April 2002

Pox Be Gone

23 April 2002

Christopher’s chicken pox seems to be winding down. The fever has been gone for 24 hours, and the blisters are starting to dry up. It looks like his infliction was milder than normal (maybe because of good nursing from RN Grandma). And he might be caught up with his sleep again. And he’s not contagious [...]

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Chicken Pox

21 April 2002

We arrived in Las Vegas last evening, tired and cranky. And, for Christopher, with chicken pox. It was going around at day care two weeks ago, and we noticed the first blisters and a fever while on the plane. He’s not that uncomfortable yet, but he must be highly contagious. So it probably won’t be [...]

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On Our Way!

19 April 2002

We’re packed up and ready to go! Departure from the house tomorrow is at 5:30 am, so we got to get to bed early and sleep well. Then 20 hours HAM-FRA-LAX-LAS. We arrive in Vegas tomorrow evening, and plan to crash at the hotel and become conscious again at about noon on Sunday. I hope [...]

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Not In My Backyard

19 April 2002

The Register: Deutsche Bahn sues Google over anarchist links (via Nothing But The Truth [en-US]). The background is the regular shipments by rail of highly concentrated nuclear waste in (supposedly) highly secure Castor containers to a (supposedly) temporary storage facility at Gorleben near Lüneburg. The shipments are accompanied by protests, massive police presence, actions to [...]

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Plane Hits Pirelli Building in Milan

18 April 2002

CNN.com: Four dead as plane hits skyscraper Eiree pictures, even though it clearly seems to be an accident. German TV is broadcasting special reports all the same. But Garret is right, calling 30 stories a ‘skyscraper’ is stretching it, even if it is Italy’s tallest building.

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How Many Macs Run OSX?

18 April 2002

Here’s a question for my readers who are Mac Men (or Mac Women): what percentage of actively used Macs run OSX? A fourth? A third? Half? I suspect my employer needs a OSX-capable machine to test our products, but I don’t have any numbers to back up my suspicion. We’re all Unix geeks who have [...]

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Rau Visits Nazi Massacre Site at Marzabotto

17 April 2002

NJ.com: German president visits, survivors recall Nazi massacre in Italy Despite (or maybe bacause of) all the current horrors in the world, listening to a radio report this morning of the over 950 civilians rounded up and shot by Germans in 1944 in Marzabotto really turned my stomach. Especially passages like “they began to shoot, [...]

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Death Does Not Justify Death

17 April 2002

INFO.ORG.IL: Death does not justify Death. I’ve avoided making comments on the Middle East, but this statement might be a starting point. Via Doc Searles here and here.

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(Not Yet) Thinking In Euros

17 April 2002

Nothing But The Truth [en-US] mentions a report (that I also saw) that most Germans still calculate in DM instead of Euros. I can understand that. Even after 12 years here, I still think in dollars.

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285 mpg

16 April 2002

Electronic Telegraph: Volkswagen reveals world’s most economical car. Front page news in Germany. What’s not mentioned in this 5-liner is that outgoing VW Chairman Piech himself drove the prototype from the VW plant in Wolfsburg to the annual meeting in Hamburg. He had predicted that he would drive a 1 liter (per 100 km) car [...]

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Komodo

15 April 2002

We seem to already be in vacation mode, although we don’t leave until Saturday. It’s not hard when it’s 10°C and rainy here, while it’s 35°C in Las Vegas. I’ve been trying out ActiveState Komodo, an IDE/debugger for Perl and PHP, among others. (For my non-programming family and friends, it’s an editor for writing programs [...]

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Germany in the Spring and Jiang Zemin

12 April 2002

If you are in charge of tourism for your town, you probably don’t have to have Chinese President Jiang Zemin (yes, the People’s Daily has a home page for him) drop in for a visit. He’s passing through the VW plant in Wolfsburg and the historic town of Goslar near Hannover today. NDR4 Radio reported [...]

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Changing Professions

11 April 2002

Another note for Alwin, who did a day of day care yesterday. “…these kids were cared for an entire day by two experienced RNs with years of parenting experience. We could charge what it’s worth, but who could afford to pay?” Our “Tagesmütter” (translates as “day mother”, the dry translation is “in-home day care provider”) [...]

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Explaining the Unexplainable

11 April 2002

Alwin writes about talkng about the Halocaust with his daughter, finding it better to turn off the TV program that started the discussion. It reminded me of the Memorial at Bergen-Belsen, less than an hour’s drive from us, which is so moving precisely because there is nothing to see. The camp was burnt down by [...]

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Bayern Madrid vs Real Munich

10 April 2002

I just watched this Champion’s League quarterfinal, but I’m not sure why. They are each the most loved but even more hated team in their country. Just like Juventus Manchester vs United Turin would be. The only American example I could think of would be the (pre-parity) Cowboys vs the Yankees, if they played the [...]

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Yet Another PHP Referers Script

10 April 2002

Dave’s Picks has yet another way to display referrers with PHP. No database required.

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Four Week Totals

9 April 2002

For those keeping score, I lost 1.8 kg the past week, for a 4 week total of 5.1 kg. Excuse me while I finish my bottle of lemon mineral water.

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Crossover Office

9 April 2002

At work I evaluated CodeWeavers CrossOver Office, a package of the Wine Windows emulation for Linux that supports Microsoft Office and the Lotus Notes Client. I found that it’s not quite the cats meow, not yet, and I recommended that we wait for an update with bugfixes and then try it again. Display of fonts [...]

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End of an Era

9 April 2002

Hamburger Abendblatt: Hamburg-Berlin: Flüge eingestellt (Hamburg-Berlin: Flights discontinued). Lufthansa has discontinued one of the world’s oldest scheduled airline routes, dating back to March 1919. Service was discontinued during the Second World War. The route was regulated by the occupying powers after the war. Only after reunification was Lufthansa allowed to resume service. Today, with the [...]

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Ants and Toilet Paper

8 April 2002

We have ants in our house again. They were here this time last year too. They seem to like canned cat food. So they are all over the cat dish in the entryway. Mama noticed this early this morning, took the ant-infested cat dish outside, and put a new dish in the kitchen. The ants [...]

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SpamBouncer

8 April 2002

I’ve installed SpamBouncer, a procmail-based spam filter, at my hoster account. Highly recommended if you have access to procmail. It detected 39 out of 40 spams this weekend alone. My email might now be usable again.

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Video Studio

7 April 2002

We finally got our video camera back into action, after 1) getting it repaired (on warranty) after (I suspect) Christopher jammed the cassette mechanism, and 2) finding that a head cleaning cassette solved our playback quality problem. And I think I finally found a usable video editing software, Ulead VideoStudio 6. The demo has been [...]

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Sunny but Cold

6 April 2002
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Off To The Sidebar

5 April 2002

I worked on my sidebar this morning. My link list is back up. I should put it in a database or something.

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FC Bundesregierung

5 April 2002

Nando Times: German government, states prepared to back soccer clubs, up to €200 million. Kirch Media is going bankrupt, the soccer clubs have already spent what they were supposed to get from Kirch on outrageous salaries, and the government doesn’t anything better to do with the taxpayers’ money. And I thought that American cities subsidizing [...]

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Things That Make You Go “Bleh!”

4 April 2002

One of those days today. All I could do is fix little problems that nobody else notices anyway. Like checking bad and malformed links with checkbot. Or XHTML 1.0 validation (just don’t try to validate any of my archives). I sure couldn’t accomplish anything useful today.

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Local Bank Robbery Makes CNN

3 April 2002

Our local bank robbery has made CNN: Robbers held after 3-nation chase. OK, not all bank robbers crash two borders with hostages trying to reach Kiev. Uelzen is just south of Lüneburg, one county next to ours. The ICE train slows down there slightly on the way to Hannover.

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PHP Magazin

3 April 2002

I’ve seen plenty of Linux magazines at gas stations and supermarkets, but when buying groceries this evening I saw PHP Magazin. I picked it up, so I can now say that everything I know about computing I could have learned at the supermarket. Well, almost everything.

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Sand Plumbing

3 April 2002
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Housewarming

3 April 2002

Thanks for the housewarming greetings, folks. Nothing like a little bread and salt to make a new place feel like home. Hal also wins the award for first post, er actually first comment. The design is still the MT default, all CSS and standards-conformant. I’m working on implementing the happy stripes from the old design [...]

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