Monthly Archives: August 2008

Nothing goes unnoticed

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I have always wondered how the media can produce well-researched, well-written, and well-presented information basically minutes after the death of a famous person. Now I know: The information is prepared beforehand, maybe sometimes even years in advance, and constantly updated.

Unfortunate for the not-yet-deceased if such an obituary is accidentally published as in the case of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, Inc., on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Although Bloomberg financial newswire realized its mistake quickly, the obituary was already seen, downloaded and blogged about at Gwaker.com where it can be read in its entirety. Even the gravestone is already finished.

Macabre? Oh yeah. That is for sure. But it shows that nothing goes unnoticed online where people and not just computers crawl the net 24/7.

Steve Jobs at Macworld 2008, photo by dfarber

Steve Jobs at Macworld 2008, photo by dfarber

My virtual past

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A number of friends always ask for pictures in which I am as we don’t see each other a whole lot. If you know me, you know that I am a behind-the-camera person and that there are hardly any pictures of me on the memory cards in my cameras.

However, I can come up with fake pictures thanks to Yearbook Yourself, even for years when I have not been around or when I would have been too young for such yearbook pictures (five of them).

It’s been fun to discover the site and upload a picture (but I did not save the result at first). I then bookmarked the page and sent the link to Bob who yearbooked himself. He uploaded pics on Facebook where two others also tried the yearbook picture generator. It was only then that I returned to the generator and saved a few of the yearbook pictures and put them together. You never know when they might come in handy.

I guess, if I were a brilliant writer and had the time, I could come up with biographies for these six faces displayed below to create their virtual stories. But as I am not that person, I just show the pictures and let you come up with stories yourself or maybe you just want to follow the link to the generator and upload a picture of yourself.

My face yearbook pictures

My fake yearbook pictures

The day between today and yesterday

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Does my Swurl live according to a different calendar? Apparently, the day after Friday, August 22, 2008, is Sunday, August 24, 2008, though everywhere else it is August 23, 2008. I moved my delicious bookmarks to my new account and thus had to change the settings in my aggregators. That’s when I stumbled upon the Swurl date curiosity.

See for yourself:

Swurls lost date

Swurl's lost date

Update: It get’s even weirder and there does not seem to be a plausible explanation.

Swurls Today

Swurl's "Today"

Poker and ringtones

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After my WordPress update half an hour ago to version 2.6.1, I checked the spam comments page to see how many spam attempts I had. Akismet caught 330 and had 132 in the queue (forgot to check the timeframe). Had I clicked on the originating links, I would be a pro in poker and other casino games by now spending day and night winning and – probably more likely – losing money, and I could have filled my iPhone with millions of silly ringtones.

To avoid any potential temptation during sleepwalking nights, I deleted these spam attack comments without shedding a single tear.

Offline vacation

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y vacation this year is already a few weeks ago, but only thanks to today’s holiday I can reminisce a little bit. This was my first true summer vacation in a very long time. I was on vacation near Toulouse, France, from July 15 to July 28. In the past years while working in Munich, I was lucky to be able to go on vacation in the off-season as I did not have to stick to the university semester schedule to much as I have to now. Thus, I explored Maharashtra and the western Himalajan region (India) in the heat of April / May in 2007 and 2005, Gozo (Malta) over Christmas and New Year’s in 2005-06, the Landes (region near Bordeaux in France) in April 2004, and Dingle Peninsula and Dublin (Ireland) in September 2003. However, this year’s vacation couldn’t come at a better time: right after finishing grading student productions and before all our student assistants started to work at the beginning of August. ;-)

As you can see from the following screenshots, I had no activity online whatsoever between July 15 and 28 (OK, Friendfeed and Swurl do not track everything, but you get the gist).

vacation from Friendfeed

Screenshot from my Friendfeed page taken on July 31, 2008 (“Tuesday” stands for July 29, 2008). Incidentally, both bookmarks are links sent to me by Bob. :-)

timeline view of Swurl

Screenshot from my Swurl timeline.

However, Swurl “messed up” my nice offline time view from above in the timeline after I uploaded my vacation pictures to flickr. You can see it as a nice feature that Swurl does not place the pictures on the day of the upload (as Friendfeed does), but on the day the pictures were actually taken.

my Swurl timeline after the picture upload to flickr

Screenshot of my Swurl timeline after I uploaded my photos to flickr.