Year: 2006

August

for the record: Swiss meteo (yeah, the one that is in Swiss German) reported that this has been the coldest August in the past 50 years.

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Categorized as General

scrolling infinitely

Scoble says: It’s my thesis that people will scroll almost infinitely. Just give them high-quality stuff. At Microsoft they did research and found most people won’t click on the “next” button. But, they will scroll. You’ll notice that the search engine at live.com doesn’t ever end. If I remember the research right they are finding… Continue reading scrolling infinitely

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Categorized as General, tech

well-intentioned, but…

stumbled across this well-intentioned attempt to increase the salary of Malawi’s health personnel in Joanne’s blog: Sometime last year DFID (the British development agency) decided to give money specifically to increase the salaries of nurses and clinicians, the thought being that this would help with retention of health workers. Unfortunately, the government decided that the… Continue reading well-intentioned, but…

Donizetti

This week in Riehen: Opernfestival I listened into the rehearsal this afternoon. Great voices. And the stage is some kind of catwalk.

About the inhabitants of JavaPolis

Linguistic nit-picking on a Friday afternoon: I noticed this phrase over at the JavaPolis 06 website (a login is required): 17 299 JavaPolians registered And I started wondering why JavaPolian, why not JavaPolitans? After all, people living in a metropolis are metropolitans or have metropolitan characteristics. The same applies for people from Minneapolis. Maybe the… Continue reading About the inhabitants of JavaPolis

mouse potato

Main Entry: mouse potato Function: noun Etymology: after couch potato slang : a person who spends a great deal of time using a computer Source: Definition of mouse potato – Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

TV Sunday

I just zapped into the making of Vitus on Swiss TV: Die VITUSmacher A film I really enjoyed. If you get a chance, go see it esp. in dialect… It’s raining cats and dogs in Basel. I hope this rainy weather will not result in floods and landslides in the mountains. Yesterday I saw War… Continue reading TV Sunday

PR 2.0

while I was blonking about the future of communications, some PR agency has come up with a press release template suggesting how to integrate Digg, del.icio.us, RSS feeds, as well as audio, and video links. source: MarCom Blog

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Categorized as General

Fare il ponte

Long weekend: It’s the Swiss national day on Tuesday and I’m taking Monday off. I haven’t decided what I’ll do yet… for suggestions, leave a comment below 😉 Here are a couple of links that have been lingering in draft status: Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School – IMHO you can… Continue reading Fare il ponte

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Categorized as General

Chongoni Rock Art Area

The Chongoni Rock Art Area has been added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites: Situated within a cluster of forested granite hills and covering an area of 126.4 km2, high up the plateau of central Malawi, the area features the richest concentration of rock art in Central Africa on 127 sites. They reflect the… Continue reading Chongoni Rock Art Area

Mount Mulanje Porters Race

The annual Mount Mulanje Porters Race takes place tomorrow for the 10th time. The race starts at Likhubula Forest Office and goes up to Chambe Plateau, about 2500m above see level, before proceeding (via the plateau) to Lichenya Plateau and back to Likhubula. Last year’s winner ran this tiring 25km race in 2 hrs and… Continue reading Mount Mulanje Porters Race

Writing Copy

Couple of writing tips I found at MarketingProfs.com: Begin with a story Use short words Write shorter sentences Remove clichés Use bridges or connectors Use concrete examples rather than concepts Pay attention to your verbs

MarComm Writing Tactics

Can technical writers be good marketing writers – and vice versa? The above presentation notes are old (from 2002 i.e. definitely Web 1.0), but the question is interesting… what’s your opinion on this? (update: unfortunately the site seems to be down. Note to myself: write a short summary of the main points for future reference.)

Sunny Days

Summer sports program in Basel from 10th July to 12th August: Sunny Days … they haven’t updated the pdf file with this year’s list of courses yet. [update] The pdf is up now!

trying out Google Desktop

I’m currently evaluating Google Desktop. And I must say so far I’m fairly impressed… There’s little things like opening up the corresponding email in Outlook 2000 which blow me over. The install hasn’t affected performance. But this is only day 2… I’m going see how it goes for the next couple of weeks.

Bike Tours

Various bike tours in Germany

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Categorized as General

Great Mistakes in Technical Leadership

some good points in this list of typical mistakes: The Technical Lead has overall responsibility for all technical aspects of the project – design, code, technology selection, work assignment, scheduling and architecture are all within his purview. Positioned right at the border of the technical and managerial, they are the proverbial “meat in the sandwich.”… Continue reading Great Mistakes in Technical Leadership

experimenting with WordPress plugins

yesterday evening I started playing around with some WordPress plugins I’d found. SlimStats This Day I made a small code change in wp-config.php. Everything was working fine… I thought. But this morning I got this error message (please skip the next paragraph if you’re a wp/PHP geek, you’re probably going to throw your hands up… Continue reading experimenting with WordPress plugins

yet another Flickr tool

stumbled across Flickrmap. An account costs 5 $ per annum. I like this: If you want to blog about Flickrmap or you’re not able to use Paypal, email us your sob story and we’ll send you a login.