Seems like we’re going to celebrate tonight together with Bunny Lake, the hottest live act in town! Yeah! Welcome 2007! Felice Anno Nuovo!
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Monthly Archive for December, 2006
As I discovered last night, Mojitos perfectly help against upcoming colds.
I felt a bit sick yesterday, my throat hurt, the nose was stuffy and running all day, something malicious was coming up inside me.
Because a swiss friend of mine was in town we decided to meet for a drink or two. Usually I avoid taking pills as long as possible, simply don’t like them. So even if I felt a bit bad, having a drink was no problem for me.
Surprisingly, when I woke up today, all symptoms were gone.
Since I only drank Mojitos last night (watched Miami Vice the day before and I felt like having a Mojito), it’s very likely that the spirit of the Mojito helped me and pushed the cold out of my body.
Actually, looking at the Mojito ingredients, the case becomes clearer:
- the Rum must have killed all bacteria and viruses in my throat (cf. alcohol as disinfectant),
- the limes brought me a vitamin C overdose and
- Peppermint is among other things a traditional household remedy against colds.
So from now on, whenever I think I’m coming down with a cold, I’ll go the next cocktail bar and order Mojitos until I feel better. More fun than staying at home in bed and healthier than taking pills.
Just found this nice Dashboard widget: (unofficial) FM4 widget.
Runs in the background, occupies less CPU-power than Quicktime and integrates FM4 Trackservice.
FM4, if you don’t know it, is an excellent *alternative* Austrian radio station. All morning shows (until 1pm CET) are in English language and there is also an official stream on their website available if you’d like to give it a try.
Techcrunch reported the acquisition of parts of Performancing by PayPerPost earlier today. I’ve heard about those affiliate programs paying bloggers to mention products or do entire reviews on their blogs before, but never had a closer look at them.
Frankly, I don’t like the concept at all and doubt that it’ll work out on the long-term. The point about reading and subscribing to blogs is the personal value given to news, events, products, experiences, etc. Once the personal opinion of the author is bought, it can’t be considered as neutral any longer, even though it would be the same without being paid. I think the author is selling a major part of his credibility to this programs.
Imagine reading a blog post about a Sony TV set, finishing with the words “brought to you by Sony Entertainment”. Would you truly belief that review? Or even come back and read another review? I would have my doubts and search for reviews on other places. If I want to read some Sony approved marketing information I’d go directly to the official Sony site.
Surely, PayPerPost or ReviewMe create awareness and probably some good backlinks for advertisers and publishers, but on the long-term, I think readers will be smart enough to see paid posts as what they really are: ads.
Nothing against ads, as long as they can be identified as ads and make the minor part of a website or blog.
Ah, yes, and no further comment on that testimonial….
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Web accessibility is a big issue for public authorities’ IT services. Since eEurope 2002 every new developed web content must claim conformance to Conformance Level A, which means quite a challenge for public webmapping services.
Now Google has added text output to Google Maps too: depending on your search and how much textual information is available in your results, the map is becoming smaller in favor of more textual information. Searching for a place won’t give you any text information at all (how would you seriously describe the result of a place search?), while searching for directions results in 100% speech-friendly textual routing information. (via Official Google Blog)
There are quite a few Christmas clips making the round. Ms Irina Slutsky from GETV did a hilarious Christmas special too. Hmm, why not release it as song?
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Update:
Boing Boing has a post with follow-ups on this clip, from Larry Flynt to Valie Export.
For my little brother I bought a video game for Christmas, not very creative from my side, but he loves video games.
Since I don’t play video games at all, never got hooked, I had to rely on cover images and reviews. He already owns a few car racing games and easy adventure games, so I was looking for something different, no ego-shooter, an easy sports game or something. Finally I came over Tony Hawk’s Project 8, which did look good and so bought it.
The effect of that present was that I liked the game more than my younger brother. Maybe it’s still too complicated for him because doing all those tricks is a bit difficult. But it’s such an amazing game!
Frankly, I’m thinking of buying a XBox or PlayStation and that game for myself. Maybe I can save some money on the new kitchen and invest in some decent video entertainment instead.
I of course never did such tricks in real life skateboarding you can do in Project 8, but the game got much of the feeling you have when you skate. The sounds and the moves feel very real.
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Besides enjoying that game I spent the last days very quiet and it was so good! I slept well and a lot – must be the tranquility and air on the countryside – and ate well and a lot. Just what I needed at the end of December.
Merry Christmas to everyone!
I’m leaving today for a short break on the countryside.
No hectic city, no computer, no internet, no work, just peace and tranquility.
Calming down a few days with my family will be quite enjoyable after the stressful days before Christmas.
Each year I wonder why clients are becoming so nervous before this magic date.
Latey I was testing some alternative affiliate programs to Google’s AdSense:
To make it short: none of them works on a blog like this is. After 2 months of testing I’m removing them now and stick with AdSense, which is IMHO the best option here.
Frankly, it’s not my primary interest to generate revenue on this blog. It’s mainly a hobby, I’m doing it just for fun and for sort of professional communication and discussion.
This doesn’t mean that the above mentioned affiliate programs won’t work for you. The content of this personal blog is probably too diversified and traffic too low to attract any Performancing or Text Link Ads clients. AdSense works contextual and runs the ideal ad for each post, page and visitor.
If you’re thinking about to run ads of those affiliate programs on your blog, I’d suggest you
- limit the content of your blog to a niche
- ensure a decent readership and traffic (I would say at least 20k pages/month or 100 subscribers) before becoming an affiliate partner
Talking about blogs and ads: don’t start cluttering up your feeds with ads! RSS focuses on pure information, text-only if possible. I find ads there very annoying, not to say that it’s nearly a reason to unsubscribe such feeds.
What makes urban areas worth living?
Right.
Good bars and pubs within walking distance.
Since two weeks I’ve got a new one close to my place: werkzeugH – cozy furniture, pleasant atmosphere and free Wi-Fi. Overall a very nice new venue in my neighborhood where you’ll see me more often from now on.