Did I say, "everybody blogs"? EVERYBODY DOES!

If you happen to remember history in SEA back to the days of the VietNam war, you might remember King Norodom Sihanouk. Well, His Majesty is now well in his eighties. And the Old Man has a blog. Get out!


Still alive and blogging from Campuchea

1999 Darwin Award: Living on Zionist Time

Just found this one, this is probably my favourite Darwin Award:


1999 Darwin Award: Living on Zionist Time

European Unity - peut-etre pas maintenant

BBC NEWS | Europe
more from BBC: the consequences of the French referendum

What about the rest of Europe?
Germany you guess

An overview: click

Loaded and blog-ged

Hey, everyone, everyone´s wife and their tennis partners have a blog these days.

I just did a wild google-a-thon and found:

Dave Barry

Jerry Pournelle
(well, old Jerry makes a point, his column and later site, "Chaos Manor" [you´re a legit Old Fart when you still remember that in what used to be BYTE magazine] actually preceded blogs as we now know ´em)

The cartoon fiend strikes again

Just found this very nice cartoon: Day by day.

Hey, it´s got a corporate context and the people involved have age issues. The comic for me, what?

Bilinguality and it´s delusions

or

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Actually, my English is said to have a certain slant towards British English, but here´s the result for me:

Your Linguistic Profile:

55% General American English

30% Yankee

10% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Well, the algorithm probably does not cater for cross-overs like me... They certainly didn´t ask me for words like "prolly" (cf. above) or "innit".

News from Old Europe

I regularly check out the BBC news services, handily provided by RSS stream, only to be disappointed about the scant coverage the Old Europe (remember when France and Germany were basically rogue states standing by to be invaded? It´s not so far back in time.) gets.

So here is one source to help that: English news from Germany´s first-rate source of political information, DER SPIEGEL (The Mirror).

Music. non-stop.

When you use your car for business purposes (or you´re stuck on your usual two-hour commute, you poor bastard), one thing that helps to stay alive is, you guessed it, music. That´s why I like my car with a CD-changer.

Now, these boxes help a lot, but they also have a couple of drawbacks:

• the CD as a medium is not quite up-to-date anymore
• most are prone to skipping on bad roads (doing the autobahn at 200 kph does it for me)
• few support MP3 or self-composed CDs
• they aren´t cheap. In fact, they are hideously expensive.

So, when I put my new car together, I looked for alternatives. I found that Volvo (in fact, so did BMW) offers an MD unit.Apart from the fact that I knew about the existence of minidiscs, I had not really understood the uses of the concept.

Let me take the floor for a short summary:

• minidisc is a media format developed by Sony. These are the guys that brought us the 3,5in microfloppy and Sony walkmen.
  
• It´s magnetic and, being fully inclosed, rather rugged.
• It has been around for some time, so an abundance of devices exist.
• It can hold up to 4.8 hrs of digitized music. I managed to squeeze up to 72 titles or 4 to 6 albums on a single medium.
• It´s relatively cheap to own, in the case of the Volvo, it costs a quarter of the 6-disc CD-changer.
• current devices support USB uplinks to a host PC, speeding up media preparation (if you have previously digitized your albums (which is what I been doing for some months, anyway)

Even with the added price of the recorder, I only spent half the money than I would have had spent on a CD changer. Sounds like a winner, eh?

how the mac started?

I´ve always liked Macs, but never used them regularly, being more of a tech guy, and being exposed to linux from very early on (my own first productive Linux box ran 0.97, I had just switched from Jolitz´ BSD), I ended up with Unix boxen and PCs. Having said that, my computer collection includes a Mac LC and a Quadra 700. Being a long-time user of NeXTStep (I still use my good old HP 715/100 with NeXTStep 3.3 hp-parisc every week), I finally came around to considering a Mac with OSX. I might just end up with a Mac Mini.

Why am I telling you all this? I just found this little bit on the ´net:
clic

Black cars rule:

It´s official, my current little black car is to be followed up by another one, albeit one not quite so small ;)

In fact, my trusty BMW 320d, yearning for retirement after five years of faithful service, will be replaced by a lovely Volvo XC90, scheduled for September 1st.

From here

to here

to blog or not to blog...

is that a question?

Probably not, since everybody seems to be at it like rabbits are after grass and sex.

So what other choice do I have?