From the monthly archives:

February 2005

Vacation

26 February 2005

We’re gone. To Leogang. In Austria. See you. Next week.

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Night Shift

23 February 2005

As you can tell from the downtime notice on blogg.de, I’m putting in a night shift this evening, moving our servers into a new rack where we have lots of room for expansion. The two hour estimate is a bit pessimistic, but I’ve learned that what can go wrong usually does go wrong when you [...]

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Five Questions

21 February 2005

Andrea passed the Five Questions meme on to me. Good thing I’ve been paying attention, I had my answers ready.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer: moneyball:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music shanson$ du -sh 6.5G

2. The last CD you bought was: Depends on what you mean by CD… The last physical CD I bought was Christmas music for Christopher: [...]

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Schleswig-Holstein Counts the Votes

21 February 2005

That’s what I get for going to bed early. The official count came out at midnight, and the CDU-FDP have fallen short of a majority by 70 votes. Of the 69 seats in the state parliament, they have 34 to 33 for SPD-Green.

The 2 remaining seats belong the SSW, the Danish minority party exempt from [...]

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Schleswig-Holstein Votes

20 February 2005

My wife’s home state Schleswig-Holstein held elections today, and it looks like Red-Green has been defeated. The polls showed the SPD 3% ahead of the CDU, but the latest count shows the CDU 2% ahead. Was there really a 5% swing at the last minute, or were the polls wishful thinking from the media?

Interesting that [...]

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Dusting The Bookends

19 February 2005

Funny, ever since I went to work for a blogging company, I don’t really have time to pay attention to my own blog. But I did some tweaking today. I put in new song lyrics in the header, and put back the photo of the DDR uprising girl. And I adjusted the blogroll to [...]

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Homework

17 February 2005

Christopher is busy tracing letters in his Laura’s Star alphabet book.

Right now Christopher totally enthralled by the Lauras Stern series of books (available in English as Laura’s Star), in which Laura finds and mends a fallen star. He now dreams of flying in a cardboard rocket, just like Laura.

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C64, Where Are You?

16 February 2005

For the past 20 years a Commodore 64 was instrumental in displaying the departures and arrivals at the Dortmund train station. Now the C64 has died, the display has gone black, and the station has a big problem: a new display system would cost over 3 million Euros. (WDR, via Industrial Technology & Witchcraft)

Update: Welcome [...]

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Where’s The Towel?

16 February 2005

Instapundit points to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trailer at amazon.com. I’m not into science fiction anymore, but Hitchhiker’s Guide is, of course, philosophy. The trailer is a bit loud for philosophy, though, and I didn’t notice a towel.

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Keep Me Dumb, Please

16 February 2005

Duncan rambles on how we bloggers (among others) keep ourselves dumb.

We choose to believe the hype, the conspiracy theories, and the outright lies that are fed to us by the media on a daily basis, and we bloggers seem quite willing to embellish which ever brand of bias we prescribe [...]

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SELECT * FROM error;

15 February 2005

I haven’t seen this explicitly stated anywhere, but you probably don’t want to run mysqlsnapshot on a database that is already an active master, since the script issues a RESET MASTER which will stop replication in its tracks.

Another good hint for mysql is to make sure that the mysql user has write privileges in its [...]

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Dresden Connection

11 February 2005

Both Gerd Stodiek from Lübeck and Jonathon Delacour from Australia have recently written about the upcoming anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. I hope they will read each others posts.

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Downbound Train

11 February 2005

Sometimes Hamburg reminds me of a Bruce Springsteen song:

I had a job, I had a girl I had something going mister in this world I got laid off down at the lumber yard Our love went bad, times got hard Now I work down at the carwash Where [...]

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Schockwellenreiter RSS

11 February 2005

The Schockwellenreiter has a new RSS feed, in case you’re like me and only read Bloglines and wondered where Jörg has been the past few days…

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Blogging Policy

11 February 2005

Scobleizer: Microsoft’s corporate blogging policy: “don’t piss off your boss”. I can live with that, as long as I can (gently) make fun of him every once in a while.

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Last Dance

9 February 2005

Today was my last day of work at Netlife… a bittersweet day to say the least, after six years of dot.com, or more correctly, dot.de boom, bust, survival, and finally, the end of the rope. We concieved Christopher just after I started, and my work at there was our sole support from his birth to [...]

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43

9 February 2005

You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day year older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company store

A sign of my age is that my iPod is full of music and not podcasts. Who [...]

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Nobody Expects The Bloglines Askquisition!

8 February 2005

wingedpig.com: Nobody Expects The Bloglines Askquisition!

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Closed In Remembrance

7 February 2005

I don’t see it anywhere on their websites, but today all offices of the McDonald’s Corporation are closed in remembrance of former CEO Charlie Bell, who died of cancer last month at age 44. I’m sure the gesture costs a six- if not a seven-figure sum, but McDonald’s thinks of themselves as family and [...]

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Martin Mubanga

6 February 2005

Martin Mubanga: How I entered the hellish world of Guantanamo Bay

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Bloglines sold by Heiko Hebig

6 February 2005

Bloglines sold by Heiko Hebig. I didn’t realize it was his to sell.

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Relaunch

4 February 2005

Today while Sven and I were fighting with software raids, flash disk firewalls and SCSI controllers, our more creative colleagues were unveiling the relaunch of blogg.de. I won’t try to guess who had more fun.

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Hostnames

4 February 2005

Assigning meaningful yet witty hostnames is an important task for every systems administrator.

When I recently took over a pair of webservers named nelson and milhouse, I immediately thought of Watergate-era US politicians, since I knew my new boss had studied politics at Berkeley. Only later did I realize that it was actually Matt Groening who [...]

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Satin Pajamas

2 February 2005

Yesterday the winners of The Satin Pajama Awards were announced at A Fist Full of Euros. I didn’t mention them until now because I was actually nominated for Best Weblog By An Expatriate and I didn’t want to increase my chances of winning (I blog to please myself, not anyone else), although judging by the [...]

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Dot Com Zombie

2 February 2005

The funny thing about my previous employer going bankrupt is that for January we will get paid on time for the first time in months. The government guarantees three months pay in event of insolvency, so it is routine for the court-appointed administrator to get a bank credit for paying salaries.

The not-so-funny thing is that [...]

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Maybe the Amish are on to something

2 February 2005

bronski.net: “Maybe the Amish are on to something… Bet they never get Spam…”

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