Sweet jeepers, I really don’t need being ill right now… it is nothing bad, just a sore throat, a cold and some headaches… Tine is ill as well, so we make each other tea (ok, she makes the tea) and spent the day sniffing (me) and dozing, watching movies and hiding from the world under the blankets.
Archive for September, 2007
Funny thing, blogging. For the last days, I could not think of a story to tell you guys that would be somehow interesting - although the weekend was full of great stuff: I graduated! Saturday was full - starting out at 9am in church, followed by the graduation ceremony at 11am (where Mr. Ackermann (CEO of Deutsche Bank) was the special guest speaker), a trip to Wiesbaden, and then at 7pm until late at night the graduation ball in the Kurhaus Wiesbaden (which is one of the fanciest locations in a 300km radius at least).
Maybe it is the winding down after that eventful weekend that made me tired of posting.
Anyhow - today, still in holidays as I am, I am filling my time with supervising mechanics who had to fix a window, continuing my quest at GTA-San Andreas and installing Ubuntu to the old computer I got from my dad to use it as a fileserver in the future. It is a proper geek-day!
The record-hunting Steve Fossett went missing almost a week ago, as you will have noticed in the news. He went missing with a small airplan in Nevada, and of course, once he did not return on schedule, a search operation commenced. Now, you can help find him, too.
With the aid of some people of Google, fired by the support of Richard Branson, a fresh sattelite map of the area where Fossett could have crashed was made available. The data was set up as a task on Amazaon’s “Mechanical Turk” website. There, you can review the sattelite pictures, and send back the result. Start HERE.
Taking technology and social networking to a good use - I am amazed that all this geekness has some real-world application.
Data, these days, is ubiquitous. In most cases, we have access to much more information than we can handle, understand, process, or analyze.
There are many good examples of data visualization on the internet - ways to see through the jungle. Take for example the various way digg offers to see their stream of news and diggs (votes for news items, if one may say so) at their digg labs.
Another rather basic but well-working idea is the newsmap, where news take more space the hotter they are.
An approach that really caught my eye is the Universe by Jonathan Harris. I came across this gem through his talk at TED this year (which I did not see in person, but online - it is a great video, don’t miss it).
BTW, whoever gets me a ticket to TED will have my lifelong graciousness for sure. Everything I have seen from this conference so far is simply amazing. Look through the website - it is a very rich source of interesting stuff.
today was simply a slow day for refueling the batteries. Relaxing!