Today it’s exactly ten weeks of non-smoking for me. Meaning that in a mere two weeks I can boast with being smokefree for one quarter of a year. Which sounds really quite impressive, especially if you mumble the “quarter of” (that’s an invention my mother came up with this weekend, so I can’t take credit for it - I’m just the chronist).
I don’t yet feel the financial relief too much, but I guess that’s because more money has been spent on foodstuffs and the occasional ticket to the public baths in order to rid my body of excess fat accumulated through consumption of above mentioned additional foodstuffs.
What I actually wanted to write about is a service I stumbled upon today via Lifehacker. See, I quit smoking because I felt that spending huge amounts of money on things that will literally go up in smoke is a stupid thing (sure, I could have stopped smoking before sending the monetary equivalent of a Porsche Roadster down my lungs, but it’s a bit too late crying about that now, don’t you think?). Anyway, that service I’m now finally presenting to you is called Smoker’s Brokers, and it’s basically a stock broker for people who have quit smoking. They can invest exactly the amount they’d have spent on cigarettes, pack after pack. It’s an ingenious idea, really. Too bad I’ve already spent my money on food and exercise.
Another charming stencil graffito, found in the intestines of central Vienna:
David Irving, self-proclaimed historian and Holocaust denier was arrested on the 11th of September November (of course) here in Austria. Read all about it here.
Well, it’s great they got him. Especially because he was on his way to talk to members of a right-wing student league (which are called “courageous” on a site closely affiliated with Irving…why they would call them that, eludes me. Or is it especially courageous to be blatantly stupid nowadays?).
The interesting thing about this most recent episode in our country’s dealing with old and new Nazi criminals is, that nobody told the press. They actually learned of the arrest yesterday by stumbling over a note on Irving’s own website. Shouldn’t this be fed to the press as a victory? The moment the put him in handcuffs?
Well, it sure does cast a certain light on our government. Which is not necessary really, considering that they’ve been ablaze as far right conservatives anyway. But still, I like that phrase.
Dominoes can be used in a variety of ways, and for some people putting one domino piece next to another just to watch them fall when tipped is a grand way to go through life.
For other people, having a splendid Friday evening TV programme is a vital part of grandly going through life. *Tonight these paradigms are destined to collide*. Austrian National TV will once again do a live broadcast of the Domino Day, an event so bizarre it’s hard to believe.
Now usually I’m all for bizarre. Unless it’s bizarre and extremely boring, in the course of which destroying any prospect of having a splendid Friday evening TV programme. Because you know what? Four million domino stones don’t topple over in 45 minutes. No, they topple over in a whopping three hours and fifteen minutes. At least that’s the time Austrian National TV has allotted to this disease of civilization.
And I’m actually paying for this kind of programming. It’s a travesty. And a shame.
Well, it looks like it’s another Google shipping week. Monday they announced Google Analytics, which is what they made out of Urchin, an acquired company doing web-statistics. It’s completely free for sites below a certain number of page hits (and it’s such a large number that I’m sure I will always be able to use it for free). Paradoxically, not everyone’s happy about the service turning from paid to free (read about that here), but I guess that’ll all be settled once Google has stocked up on their system resources. Right now it’s sluggish and unresponsive, which of course can be attributed to the fact that everyone and their grandma is now tracking their website’s stats with Google Analytics.
The second Google service was announced today. It’s Google Base, that thing everyone and their grandma was talking about a few weeks back when Google was caught during a test drive. There was a whole lot of speculation as to what it would be, but in the end, nobody really knew. Well, now it’s officially launched and I still don’t really know what it does. Well, let’s look at what they say on the front page:
Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we’ll host and make searchable online.You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.
Right, uh, what? You can actually enter everything and hope Google picks it up? What is this? Spammer heaven? Let’s see what other people say. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch:
It’s ugly. It’s centralized content with less functionality than ebay or craigslist.
Exactly. It’s a monstrosity and I doubt it will be able to lift itself off the ground and soar like the eagle it was designed to be (the eagle part was made up…I don’t think it was designed to be an eagle, not even figuratively speaking).
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