Then again, perhaps the “Buy-Nothing-Day” is in its idea, in its name itself bad. Perhaps it should rather be a “Do-Something - Day”, encouraging people to, well, get something done. Right now, being force-fed with advertisement and commercials no matter whether watching t.v., reading through some websites or even just taking a walk through the city, perhaps there needs to be some awareness in our minds again that we’re more than just mindless, braindead consumers, only being capable of taking what “they” give us, be that some sort of product or information or news or art or culture or whatever. That’s why a “Do-Something - Day”: Get rid of all that consumption idea, get something done. Try something you didn’t yet do so far. Write a short story, an essay, a poem, a weblog or some code, build yourself a nice piece of furniture, paint a picture or go out to take some great shots of the world surrounding us, create some music, prepare a meal for friends or whatever - just get back on knowing, feeling that you’re able of doing more than just sitting in front of your t.v. set or walking through the city always in search for the next bargain, the next fashion trend or the next “superstar” to be stuffed down your throat by industry, advertisement, marketing. Get something done. Pick your “Do-Something - Day” and get started…
Ralf has literally been asking for a flame war writing about “Why aren’t we all using Linux?”. Since I’m also a GNU/Linux enthusiast and administrator of Windows XP desktop machines, since I also used to help selling computers with both GNU/Linux and Windows earlier in my life, just a few thoughts on that if you dare to read on… :)
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Wer wiedermal durch das Web tappst auf der Suche nach Sehenswertem: Die Website meines Schwesterchens ist neuerdings nicht mehr grün, sondern blau. Das tut dem Ganzen aber keinen Abbruch, insgesamt hat sie sich schon mit CSS, XHTML und PHP recht viel Mühe gegeben, was einen Besuch auf der mystisch wirkenden Site mit gelungener Foto-Galerie durchaus rechtfertigen sollte. :)
