Football

It was a nice game, we won. Can everybody please calm down now and go to bed?

These car corsoes are getting really annoying nowadays. I think, fuel is by far not expensive enough, nor are cars. About half of Erlangen is driving around in new and expensive cars now, honking like mad, driving like they never went to driving school and "celebrating" the great and historic victory over the dangerous portuguese, who, if they would have won, would have eaten our children. Or something like that. For a football game this is a bit too much...

Why can't we have fun just walking, jumping around and getting drunk?

(And to be honest, most of the guys and girls in the cars do not really look like they have fun, most of them are aggressively annoyed)

Footnotes in history

So, the big success in Bali is a footnote with a reference (including a PAGE NUMBER!) to a formerly agreed document, which states that a lowering of about 25-40% in CO2 emissions might eventually prevent the planet going boink (of course we know, it is, just like evolution or the bible, just a theory).

We are all safe now. Birds sing, peace on earth will begin soon, and wolve and deer live nicely together. And if not, we just buy a new deer.

Lights out...

Tonight we are supposed to turn our lights off between 20:00 and 20:15 to save the planet. This is advocated by Bild (a newspaper who is a strong opponent of high fuel prices and speed limits), Pro7/Sat1-Media (a TV group who will continue to transmit crappy programs and ads in this time and whose extremely bad reality shows are responsible for about 50% of TV caused energy consumption) as well as Google (an Internet company, whose founder is marrying on a tropical island, which has been enlarged by artificial sandbanks, who has his friends flown in by private jets and celebrates in air conditioned tents...).

The electricity companies are already stating that we will all die, because the huge changes when everybody switches lights on and off will kill the power grid.

Can we please return to planet earth sometime and start behaving like grown ups? I think, I'm going to be sick somewhere...

Service

As you might have read in the last post, I lost the password for a website. So I tried to contact the hoster... They have a feedback-form which you can fill out for questions related to your contract and technical problems and they have an expensive phone hotline.

I filled out the form. I did fill out my contract number, my client number, my e-mail-adress, my name, the domain-name, my shoe size, everything they asked for. Today I got a response.

We are sorry to inform you that we don't answer not authenticated mails, please use our expensive hotline

WTF!?!?! Why do they have the form in the first place? To make sure their clients get seriously angry before calling them? If I hadn't found out how to quit the contract by Fax and already did so yesterday, I would have done it today.

Logic

In spain's schools religion is now substituted by a course about citizenship and how the state works. It is thought to explain people's rights, democracy and how the law works. Some of the books also explain that homosexual marriage is allowed in spain. Which made the catholics go berzerk...

Now the catholic parents organisation tries to fight this course. In an arte interview their speaker explained that it is the parents right to teach their believes to their kids, be it atheist, be it catholic. The state should not try to teach children anything about religion. This is why the state should teach catholic religion instead of democracy. Around this point he completely lost me in his argumentation...

It's improving!

»Há dez anos havia o dobro do dinheiro, mais professores e menos alunos, o mesmo resultado, o mesmo insucesso escolar, o mesmo abandono escolar«

De Rerum Natura cites the portuguese prime minister: »Ten years ago we had twice the money, more teachers and less students, but the same failures in school, the same amount of students dropping out«

This is an improvement. Crappy as ten years ago, but now much cheaper. This seems to be a very common way of thinking these days...

Hurray for Lawyers

So, I am not allowed to write "GEZ Brief". I need to write "Informationsschreiben der GEZ und/oder Schreiben, mit dessen Hilfe der gesetzliche Auskunftsanspruch des § 4 Abs. 5 RGebStV geltend gemacht wird". I am all in favour to only allow completely correct law-speak whenever anything is published. No longer these spongy formulations, if GEZ-Brief actually means the "Informationsschreiben der GEZ und/oder Schreiben, mit dessen Hilfe der gesetzliche Auskunftsanspruch des § 4 Abs. 5 RGebStV geltend gemacht wird" or actually only means a love letter or anything else in letter form send by an "Beauftragtendienst der öffentlich rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten oder Rundfunkgebührenbeauftrag".#

BTW: that's the same guys who annoy the hell out of you with letters and threats if you don't confess that you have a TV. I am paying my TV fees, but nonetheless they sent my parents (sic!) about 20 letters that I have to pay my TV fees for the TV I have at my parents home for sure (I don't). They only stopped after we threatend to call a lawyer. Public Broadcasting Service Mafia, of the worst kind...

[Edit] Nice article from jetzt.de

Competent Publishers

In Ferbruary I went to a conference in Vienna, where I presented a poster. The proceedings I wrote got accepted and will be published in NIM A, a high reputation journal published by Elsevier. Today I got a mail where I had to sign a copyright transferal. The copyright on the article, all included figures etc. has to be given to Elsevier. They can now do whatever they please with it. This is just the normal procedure how science publishing works: scientists (and people like me) write articles, where they do not get any money. The articles are then peer reviewed by other scientist, who also don't get any money. Then the article gets published, the original writer looses all copyright and the publisher sells the journal for some thousand Euro per edition. So far I did not really worry more than normal...

They did however address me as Dr., which is still wrong (and will be for some time...). So I sent them a mail:

Dear Sirs,

my contact details are not completely correct, I am not yet a Dr.
Can you please remove the title?


Tonight I got an aswer:

Dear Dr....


Should I trust publishers who cannot read mails?

Think. flickr, think!

Think. flickr, think!
Originally uploaded by perreira

As flickr seems to go the same way compuserve did go back in the early nineties (from a successfull community to a huge coorporate hell which ignores it's users and only focuses on shareholder value, from being great to being bancrupt because they overlooked what it really was they had...) I am now trying some alternatives. There is a good overview of alternatives (in german only though). I signed up at zooomr and 23hq, experiences will be posted here...


[EDIT] This is how flickr treats it's customers... (For those of you who do not speak german: this guy sent a mail saying that he is leaving. He got a response which basically tells him "We don't need you, just f*ck off")

[EDIT2] I also signed up at ipernity which looks quite nice