July 2006

Wal-Mart says Tschüss

28 July 2006

Wal-Mart Stores to exit Germany after 8 years, selling their 85 locations to the Metro Group and taking a $1 billion write-off. Their culture was alien to both employees and consumers, and they never grew big enough to compete with established discounters like Aldi. Update There’s a nice discussion (in German) on why Wal-Mart failed [...]

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Money Quote

27 July 2006

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money; that’s just not why most people use communication tools. Anil Dash on weblogs and money, and he was even considerate enough to put this statement in bold so I wouldn’t miss it.

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Beat The Heat

26 July 2006

Garret P. Vreeland has some heat beating tips from New Mexico that are applicable to the current German heat wave as well. Wear a hat. Carry an umbrella. Use a hand fan. Little bandana things with gel inside. Use light moisturizers and sunscreens. Loose, light-colored clothing. Open footwear. Navigate from shade to shade. I can [...]

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I’m PapaScott, and you’re not

26 July 2006

I just had to try the free video publishing service at hellodeo (via LifeHacker).

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Scaling the Pings

26 July 2006

Remember those 60000 pings per hour I complained about last week? My colleague Lars said he wants them at 85.114.159.59 for some Ruby project he’s working on and is supposed to be ready “real soon now”. Whatever he’s doing, I hope it scales.

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Top 5 Social Media Tools

24 July 2006

My boss has kindly requested that I blog my 5 most used social media tools. On the internet, I am an old geezer. My first computer experience was with punch cards, and back then we didn’t have any internets because we didn’t have any massive, tangled-up tubes. So my tools are pretty old school… Mabber [...]

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Second Whiney Expat Bloggers in Germany Meet Up

24 July 2006

The Second Whiney Expat Bloggers in Germany Meet Up will take place in Bonn on 18 & 19 November 2006. I’ll try to be there, and I’ll bring recordings of Christopher in a bad mood so I don’t have to do any whining myself.

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Scandinavian Park

24 July 2006

We took a trip up north to Denmark for the weekend, and I was most impressed by our stop Sunday morning at Scandinavian Park in Flensburg, a shopping center for Danes just inside Germany with a business plan based entirely on selling Danish beer at German prices. Prices are prominently displayed in Danish Kroner, and [...]

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Let’s go exploring!

24 July 2006

Thanks to Andrea, we found that Amazon.de is offering The Complete Calvin and Hobbes for just EUR 63.89, less than half the list price. So we got one. At 10 kg, it’s not light reading, but it’s everything a Calvin and Hobbes fan could hope for (short of a rivival of the daily comic strip). [...]

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Graduation Party

21 July 2006

Christopher’s graduation party.

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Sharp Objects in the Lawn

21 July 2006

One way to beat the heat is to get up early and get your outdoor tasks done before it gets too hot. You’ll want to be careful if you’re barefoot, though. You never know what you might step on.

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Through the Window

20 July 2006

Today was Christopher last day of kindergarten. The tradition is that the “graduating” children jump through the window when they leave for the last time. It’s not time to say goodbye yet, there’s still a party and picnic on the Elbe tomorrow.

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Don’t Keep Knocking

19 July 2006

At blogg.de we used to run a ping service using XML-RPC (similar to weblogs.com) for German (language or related) weblogs. We discontinued the service back in November. The data coming in was at least 99.9% garbage, either spam or from logs having nothing to do with German weblogs. The start page for blogg.de now lists [...]

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Poor Role Model

18 July 2006

When Christopher was born, his uncle gave him a framed print of Calvin and Hobbes for his bedroom. This week Christopher discovered a book to go along with with his print. I think he’s just found a very poor role model. I suspect that was his uncle’s plan all along.

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And Action!

17 July 2006

As promised, here’s Christopher doing laps around the backyard. There’s only one firey crash, at 0:22. We’re still working on braking and coming to a safe stop. Yes, the bike is too small for him. It’s two years old, and he’s, well, grown in the meantime.

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Bravery and Balance

16 July 2006

I’ve got poor priorities for shooting video. Instead of taking silly videos of my wife, I should have been filming Christopher this afternoon as he was doing laps around the backyard on his bike, the first time without training wheels. He was pretty happy with himself. That he wasn’t until now able to keep up [...]

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Firestarter

15 July 2006

Things are going better for us at home. MamaMaus is able to start the fire now, and I expect that by tomorrow she’ll be able to fetch water from the creek.

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Cheap Sunglasses

14 July 2006

Sonnenbrille Fielmann.

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Half a Man

14 July 2006

At the beginning of the month I reduced my hours at nu2m to half-time, in preparation for the beginning of Christopher’s school career in September (when he’ll come home at noon on weekdays instead of 3 pm). I thought that by reducing hours before I needed to that I’d have a few weeks of relative [...]

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Yo Momma!

11 July 2006

Anil Dash: Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival

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World Cup Ratings

11 July 2006

About 16.9 million viewers watched the World Cup final in the US, 2/3 in English on ABC, 1/3 in Spanish on Univision. That’s roughly the same number who watch the NCAA men’s basketball final or the World Series. That’s also roughly the same number of viewers who watched the final in Great Britain. And for [...]

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Fanfest

10 July 2006

On Sunday Christopher and I left MamaMaus with her injured foot at home to check out the last day of the World Cup FanFest in Hamburg. In his Italia shirt he fit right in. First he had to try out the trampoline. Flying at the Heiligengeistfeld. (Update: I just realized that’s my old office building [...]

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Hillary Clinton and Fargo

6 July 2006

“Well, there’s room in my village for a wood chipper.” (Helen Thomas via Anke Gröner)

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Germany 0 Italy 2

5 July 2006

I’ve been meaning to post something more on last night’s game, but instead I’ll point to a couple of tech bloggers who’ve written about it, namely Matthew Langham who explains how Germany won even though the team lost, and Tim Bray who says it was what soccer was meant to be. My thought as it [...]

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Dip in the Seeve

5 July 2006

We have temperatures well over 32°C (90°F), so yesterday afternoon Christopher cooled off in the Seeve, the creek that runs near our house. It used to be a popular starting point for canoes, but the banks have eroded and the county has now banned all boats. They’re currently building up the bank, so Christopher had [...]

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Christopher Wins

4 July 2006

And he doesn’t even know that his team won yet. He fell asleep at halftime.

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Trick Ankle

2 July 2006

After running 5K in the Buchholzer Stadtlauf last year, MamaMaus has been looking forward to running 10K this year. The big race was today, her firm was a main sponsor and she started together with a dozen colleagues. The weather was warm, but a a breeze kept things from getting too hot. Alas, she never [...]

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Italia

2 July 2006

Our son is an independent thinker.

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Art Auction

2 July 2006

Yesterday was open house at Christopher’s kindergarten. The theme was Color in Kindergarten, and they had numerous projects and games with colors and painting, including an auction of several paintings done by the kids. The teachers had obviously dropped hints to the kids to get their parents to buy paintings. Christopher has been telling us [...]

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Don’t Get Naked

1 July 2006

Christopher is already excited about our upcoming trip to visit his Grandma and Grandpa in Minnesota. He’s already planning on fishing from the dock, playing tricks on his Uncle Steve, roasting marshmallows, and getting presents from the Lego Store at Mall of America. He’s also looking forward to swimming in the lake, but he has [...]

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