It’s drawing near. Inevitable and unstoppable. The “happiest” time of the year. The interesting thing is that only today I read about surveys which have shown that most people fight more during the Christmas time, and are happy when they’re over and they can retreat to their respective dwellings again, with the assurance not to be subjected to family gatherings for another year. Well, good luck to these people.
And for those of you who are into snow-white Christmas and all that jazz, I’ve captured what I see when I take a look out of the window:
Snow, snow, snow…it’s all so snowy white. Uhh, yes. It snowed today. Next:
So these are the plants. I know, it looks as if I don’t give a damn about those plants, but actually, there’s a whole lot of reasoning behind not tending to those plants all the time. It’s my masterplan, and it’s secret, like any other masterplan. Except for James Bond movies, where they are happily explained to Bond because the villain thinks he’ll kick the bucket anyways…since I know that the probability that every single reader of this entry is going to kick the bucket today is rather slim, I won’t tell you my plant-masterplan. I’m not a stupid arch-villain.
Finally, here’s a picture of a board of styrofoam, which somehow ended up next to the window:
It makes funny noises when it’s hit by the harsh winter wind. I don’t think I have the energy to remove it. I’ll just wait for it to disappear one day. I’ve always liked that strategy.
Yesterday the following was announced by Google:
Some of us admit to a misspent youth lurking in libraries, devouring books on anything from “the survival of the fittest” or the explorations of Lewis and Clark to the essence of philosophy or Victorian detective yarns. This immersion has made us certain of one thing: there are a million and one books are out there waiting to be found (tens of millions, by some counts) - but library collections just aren’t that easy to search.
Which is why we are thrilled to begin scanning book collections belonging to the University of Michigan, Harvard. Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library, so that they become more searchable.
Now there’s an ambitious project. And I think it’s definitely one of the best ideas this year. Joining libraries and the Internet was the next logical step, and once again Google did it. I am not a librarian, but I wonder what they think about this? Maybe, once The Aardvark is back, he’ll tell us what he thinks (being a Google critic and all that…).
Lately there have been rumours that my great little register navigation bar at the top of my page was positioned strangely for people using IE. Now, I normally only check my site with Firefox and Konqueror, so I don’t see those things. But I did check it now, and yes, the positiong was way off. I am by no means a specialist in web-design, but I’ve tried out a few things, and if everything worked out the way it should, then that issue should be resolved. If that navigation bar is still way off to the right or somewhere else on the page where it clearly doesn’t belong, please tell. And if not, feel free to peruse my site.
Update: I’ve now done a few things to my CSS which are probably highly illegal, or at least nothing to write home about, but it seems the navigation now seems to be suitable for all browsers, including Konqueror, Mozilla (Firefox and Oldschool) and Opera. The only browser unable to display my site the way it’s supposed to be is an awful assembly of code called Internet Explorer. STANDARDS!!!
Update #2: Everything’s fixed. I won’t even go into IE colour-management, but the navigation bar issue is resolved. FOREVER. No more CSS fiddling for me. My eyes are bleeding.
MSN today announced the beta release of their new desktop search tool. It’s supposed to be a great tool for finding pictures, emails or any other files on your computer. Now, please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this what the built-in search feature in MS Windows is supposed to do (apart from the email thing)? How come that shortly after Google developed their desktop search tool, MS suddenly thinks they can do it just as well, although existing search features in Windows have shown they can’t? What gives…?
And here’s another interesting bit from their announcement:
Find entire conversations
After finding an email you were looking for, try right-clicking on it. Select “Show Conversation” and we’ll automatically refine the search results to show all the emails from the conversation thread.
For those of you who have a GMail account, doesn’t that seem strikingly familiar to you? CONVERSATIONS! That’s so lame, I wonder if the people at MSN can even walk upright.
Well, another minister has decided to simply leave office in favour of the much more attractive “private economy” as they call it. Federal Minister of the Interior, Ernst Strasser, stepped back from office, and now our Federal Minister of Defence, Günther Platter, has been given that ministry as well. Now, you may have heard about something called separation of powers before, and then you’re probably asking yourself how that is possible. How can someone who’s in charge of the military now be in charge of the whole police-force as well? Actually, that’s quite easy. Just find a Federal Chancellor who doesn’t have a clue about the future plans of his servants, let one of those servants resign and there you go: The Federal Chancellor has to react, and hey, if that one guy already knows how to manage the armed forces, why not give him the job of managing the executive powers as well?
In the light of discussion about various eastern countries like the Ukraine going through the process of democratization, the things going on here in Austria bear a disconcerting resemblance. If you want to find out more about the disaster they call the government here in Austria, here’s a link.
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