The most shocking detail about yesterdays elections in Vienna are the 15 percent of votes gained by our right wing party FPÖ. I think a healthy democracy can stand about 10% extremism, either from the extrem right or left. What I can’t understand is how is it possible to get 15% of votes (100,780 persons!) with that ugly, aggressive and racist campaign?
It’s just unbelievable…
15% of Vienna are accesible with mainly xenophobic arguments,
15% of Vienna seem to prefer to solve certain issues in the good old manner (“it’s not our fault, somebody else has to be blamed!”),
15% of us don’t seem to be capable of learning from the past (neither recent nor long term).
We simply have to face that 15% of us will remain (dangerously) dumb!
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Jean-Luc Godard
…is written on the wall at Künstlerhaus cinema in Vienna. Last week the international film festival Viennale started here. At least this year I managed it to get tickets for a few movies – it’s sold out every year.
We started with an argentinian movie, Vagón fumador. The highlight of the story is the conversation about “everybody has a price”, makes you think, the rest of the movie and story is way too slow. Then we watched Takeshis’, a cranky self ironic show of the big narcist Takeshi Kitano – well worth seeing! Of course, only if you like nearly endless japanese yakuza gunfights.
On friday I went to see Manderlay by Lars von Trier. A cynical portrait of our society which basically asks one question: do situations for other people and cultures improve when we – the so called western modern society – obligate them to take over our rules? It’s simply a masterpiece, the story and realisation of the movie.
Yesterday we watched Zuihaode Shiguang (Three Times), a couple in three different eras, three different contexts. If you’re one of those who enjoy silence then this is your movie, especially the second episod is a very calm and silent one. Like the most south-east-asian movies this one is as well very beautiful and stylish, well done.
Update:
The last movie I went to was Good Night, and Good Luck. by George Clooney. What I got from this movie – I’m no citizen of the US, thus my knowledge about that specific part of recent american history is very limited – was a lesson in high standard journalism and what media in free countries can (or better should) stand for.
Flock has landed and this is the 78,340th post about it (c.f. Technorati Flock search). However I just wanted to add my 2 cents about this “new” superbrowser.
I really started liking it, but took me 2 tries. After the first attempt I immediatly uninstalled it because I wasn’t able to import all my settings, bookmarks and passwords from my other browser (Firefox). Then I read a few articles about it and gave it a second try. Now I used it the whole day, and honestly, the concept, the few new addons are not bad at all.
First, I had to get accostumed to the new bookmark concept. It’s hard to find a bookmark when you’re used to browse through folders instead of finding it via tags. One time you discovered the search-as-you-type feature in the search bar, this new concept is awesome, though. I would love to enable that feature using a keyboard-shortcut (like spotlight works for instance).
A fantastic new feature imho is the shelf. Just put interesting stuff there temporary and either store it or delete it later – easy and practical.
What I’m missing is a way to keep some favorites private, in other words not to publish them on del.icio.us. It would be big help for new users like me to get accostumed to the new bookmark concept by implementing something like “intelligent collections”, rule based collections that auto-aggregate given tags for instance (without switching back to the folder concept). Yes I know, seen on iTunes and Mac OS X and other places but still damn’ useful!
And please enable the right-cick in the favorites bar to edit properties.
However, Flock has potential but for now I’ll stick with Firefox. Even if I appreciate the built-in blog editor very much, but it froze/crashed one time while I was writing this post, I had to clean up the code by hand and migrate the Technorati tags to my WordPress plugin. To use it on a daily basis you’ll need a lot of patience, it’s still a developer preview.
Brazilian Amazon being cut down twice as fast
Loggers are cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest at twice the rate of previous estimates, according to a new analysis of satellite images of the region. Earlier attempts to gauge the scale of deforestation were not sensitive enough to spot the occurrence of selective logging – the cutting down of individual trees without clearing the surrounding forest.
I know it’s kind of “presumptuous” telling a poor country like Brasil not to use it’s natural resources but something has to change. This problem has a global dimension, thus there can only be a global solution. But first we have to overcome our short term economic interests (like cheap soy food for our EU pig-farms) and become more aware about that problem. Even it’s located so far away on the other side of the planet. I’m afraid that our politicians currently don’t really care about developing strategies to protect nature and our planet. The Kyoto Protocol was an ambitious document, but is it put into action? Or are there even plans to do so? This powerlessness is not increasing my confidence in a bright future…
The funny thing today was the new Hofer brochure in my postbox. Nowadays it’s not surprising any more that you find all sort of things besides food and other quite common supermarket products like detergents, etc. Lately electronic gadgets like cheap mp3-players, GPS enabled PDAs or computers and laptops become quite popular there. However, today’s brochure made me laugh. Next week they are offering drums! 
Still more interesting was another item: the Carrera racing set. Maybe I’ll make my dream come true and buy myself one of those when Hofer is offering it.
Surfing through their site I found out the Austria and Slovenia are the only countries where Hofer is called Hofer, the rest of the world calls Hofer Aldi – quite curious. Well, I didn’t even know that Aldi international exists.
A few days ago I found the interesting WordPress Heat Map plugin. It lets you create so called heat maps, like those “occurrence-dependent weighted tag clusters” on flickr or Technorati, of your categories and archives. I think those maps are pretty useful. With the help of them you get a first impression about the focus of the site you are visiting and it allows you to jump immediately to (tag)related content. Tags offer you to find, filter and select content of your interest. Considering the online information overload, tags will become and actually already are an essential help to navigate through the web.
Anyway, since I don’t have too many categories nor do I consider archives significant enough for indexing my content, I took the plugin and modified it slightly. Actually I created an additional function. I wanted to show all my Technorati tags as heat map. The Technorati tags in my blog are added with the help of Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin to my posts, which does the job quite well. So I developed a function which reads my Bunny’s Technorati Tags and shows them as a heat map. It’s just a small bridge between both plugins.
Feel free to download and use it!
For further information on installation and usage check this website (the plugin was originally done by Christoph). The only difference is that if you want to display your Bunny’s Technorati Tags you have to call the heatmap_bunnytags function like:
heatmap_bunnytags( [your parameters here] );
And if you would like to link to your Technorati-blog-search you should add your blog-url on line 173:
$myblogurl = "http://yourblog.com";
Update:
As you can read in the comments below I installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. It’s a very powerful tag administration tool which does tag heat maps among other things.
Paying with an austrian card in foreign countries you are quite often asked if you would like australian dollars shown in your receipt. So we’re already used to explain the different geographic locations of Austria and Australia. But it’s pretty surprising that even programes get confused with Austria and Australia.
Well, actually I don’t know “Anniemal” but this peek (or here) into the next DJ-Kicks album from !K7 sounds VERY promising!
Free mp3: Annie Wedding (BIGedit)
I got curious about the new features (e.g. beginning of native SVG support, usability increase on Mac OS X) of Firefox 1.5 and downloaded the latest beta version. Unfortunately I encountered problems with some flash objects caused by the adblock extension (even though it’s compatible and basically works with Firefox 1.5 beta).
If somebody else is experiencing the same problem, here is the solution:
- Uninstall your existing adblock extension
- and install the current developer version of adblockplus (download and open the file in Firefox to install the extension)
- under Adblock_Options unmark the entry “Obj-Tabs”
On my system this small workaround solved the problem.
Btw, don’t forget to check these beautiful GrApple Firefox themes!
Florida’s “Shoot First” Law is Deadly and Wrong:
Looking to commit murder? Florida’s the place to be, because all you have to do now is say you were threatened, and it’s completely legal.
Maybe there is to much water in between but for some reason I don’t get the motivation of Florida’s governor to enact this new gun law.
Let me get this straight: in Sunshine State I’m now allowed to use deadly force against someone who has broken into my home and against someone whom I think might present a danger of physical harm or death on the street. Florida must be a dangerous place indeed. Otherwise why would people there need such a law?
Do people actually feel safer knowing to have the option to solve dangerous situations by shooting somebody?
Well, for me and I guess for the majority of the world (except for some warlords and their compañeros in central africa), the north american gun fetish – which obviously stands behind that law – is in general hard to understand.
Shoot first!
