enjoying Stanza 2008-12-12 (616 words)

One of the things I hoped to be able to do with my iPod touch was to read eBooks - like while lying snuggled up in bed. There are several (free) choices for reader apps available, and following the recommendations I downloaded and tried Stanza which seemed like the most flexible if options. ...

MACHINA LVDI 2008-12-11 (520 words)

So there. This is a bojt as mobile as I may get. I now own my very own iPod touch 2G, This is the iPhone that is NOT a phone. What ise would I have of a mobile phone, when it's very rare that I actually move, like in being mobile. And if I I ever do, it's usally far away from any net connectivity, and that would be intentionally so....

shulman 2008-10-15 (21 words)

For thos who like this kind of music, shulman might already be well known. Anyway, go check it out. Highly recommended.

riding on dragons 2008-10-15 (62 words)

Dick Richards has re-entered the blogosphere - now Riding On Dragons. Gotta love the name - and the concept behind it!...

blonde coyote 2008-10-5 (420 words)

A blonde coyote walked the trail one day, when suddenly a foot trap snapped closed around her front paw. Howling out in pain she jumped and raged for a few minutes trying to free herself, but soon realized that she stood no chance to get free. Resigned she sat on the trail, her paw stuck in the trap and awaited her fate.

drama 2008-10-4 (175 words)

One of the big lessons I have learned in my life is that all humans are storytellers. And more often than not, we create stories for an audience of one. And then there is the manipulative story... the kind that - in it's extreme form earns people, who employ it, the label of 'drama queen.'

One of those Faces 2008-10-4 (10 words)

Stranger Things, Episode 4. Go watch it if you haven't :)

you will miss me 2008-9-13 (182 words)

production - crash cycle 2008-9-10 (110 words)

Oh I know only too well what Phil is talking about here. Recently this work cycle of high productivity followed by periods of 'crash' have been quite pronounced, what with several projects all at once and a largely reduced team... Beining forced offline by ISP/Telco troubles this weekend put me on forced vacation. Instead of using this time for closed room coding to get ahead with some project work, my body decided to flip the switch and put me into forced recovery mode. Taking the que I also decided to take a break from coffeine... oh my I tell you. Lucky me I'm back online in all respects now ;)

fear, panic, thresholds 2008-8-31 (898 words)

aMusing my genius: "Going back into the dark realms of my early memories as a little kid, much of the world seemed a deeply scary place to me."...

5 reasons to not do what I want to do 2008-8-29 (144 words)

ha. A list. FIVE, not ten... at least for now... ...

thinking in tinderbox 2008-8-28 (435 words)

The new release of Tinderbox 4.5 (which I sadly haven't upgraded to yet, but will), and a new PeopleAggregator client project has gotten me thinking about the "what is it about Tinderbox anyway"... ...

little things we like but don't need 2008-8-28 (231 words)

More musings and observations... A friend recently got a nice cigarette lighter by filling out a promational questionaire in a mall. On our way home in the car this lighter ended up in my hands, and I toyed around with it. It was a very solid feeling thing, one of those objects that just feel good and solid to play around with. In that car, I wanted one of these too. Not being a smoker, I had no reason to ask my friend if I could have this one, or if I could take one of those questionaires myself to get one... So here I was, wanting an object I had really no use for. In the end I just gave up this little gem that was not to be mine and handed it back to my friend - who had a real use for it anyway....

edgeworker 2008-8-27 (219 words)

For no apparent reason - apart from getting older - I've been musing about class reunions... and had an interesting observation: one the one side I'm not really interested in meeting my class mates again. Yeah it would be nice for curiosity's sake and all that... but the people from my school I'd actually want to re connect with weren't class mates of mne....

my lil succubus - tattoo'ed 2008-7-11 (127 words)

Oh hey, what a wonder a long standing website displaying your personal art can be. Some may remember me mentioning one particular piece, and the kinds of emails and contacts it has brought me over the years... ...

screen zoom in windows 2008-7-5 (213 words)

One of the major reasons why I still use my MacBook as my MAIN workhorse (after adding a sleek vista laptop to my park) is the very smooth and interactive screen zoom. This is something I haven't perviously been able to do on any windows (or linux) machine: hold down one hotkey and use scrollwheel to actively zoom the screen rehion. This has been majorly helpful for me (I can work nicely on a failry small screen, but some text fileds or fiddely controls are just too small to figure out to me)...

VWORP 2008-7-5 (31 words)

This post on Digital Ghosts very, very much resonates with my own thoughts on roleplaying in virtual worlds, OpenSim/SL et al... watching closely: VWORP - Virtual World Online Roleplaying - Part 2

the one skill 2008-7-3 (520 words)

One of the main goals of the IC Experiment I'm part of (as Archer Mokeev) is to "prepare for the future." That future possibly being drastically different from our current

root server death card 2008-6-29 (251 words)

As you may have read here, my root server died this week. It had been running quite reliably ever since sometime in 2002. But much as the "Death Card" in tarot os NOT the harbringer of doom, the death of this machine was actually a bit of a lucky stroke for me. Why? Well you see, the way these root server contracts go, you get one machine all to yourself. One physical piece of hardware. And that's the catch. If this piece of hardware is anything near as reliable as the one I had... you're sort of stuck with it. And in our toimes of rapid hardware performance immprovements that's a bit of a PITA after six years. If I had signed the exact same contract this year, the hardware I'd be using would be quite a bit more powerful than the late server-wg.de was!...

identifying 2008-6-29 (135 words)

Bless Her Holy Hooves for inventing Google and lyrics sites. I had two CD-Rs of wonderful music lying around here I never got around to actually listen to. They were in audio track format, and as such had lost all track/artist/album info you'd normally have. I had a listin of all tracks, but sadly that lacked any resenblance of the proper order of tracks on the CDs. rying to identify them by lenght was hopeless, as they seemed to differ by 1-2 seconds each. What ti do... Well, googeling the track titles, listening to the lyrics and googeling for the first few lines of the tracl... actually worked quite well in the end. There were some obvious ones in it anyway, and once you identified a few, it only get's easier :)

fully local testing of email sending web apps (on Mac OS X) 2008-6-28 (1710 words)

Attention: extreme OS X geekery ahead. This is for people who actually know what Terminal.app is and use it. ... more...

Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? 2008-6-27 (159 words)

In a very good - and also very falsely headlined* - article, Terry Pratchet ask in a side note about the different apeal of Darwin's teachings and that of religion: "Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel?"...

back up, but not from backup 2008-6-27 (1282 words)

You *may* have noticed, this server was down for almost two days. What's up?

playing OpenSocial - in your own sandbox 2008-6-13 (1339 words)

Google's OpenSocial spec and stack of technologies has been my main focus of the last few days. I'm investigating several things:...

ambience 2008-6-6 (237 words)

you gotta love legacy OS 2008-6-4 (274 words)

Oh wow... it's so quiet in my inbox now! Where is all the clater and clanker of our friends the spammers?...

seeking the truth - the one we like that is 2008-6-2 (96 words)

Many people "seek the truth," and very often others (outsiders, onlookers) will think that the truth the person is seeking... is staring them right in the eye. It often seems so obvious......

moving iTunes created mp3s 2008-5-29 (248 words)

No wonder my MacBook was getting sluggish... I've aquired over 20gb of music on the rather smallish internal HD :) ... So now that I have a nice and stable *Vista* laptop siting here right beside the MacBook, one that I actually use on a regular basis... that has a whooping 250gb of HD to booot.. the plan was to move my main iTunes storage to that machine. So I happily copied over all my folders to the vista hd, expecting iTunes on windows to re-import all my mp3s with all info intact - after all they all have ID3 tahs written, right?...

it was my birthday 2008-5-28 (46 words)

Huh, I'm an old man now, apparently. On 14th of MAy 2008 I turned 38. Go figure....

Archer Mokeev Productions 2008-5-16 (234 words)

Hello friends of virtual worlds and residents of the Second Life(tm) world in particular. Now you can go and buy some of Archer Mokeev's creations inworld or on SLX!...

I finally put it online 2008-4-25 (73 words)

There is this article I wrote in the time of '04-'05 about my work with designing a fictional Tarot deck in Tinderbox. It was originally meant to be published in Eastgate's TEKKA online magazine, but that never really got finished... I've hinted at it some time back, and now I've decided to put what I had online here on my own website. Come read and enjoy: Designing a tarot deck in tinderbox.

a replacement for love 2008-4-14 (186 words)

Hmmm. What does 'love' mean anyway? I'm musing about the use of the word 'love' in our daily language here....

seeing our brains think 2008-3-25 (20 words)

daylight shavings 2008-3-20 (122 words)

Oh Me Oh My - you gotta LURVE Day Light Saving Times. Apart from the missed meetings due to different parts of the world having different ideas of WHEN to switch... I just spent quite some valuable time with a calendar related bug that was never previously observerd... cause it just HAPPENS in March and in that other month of the year when it all goes backwards. This was a bug that occured ONLY on the servers and not on my local machine... I checked everything from different versions of the PHP install down to the OS, The reason? I'm in europe, we don't switch just yet, while the servers are on PST, which already HAS. I'd cry if it weren't so FUNNY.

twelve offerings 2008-3-18 (97 words)

"Twelve Offerings, the newest release by Logickal. It is dedicated to the people and Sangha of Burma, the monks who peacefully led protests against the ruling Junta on the country before being suppressed. All proceeds of this release will be given to The U.S. Campaign for Burma."...

the cannibal mantis myth 2008-3-16 (170 words)

"[...] a study by Liske and Davis in 1987 threw the first human light on the importance of the natural environment to behavior in mantises. The Chinese mantis Tenodera aridifolia sinensis was among those wrongly accused of sexual cannibalism during mating in several previous studies. However Liske and Davis, although still stuck in the laboratory, made some concessions to the mantis. They fed the mantises regularly, turned the bright observer lights down, and left the room to replace a fidgeting human observer with a stationary video camera. Surprise surprise, no cannibalism occurred! In fact, a whole courtship behavior by the male and female mantises, new to science, was observed!" - "Under natural conditions, it would seem sensible for them to evolve a courtship behavior that then allows their own kind to turn off the 'pounce and eat' instinct from a safe distance. Such an instinct would be difficult to turn off when hungry or starved under artificial laboratory conditions, but under natural conditions the courtship would allow non-violent mating to occur."

right side, left side, world peace and lala land 2008-3-12 (287 words)

If you are at all interested and intrugued by the difference between right side brain and left side brain... you need to watch this TED talk: Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight...

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote 2008-3-10 (43 words)

less noise 2008-3-10 (80 words)

Seth Godin: "[...] Lisa was on a plane once and her seatmate kept looking at her. She finally said, 'Is the noise inside my head bothering you?'" ...

reading assistance 2008-3-2 (196 words)

Eolake has problems with Tiny print and is looking for suggestions. Well I know that problem very well indeedy... and I recently found something that helps me very much: here in Germany you can buy 'reading glasses' that are actually ONLY a magnifier, no vision correction at all. My dear aussie visitor got me the stronges there are at 3.5x magnification. They are almoast too strong actually for the book I am currently reading - Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things - which has relatively normal sized print. One issue I face though is that due to the magnification the field of vision on a page get's quite reduced. It's not such a big deal for me - as I am narrow sighted anyway (slightly downplaying it, am I now hehehehe) but I guess for people who are used to seeing a whole bookpage in one glance it would be an major issue. Me? I think I'll get myself an extra set with lower magnification, so that I can choose the strength according to the book I'm reading. Looking forward to reading those small print paperback for sure :)

to whinge, or to observe small anoyances 2008-3-1 (250 words)

Know thyself - is a key message and skill on living a better personal life. Some time ago I started to pay far more attention to what Arnold Mindell calls 'flirts' abd 'bleeps' (Dreaming While Awake)... small notions and yet-unformed moods. The idea is that you recognize a mood change before it adversly affects you and your surrounding, by observinge the small things. To do so obviously also brings an awareness of small anoyances, and with it the urge to communicate them. Here's where things get tricky: not many people are prepared or expect you to openly state and want to discuss things like "The noise in this room makes listening to you hard" or "I feel stressed by talking about this topic over the phone."...

flow - painless yet engaging 2008-3-1 (103 words)

With my professional (and personal) motto of "making the complex simple" this ALA article struck a chord with me: A List Apart: Articles: Designing For Flow...

the outside of your world could be the inside of mine 2008-3-1 (49 words)

Vlad is re-emerging? A Place Made Entirely Of Sky... "As with the sky, I've become aware the true directions of self are in and out.
Out is where I'm headed."

re learning my own signature 2008-2-29 (410 words)

For the most part of my adult life, I have had a pretty poor excuse for a signature - the thing you use to sign legal papers etc. The one I use developed - or rather detriorated - during my first job. I had to do the cash counting, fill out a form and deliver both to the store's main cash register in the short time between end of business and close of registration. That was sometomes about 10 minutes or less, and also involved a lonish walk and climbing several staircases. Signing the form legibly was my least concern. But doing this on six days of the week for almost two years... kind of burnt in that weird scrawl of a signature that might have been three crosses for all it mattered....

useful vista links 2008-2-28 (88 words)

Here are some useful HowTos for when you are setting up a new computer with Vista (and winXP too)...

vista or xp? now what 2008-2-28 (247 words)

Continuing my saga of an unexpected love of windows... I set out to get the new laptop to dual-boot vista and xp. I had all the best instructions too. Only was I trying to be very smart and ended up with ONLY xp on the machine. No big deal, I didn't loose much I can't reproduce anyway. So now I have a fully working laptop with winXP... It feels snappier than the previous lean Vista install... but... yeah, BUT. I'm not sure if it's because I set out to have Vista AND XP and ended up with ONLY XP... but I don't like XP so much it seems. I need to keep in mind that I haven't actually worked much with wither installation, only twiddled around a bit and browses the web. My previous Vista install just seems nicer, friendlier in retrospect - not that it's gone. The feel of a work environment mater to me almost as much as the 'performance'... and the vista install just felt better to me - at least I recall that it did. And this is where my condrum set's in: I know very well that it might be a recollection colored by the fact that it's gone! So here I go, another setup session. I shall have vista and xp dual-boot- Direct comparison....

revisiting the Random University 2008-2-28 (216 words)

Some time ago I jotted down a concept for a (fictional) education system I entitled the Random University. A recent oist by Dave Pollard (Not Knowing What We Need) made me instantly think about this concept again :)

the bat never fell far from the tree 2008-2-27 (62 words)

Here's a nice profile shot of my pa (left) and me in the background. Currently having similar facial hair, it seems quite obvious we are related, no? It hasn't been that obvious to me in pictures before, as my pa tended to have a very full beard in the past... and didnÄt have any.

writing and reality 2008-2-27 (50 words)

Bruce Holland Rogers Days Six and Seven"This is what I once imagined it would be like to be a writer: satisfying my curiosity about the real world, and then lying about it artfully."

haste ma vista? 2008-2-27 (457 words)

You won't believe it. I now own a Windows Laptop that actually runs Vista! Well you might believe that part. But I actually kinda like the Vista experience....

channeled communication 2008-2-27 (118 words)

Magdalena Böttger on Communicating in a clustered social network: "They want you to connect to all the people you know. But you don’t want to communicate the same things to everyone you know. [...] The more targeted communication you allow, the more meaningful will it be."...

being visited 2008-2-18 (379 words)

When there is someone visiting a foreign country, there's often someone local being visited. Sometimes both visitor and visited are on vacation at the same time... but I'm sadly not. So I'll be busy bat and just point to the story here :)...

templates in the Tinderbox document 2008-2-18 (67 words)

Mark Bermstein: Testing built-in templates...

five whys 2008-1-22 (46 words)

Joel on reliablility and how to measure and improve it: "[]we all agreed that rather than imposing a statistically meaningless measurement and hoping that the mere measurement of something meaningless would cause it to get better, what we really needed was a process of continuous improvement"

max me up 2008-1-22 (133 words)

Vlad seems all excited about Max/MSP 5, and reding his report I can see why. Me? I had a very pleasurable two das with Max/MSP a while back, just learning the concepts and tryng to prototype something I had dreamed of for a long time. And at least one of the new improvements in Max 5 sounds like it might actually make me break down and finally do get a licences in earnest: resolution independant vector based scaling UIs. I still remember that my work with Max was THE turning point in my use of Mac OS X's screen zoom feature. The standdard UI sized of a typical MAx path were just too tiny for me, but in larger projects it's the only way to get all the stuff organized etc...

The Oblique Angle 2008-1-21 (190 words)

The Oblique Angle
Love, Life and Fotoshoppe
(we didn't mention Sex, Music and Art btw, but it's also about those)...

female side of men 2008-1-21 (74 words)

Xiao Yong: "Women often go twosome to the bathroom. I've hardly ever seen that with men."

been there - done that - it's no silver bulltet - syndrome 2008-1-18 (222 words)

ha, wadda title, hm? This thought just crystalized for me. There is a certain pattern to what I do passionately... and to what I get kind of jaded about. When I start something new, I can be very *into* it, I reach a very high level of involvement in a field very quickly. Bleeding edge, that's me. Usually this is in new fields, where I can be a pioneer, where it is possible to do things fresh and in unexpected ways etc. But there are also a number of fields and expertises that I already have, that I aquired in the pas... where I am what someone dear called 'jaded.' The classical "Been There - Done that" kind of attitude. A wane smile crosses my lips when I read of people being all enthusiastic about stuff I've been doing months or years back. I still feel a pull towards these endeavours myself, but there is also a strong sense of dis-illusion......

online feedback 2008-1-18 (149 words)

Dave Pollard just wrote a few lines that really reflect what I have been struggeling with in blogging for a long time: "The challenge with online communities is that it's harder to know, every day, what you're doing for others. You have to rely on them to tell you, over and over, because they can't show you how much your attention and appreciation does for them, gives them."

a serious flow stopper 2008-1-5 (122 words)

"When we do what we do best, what we do naturally... we are experiencing flow. But there are many ways to stop that flow. In an freewriting email exchange with Carlos, I just realized one of my biggest flow stoppers: taking things seriously."...

just stop thinking 2008-1-5 (36 words)

"[T]he problem with thinking about things consciously is that you can only focus on a few things at once. In the face of a complex decision this can lead to giving certain factors undue importance."

prose: When Depression Lifts 2008-1-5 (113 words)

Gone is the Pain, gone the Wallowing....