June 2004

It’s Over

30 June 2004

We can forget any suspense at the Euro 2004, since Anna has published her favorites for the final games, and her favorites have without fail all lost. The prospect of Holland as champion is horrifying for German fans (according to Duden, Schadenfreude is defined as “disappointed Dutch fans; see World Cup 2002“), but one we [...]

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Pulling out of here to win

29 June 2004

It looks like we’re set. Christopher begins kindergarten on Aug 5. As we hoped, he was admitted into the speech therapy group in Winsen. We were at their Sommerfest last weekend, and they had already had him registered and assigned to a room (he’ll be in the ‘penguin’ group) and teachers. Our first parents meeting [...]

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I Have No Goat

27 June 2004

Null Bock is the German phrase that describes my mood today. It literally means “no goat”, but in this case means I’m feeling bored and apathetic. While on the subject of silly German phrases, it betrays my age pretty exactly to admit the first hip German word I learned was Affentittengeil (literally “monkey tits horny”), [...]

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Top Hat

26 June 2004

Today we celebrated the 90th birthday of Christopher’s great-aunt Annelise. This is her just before my father-in-law’s wedding in 1956. She’s the one wearing his top hat.

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For Housewives

25 June 2004

Mobile computing anno 1967, at sofa

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Manila: Converted

24 June 2004

Good News! Jason Levine’s Frontier script has worked! Susan now has a working MT Import File. Jason says he’ll be posting his script in the next few days, and since UserLand offfers a 60-day trial version of Manila for download (thanks, Alwin, for the tip), I’m hopeful that we can come up with a procedure [...]

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Converting Manila

22 June 2004

Back in April 2002, I converted my Manila weblog at editthispage.com to Movable Type using XML files exported from Manila and a simple Perl script (using XML::Twig). This month (2 weeks before the weblogs.com outage), Susan Kitchens found my old script and asked me about converting her Manila site http://www.2020hindsight.org (after she had painstakingly extracted [...]

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New Religion

21 June 2004

I take it back. Rooney (45+1, 68) is God.

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Auf die Palme

21 June 2004

Our new cat Nena had a unique way of celebrating Midsummer this morning. She decided she wanted to be let outside at the crack of dawn, which at our latitude was 3:30 am. She’s learned that she can wake us up by rustling through the potted palm in our bedroom. Very much annoyed, I brought [...]

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Null Number

19 June 2004

Latvia 0:0 Germany After looking brilliant against Holland, Germany today just looked tired and frustrated. But look on the bright side. They have now doubled their point count of Euro 2000.

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DSLed

18 June 2004

Much to my surprise, our DSL connection was activated on schedule today and the splitter arrived with today’s post. Alas, our ISDN NTBA and DSL splitter are in our basement washroom, where I have no ethernet cable, so we can surf from the washing machine but not from our desktop PCs. I’ve put our WLAN [...]

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Expert Opinion

17 June 2004

We had our appointment today with the speech expert from Hannover. She approved Christopher the speech therapy kindergarten in Winsen, which was what we wanted. The costs will be split between the county and our health insurance. Now that the plans are concrete, I can make arrangements to work part-time starting in August and maybe [...]

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Where I Won’t Be

17 June 2004

I won’t be able to make it to BlogTalk in Vienna next month. I have to do the child care thing at home, as my wife has to be in Lisbon on the 4th. Her company is sponsoring a football tournament there or something.

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Egil Aarvik

16 June 2004

A couple of years ago, I posted about the possibility that a distant cousin was married to a member of the Norwegian royal family. My great-uncle who told the story has since passed away, and among his effects was a newspaper article about Egil Aarvig (1912-1990), Norwegian politician, newspaper editor and chairman of the Norwegian [...]

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PS: Mena Loves You

16 June 2004

New lower pricing for Movable Type, and fairer licenses. Especially cool is the free license for small non-profits.

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Pardon Me?

15 June 2004

Did Holland really leave both their defense and their midfield at the hotel this evening? Did Germany really play the best 45 minutes I’ve ever seen them play? Germany leads Holland at halftime 1:0. Update: Final 1:1. But a good result, and very entertaining to watch. Holland was lucky to tie, and Germany could well [...]

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Tip Me Not

15 June 2004

I joined the Euro pool at zeit.de (pointed to by Jim, and after the first 3 days my result is so remarkable that I should post my picks here, so you have an idea of what’s not to happen. I have one (un, eins, uno) point, and it took a herioc effort by Zidane to [...]

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Grill It (Like A Polaroid Picture)

14 June 2004

I’ve been preoccupied this weekend by my wife’s birthday celebration, work matters, hay fever, and Euro 2004, but I would be remiss not to mention BlogGrill in Hamburg last Thursday. I was there. I did man the grill for a time (after expressing doubt about the grilling skill of urban Germans and the equipment used). [...]

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Zidane is God!

13 June 2004

France 2:1 England Zidane (90+1), Zidane (90+3) Update: Haiko and I did not coordinate our blog entries on this match, even though it may appear that we did.

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Euro Election

13 June 2004

David laughs, Nico cries. In today’s Euro-Parliament election (results presented between Euro 2004 matches), with less than 22% the SPD has its worst national post-war result. They have less than half the vote of the Union (45%). Maybe Schröder should think about buying the rights to Project 18 from the FDP. What I find worrying [...]

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Sherpas for WordPress

13 June 2004

Shelley had a bad experience with the new WordPress bug tracker Mosquito, and Matt (among others) thought she was being a poor sport about it. Nonetheless, Shelley does have a good point. To be successful, WordPress has to provide support to users that is both effective and understandable. Bug trackers are a subject near and [...]

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Begging for GMail

11 June 2004

If it worked for vowe, maybe it will work for me. If anyone cares to send me an invitation to GMail, you’ll earn a gushing but sincere compliment and my eternal gratitude. Any takers? Update: All praise be to Phil Ringnalda, who has invited me to partake in the pleasures of GMail.

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Market State vs Nation State

10 June 2004

John Robb: (on the killing of 11 Chinese workers in Afghanistan) “This begs the question: why are we using market-state techniques (like outsourcing work) in a location that needs nation-state development (ie. local work)? This is the same mistake we continue to make in Iraq.”

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Wait For Me

10 June 2004

The Telekom (or as they call themselves these days, T-Com) has scheduled our DSL connection to be activated on 21 June, approximately 11 weeks after my I submitted my order on 31 March. Good thing I didn’t order something really rare and precious like a Trabant.

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Gone With The Wind

10 June 2004

Yesterday’s severe thunderstorm in northern Germany provided one solution to getting rid of unwanted wind generators.

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Why’d You Cry-y-y, For The Guy-y-y, Say Goodby-y-ye

9 June 2004

The next shoe has dropped in the ever-continuing soap opera that is my workplace. Yesterday management proposed a permanent across-the-board 10% pay cut plus an additional 5% conditional on profit. Say what? Like the Sugababes say, takes more than begging to reverse my brain. Maybe I should bring my resumé to BlogGrill tomorrow, I hear [...]

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German ‘bomb blast’ injures many

9 June 2004

BBC: German ‘bomb blast’ injures many Cologne Turkish neighborhood of Mülheim, thousands of nails found at scene, at least 17 injured

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Kaufrausch

9 June 2004

The German Consitutional Court today ruled that the national store closing law is not unconstitutional. So one of the more annoying peculiarities of German life won’t be disappearing just yet. But it will probably better if the law is done away with by lawmakers in Berlin rather than a court ruling in Karlsruhe. An argument [...]

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Work Less Harder

9 June 2004

When I first saw this graph of the CPU usage at my web host for the last month, I thought that WordPress was using less CPU than Movable Type had. But then I remembered that I turned off a busy database cron job at the same time I switched blog software. That must explain it, [...]

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Staticize Plugin for WordPress

9 June 2004

Staticize Plugin for WordPress Static pages for WordPress, protection against database crapout. It caches the entire page, even the parts I would rather have dynamic, so for now my held-o-matic is more of a held-o-static.

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