The colourful world of ebay

You just can't make this stuff up...

11.11.

“At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month, one minute of silence will be observed to mark the signing of the Armistice and to remember all those who fell in the cause of their nations.”

At 11:11, 11.11. in germany carnival starts. But I think it's unrelated...

A post two days late...

The 9th of November is sometimes referred to as Schicksalstag (day of fate) in german history. A lot of stuff happened at a 9th of november...:

• 1848 - During the german revolution the democrat Robert Blum is executed in Vienna by monarchists. He soon becomes the most famous martyr of the 48 revolution, and soon is forgotten (I never heard of him before...)


• 1918 - Kaiser Wilhelm resigns. Philipp Scheideman proclaimed the republic at 14:00, two hours later the Soviet Republic of Germany was declared by Karl Liebknecht...


• 1923 - The Hitler-Ludendorf-Putsch (also known as Beer-Hall-Putsch). It failed, Hitler was sentenced to only 5 years of Festungshaft (the more comfortable jail) because of his patriotic motives. Hitler only served 8 months of the 5 years...


• 1938 - Kristallnacht, the first large Progrom against jewish people in germany and austria.


• 1989 - Fall of the Berlin Wall.
  

And we do celebrate the Inventor's day... It is the assumed birthday of Hedy Lamarr, who as most sources say was born (as Hedwig Kiessler) on November the 9th 1913, 1914 or 1915. Or maybe at the 9. September, as in the birth certificate it first was written IX and later corrected to XI.

Hedy Lamarr was claimed to be the world's most beautiful woman by her Holywood Producers. Groucho Marx once said after leaving one of her films "I hate it if the male lead has bigger boobies than the female...". Together with George Antheil, composer of a Ballet pour instruments mecaniques et percussion
(for 16 mechanical pianos, percussion, sirenes and a plane propeller, according to the FAZ the loudest concert in the history of mankind...) and a self claimed experts on adenoids, who wanted to enlare Lamarr's breasts with lotions invented by himself, (to remind you of the beginning of this phrase: it started "Together with George Antheil") she invented the frequency hopping method of spread sprectrum techniques and had a patent for it. Unfortunately it wouldn't have worked... There is a nice article on FAZ.net, which deconstructs some of the otherwise nice story :-)

As last words of this post, a quote from Miss Lamarr:

Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

LED

A prototype for a LED tail-light for a DKW 1000S (and probably also my DKW F8...). This 1W LED is really bright...

Remember, remember the Fifth of November

A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!


Happy Guy Fawkes Night everybody :-)

Me versus Leonardo

Wired has an article called "Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin", in which they claim that vinyl discs are and will always be better than CDs. Although I am a great fan of vinyl discs, I sometimes wonder who ever writes such articles. It basically says that a good recording well mixed on vinyl sounds better than a crappy record badly mixed on a CD. Doh...

A fresco done by me looks better than a sketch done by Leonardo drunken, blindfolded and all gagged up while beaten with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Well, maybe it doesn't. But you get the idea...

Braune Häschen

The NDR send a drag queen to a party convention of the NPD, the extreme-right party (just to avoid the word neo-nazis). They are completely lost and have no clue whatsoever how to answer the very simple question "Why should I vote for you". Only one manages to give an answer "I just don't know..."

Three generations

Micha: Der hatte auch welche :-)

Family

I am scanning old negatives from my grand parents I found in a cigar box at my parents. It's quite interesting to see those old pictures, taken some 70 years ago, still usable, still full of details. Of these days, all the digital pictures we take will be lost. Our children and grand children will not have the fun of digging through old cigar boxes full of strange old glass negatives and films...

Also interesting: not only do I look like a nearly exact clone of my father, also I do look like a nearly exact clone of my grand-father (I'll post a picture soon for you to compare). And all three of us have (or had) the same unreadable handwriting (similar not only in readability but we could all fake each others signatures without effort), which in the case of my grand-father is even worse, because he wrote the completely undecipherable Sütterlin.

Ich habe fertig.

At least partially. Today I finished the first draft of my thesis. I think I still have to include some corrections, but that should be a matter of days. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter, right now I should hear the sounds if it were a train...

Pinkle

You might have heard about blackle, which was created because somebody calculated that using a black background for google would save the planet or at least some energy (which is a at least doubious assumption).

Now there is also greenle and my new favourite search engine: pinkle. Probably more energy could be saved if you switch your computer off instead of creating stupid websites...

The strange notion of getting old but not growing up

Today I just wanted to drop by at a birthday party of two friends, just say hello, have fun and not stay exceptionally long. I was the last to leave. Twice.

Around midnight everybody left, just me and another guest stayed. Then some guests arrived late and left again after some time. Leaving me and the other guest as the last ones to stay for the second time...

Pretty weird if your the last to leave for the second time...

Fußballgucken

Nachdem ich gerade einen Fernseh-Empfänger da hatte und die Kollegen informieren konnte... Die Chat-Mitschrift


(15:44:35) gajosimpático: schuss richtung tor, aber deutsche abwehr kein problem damit
(15:44:40) gajosimpático: schon wieder
(15:45:33) gajosimpático: jetzt gehts noch mal richtung norwegisches tor
(15:45:49) gajosimpático: wieder bei den norwegern
(15:46:03) gajosimpático: torabstoss de
(15:46:31) gajosimpático: norwegen hat den ball
(15:46:39) gajosimpático: aber mehr auch nicht
(15:46:42) gajosimpático: einwurf no
(15:47:02) gajosimpático: schuss aufs tor, deutsche torfrau hält
(15:47:13) gajosimpático: sehr niedliche norwegerin
(15:47:32) gajosimpático: drei minuten verlängerung
(15:47:42) gajosimpático: einwurf de
(15:48:16) gajosimpático: reporter faselt über teamgeist
(15:48:51) gajosimpático: schuss aufs tor, torfrau von NO hält
(15:49:02) gajosimpático: wieder richtung NO-tor
(15:50:01) gajosimpático: ausausausdasspielistaus
(15:50:31) gajosimpático: lauter hopsende frauen
(15:51:51) gajosimpático: sauberes eigentor, die norwegerin hatte echt keine chance
(15:51:57) gajosimpático: war spiel mit bande quasi
(15:52:06) gajosimpático: die anderen beiden tore waren auch sehr schön

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.

Security by obscurity

Today I got a mail from a specialist on computer security. His name appears on a web page I did for my school some years ago, he asked for his name to be removed, as his private background should not be on the web. I already forgot that the page existed and of course I have no clue what the password was... So, I mailed him that I will remove the page as soon as I find the password. Hurray for showing competence :-)

Old Skool Communication

I just returned from an expedition. I tried to send a letter (for those born after 1980: letters are a paper based form of communication, like printing out your e-mail, giving it to somebody and hoping it will arrive somewhen within a week). The problem: the post office has moved about three times since I last wrote a letter...

So I went to the all new and shiny shopping center (which will be feature of another rant soon), which is where the post office used to be. And, behold, I found a post office. Or at least something similar. Just at the back of a post bank, hidden behind the mobile phone shop hidden behind the bank, there was something like a post office counter. After having fought through the bank salespeople ("No, I do not have any money"), through the mobile phone salespeople ("No, I don't want a mobile phone, I have one already, that's why I don't have any money and passed through the first line") I managed to squeeze in. Tried to find an enevelope, but for some reason they are only sold in family packs (100 envelopes for the prize of 110). Well, also facing the enormous queue at the stamp sales counter, I just gave up the hope of interaction with a semi-human post sales-drone, and just went to the stamp machine.

Now faced with the problem, if I want to send a Maxi-Letter, an oversized letter, a XXL-letter, a huge letter or a Happy-Weekend-Letter (wait, the last one doesn't exist, happy weekend is railway...). None of the options had any explanation, nowhere any information about sizes could be found. Just these fancy names. I just bought a random stamp, went home, found an old envelope and threw the letter in something yellow I believe to be a letterbox... I hope it will arrive.

I start to like e-mail.

PhD

An amazing amount of people doing a PhD comes out of it with stress related problems, either psychological or physical. Some develop stomach ulcers, some turn into near-alcoholics, some are depressed. If you are lucky, you just survive your PhD with a major frustration. Not sure if this is supposed to be like that or if it is worth it...

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...

Fashiosm

Eva Herrman (a german TV presenter) saying that back in the good ole Nazi Times, Mothers were much more appreceated, families were still great and so on.

Cardinal Meissner going on that Culture which does not praise god is to be considered abnormal (»entartet«).

And you could go out on the streets back then without being molested, and they built great Autobahnen, and everybody had work, ...

Seems that the collective memory forgets pretty fast.