Monat: Juni 2004

Well, maybe my headline´s not quite right – because: „it´s always the same“ isn´t true for me, ´cause I can´t really remember the last time I went on holidays for more than some days. But now we´re going to portugal, nearly three weeks from the first until the 20 th of July – and that´s the point: we booked the flights in december, so from that day on I knew, that I have to organize everything, to have peaceful holidays – but: the last days were just terrible: wirting my blog – even reading the blogs of my dearest friends was nearly impossible. Organize your employees, organize a cat-sitterin, organize the car-rental in portugal, buy clothes, something against the flies, against the sun, against sicknes…ugh—it seems as if you have to build a whole new life. I remember times, when I just went into my car, heading off for italy, having a nice time for five weeks – without stress. It´s because I´m getting older? Having more to care for? I guess so, and know what? I´m looking forward to this special feeling: checking in in the airport on thursday eveneing, and knowing – you can´t change anymore. It´s done, now it´s just time to retire. So friends, have a nice time – I will so! 😉 bye

As the macobserver reports, Apple and BMW are going to release a system with which you are able to control your iPOD through the BMW one-touch control system. Well, that´s a really nice idea, but: APPLE, please help them out with good designers – I think, they are the worst designed-cars on the market at the moment.

Some days ago itunes germany started. And due to the fact, that it was raining yesterday, I decided not to go to the music-store, but try my luck finding the new song „Troy“ in iTunes. First of all I have top say, that the concept, having an online store in a „local-software“ seems to me very good. You always have the latest songs and albums in your well known surrounding. Making an account is simple: you just need to select the right store (in my case iTunes-store germany) and enter your credit-card informations. iTunes germany doesn´t have many songs at the moment – but they are presented in a clear and well designed way. I wasn´t able to find my beloved song, but I chosed to take another one. They all cost 0.99 €, which is quite ok in my opinion. I mean, if you go to the store and buy your song on a single you always have to pay at least 7 €, for a rap, hiphop, metall and no-voice-karaoke-mallorca-mix-additional version of your song. hell, the download was fast: there was no speed-o-meter, but I guess it was at least 150 kBit, cause the 2.30 long Beastie boys song was delivered in less than a minute. So, iTunes gives a very new shopping experience: you get a 30 sec. long prehear of your song, you can see the cd-cover, you can be lead to the interprets-website, and may view their music-vid. The song is delivered very fast, and when iTunes is able to convince even more music-companies to participate with their store, I think, times are getting harder for my music-store next door.

Gunners Palace is a recent Saddams palace just in the center of Baghdad. A journalist has been living there among the soldiers for several weaks, going with them on raids, etc. The site gives an inetersting view inside the soldiers thoughts, their fears, and their perspective of the iraq-war.

This „Wahl-O-Mat“ is a very interesting tool (sorry, it´s just in german, turkish oder russian) for germans, and their decision for what party ever in the upcoming european election: you click through a certain number of thesis, and can decide wether to say yes, no, neutral or don´t know to the questions. After finishing the questions you get a result of which party fits best to your answers. Unfortunately my result was quite the other handside of the party i usually tend to chose: i guess i have to think abut this, and still have to read a lot…

Here you can find a Top 25 list of influential sites about politics on the internet. Among them, and for me it´s a quite fascinating one, is the one from Ben Casnocha comcate.com. Ben is a now 16-year old boy who founded his first comapny at the age of twelve, providing e-government software. This is true entrepreneurship….

RSS to WAP: this seem s to make sens…RSS feeds aren´t that big (mostly they are text-orientated) and you now can read them wherever you are on your mobile phone via wap. But it´s even more interesting, that I came to this service via an advertisement feed on the google-blog.

Joi on the very famous german online/offline mag Spiegel. Thx Ewa for the pointer 😉

Next weekend we have to elect the new european parliament. Here´s a list of our lovely german politicians being already in the european-parliament and their amount of attendence: Nearly half of them are UNDER 85%!
(thanks Loic for the pointer.)

Well, it looks as if bloglines has a mobile version. Now, this really rocks! With millions of mobiles getting on the internet soon, this is a reliable and small must visit! All your info´s on your cellphone. Great! But I wonder how bloglines.com will managa to keep all it´s great services free. If they would offer a paid service for about $ 30 /year I would definitely want to pay for it.