just to let you know

Britain's Eurovision 2004 Entry

After last year's Gemini desaster ("Nil Points"), the british are approaching this year's pre-selection with a bit more structure. A whole bandwagon is touring several TV stations (TOTP), clubs and other venues to promote the contestants and build up to the grand domestic final.

The BBC has -like every year- its own Eurovision website. In true 1966 style the competition was named "Making your Mind up" (from the last winning UK song by Bucks Fizz). So does this mean that we'll hear about 1981 more often ? It probably does.

I'm just surprised this seems to be taken so seriously here in the UK. It appears some music pros seem to bear a grudge. I always thought that this is the job of the Germans. :-D

Linkable

• a green german politician injected some fuel into the eternal debate in Germany about speed limits on the famous Autobahn (motorway). "We brake for nobody!"
• ever tried and entered 'Bush's foreign friends' in Google and hit 'I'm feeling lucky' ? That's the result...

David Hasselhoff comments on Amazon.co.uk

Someone mentioned the comments on Amazon.co.uk about David Hasselhoff CDs to me the other day. I thought I might have a closer look again:

"Joy, pure joy. No words can describe how I felt when I put davids greatest hits in my cd player. It's a marvelous cd. The songs are funky. The songs are happening. The messiah is without doubt a god!!. Fantastic array of songs. The front cover was genius by david, using a camera to take a picture of himself on a beach and then scanning multiple copies of it and with those eyes it's not hard to see davids soul."

"God made man and angel, but only in David Hasselhoff did he combine the two. He has the body of a perfect man, and the voice of a perfect angel. Listening to this CD is like staring into the ears of God."

and especially this person knows what he or she is talking about:

I remember back in the early 90s, during a heady evening, in New Orleans when I first heard David's 'Doing the Limbo dance'. The crowd immediately went into a voodoo frenzy and it was then that I realised David had something extra special. I now own all his singles including a very rare limited picture disc of 'Hot Shot City'..the launch party in Frankfurt was a night to remember!

For a full list, click here

According to Amazon.co.uk those people who buy David's CDs also tend to buy music by Leonard Nimoy - Fascinating !.

Linkable

Things I love about the UK: bring your own bottle...!

It happened in a curry place in Coventry A.D. 1997. That's where I - for the first time in my life - brought my own bottle to a meal. To be precise, we're talking a 2 litre bottle of Cider here. After all, we were students. And we all thoroughly enjoyed what we could never imagine to be possible back home in Germany: consuming your own beverages while enjoying the delicacies of distant asian countries.

Someone please explain to me why this system has not been adopted in Germany yet - you save money *and* you know what kind of drink you get. I guess there is some sort of law against it. With bevvies getting more and more expensive on the continent, I can see this becoming normal practice.

There is the "corkage" though... a fee for opening bottles on the premises - and it feels almost like a rip-off. There is you, bringing all these bottles and then somone still charges you for merely opening them ! Also, there are restaurants which do not allow you to bring beer, but are happy with wine.

All in all, "Bring-your-own-bottle" gets top marks from me. Lets hope for the german students that they might find a loop hole in gastronomy legislation.

Apple's iBook Recall Programme

2 weeks ago, I found out that my iBook is affected by the recall programme that Apple has just announced. Grudgingly, I took it back to my local Apple dealer and explained the situation. Unfortunately, they had not had any recall-iBooks at that stage, so no one really knew what the fault looks like (apart from the descriptions on Apple's support page). I agreed that it had to be checked out first to see if it is *really* affected. One interesting twist in all this was though that Apple would *not* pay for an iBook which -despite being in the serial number range- hasn't got the faulty main board as described.

Hae? STOP - REWIND - PLAY.... yes, you read right. There apparently are iBooks within this range that are not (or not yet) affected. Explain this to me whoever wants, but to me it sounds as if Apple is trying to cut corners here and chicken out. Why not offer to replace all main boards in all affected machines within the range? Why not providing the dealers and customers with better descriptions of what the problem looks like. I don't think there are too many Apple users who send away their iBooks just for fun.

Well, this is hopefully all academic for me now, as the technical staff of my Apple dealer found my iBook displays distorted video after > 150 minutes. To be honest, I never found this to be a problem. But I have to add that I found video display fairly distorted and stopping-starting at all times. Someone hinted to me that this could be from corrupt video, but the same clip displays OK and my G4.

Hopefully this saga will come to a hapy end in about 7-10 days.

Linkable

Karneval in Germany

Oh it's that time of the year again. From today until next week Wednesday (Ash Wednesday), Aachen, my hometown is just going bonkers. Duesseldorf, Cologne and numerous other cities follow suit. Working life almost comes to a stand still and thousands of "Narren" drink, celebrate and sing in the streets, bars and cafes. Oh, and did I say there is lots of drinking?

Luckily, I managed to escape all this frivolity and ran off a long while ago to a place at the Kilt Equator.

Milly Mops is 0.5 !

Seeing our daughter Milly growing up is a true pleasure. Above this though, it's such a constant reminder to me what fabolous and gifted beings all of us are. Within a span of 6 months Milly learned so much already and there seems to be a major 'development milestone' every week. Last week, for example, she easily passed a toy from the left to the right hand several times. Even more surprising if you consider that Sal and me had no involvement in this evolutionary step. Milly also recognises the times when we're singing to her and she changes the tone pitch of her voice - she's singing with us ! This also reminded me again of the fact that there are so many ways besides language how you can communicate with another being. Over the course of the last 100 years we have developed telephone, fax, email and video conferences. But have we really explored these non-verbal avenues of communication well enough, I sometimes ask myself ?

Unfortunately -as in all other walks of life- there are people who just have to take matters that little step further: I've heard about so-called courses or instructions to teach a sign language to your baby - so you are able to communicate even earlier with your child. To me this is absolute rubbish and something that can only stem from over-excited parents who can' t wait until they can launch their kids onto the educational race.

We live in such a highly stimulative world. Language is only but one of the big tasks that a child has to master - and in our case it'll even be two.

Milly will be 6 months old this coming weekend. Happy Half-Birthday, Maus !

Linkable

the british way

People sometimes ask me what I think the "British Way" is. To me, a little anecdote describes this best.

During January 1998, I visited a german friend who did a practical down in Bournemouth. I was still a student and lived in Coventry at the time. It was my friend's birthday on Saturday and I took the National Express down to lovely Bournemouth. I arrived fairly late and we went straight to an Irish Pub where we consumed substantial amounts of alcohol. We continued celebrating until the wee small hours and had a great time.

Needless to say that I felt a bit under the weather the next morning - I stayed in a B&B that my friend had arranged for me. I either must have been the only visitor that weekend or terribly late because when I finally went downstairs for breakfast, there was no one else there but the landlady. After placing my order and staring into a Nirvana behing the Cornflakes box, she reappeared with my breakfast and also decided to have a conversation with me. "Oh dear", I thought and it turned out to be one of the biggest morning-after ordeals I have ever had in my life. She wanted to know all the glory details - Where I come from, what I do in Cov and if I would stay in the UK forever - the usual stuff. After a while of talking through a major headache I put my courage in both of my hands and popped the important question, "Excuse me, but do you maybe have an Aspirin for me?". "Oh,", she said, "have you got a headache?". "Yes," I replied, "we've been to O'Neills last night - the Irish pub in town, you know".
And here it comes: smiling, she replied, "Oh, I know this place, they play terribly loud music there. I'll get you your Aspirin.".

How lovely! To me, it doesn't get more british than this. Even though her smile revealed a certain kind of Schadenfreude for my misery, she would *never* be rude and mention this to me. A german landlord would have probably lectured me about age and alcohol and drugs - she simply kept stumm about it and would never even dare to interfere into what's my business.

Moments

Simon posted a link to his short movie "Moments" which he shot with his digicam yesterday on MacAssist. I think it's fab and again shows that sometimes you don't really need all these fancy effects in Apple's iMovie.

For a smaller 56k modem friendly version click here.

Leith, Edinburgh

I took some photos last weekend during a stroll through Leith - Edinburgh's port. Have a wee look ...

links into new windows?

We had another one of those link-into-new-opened-window-or-not-discussion on the MacAssist Tosh forum today. All I wanted to say is that on the "Just to let you know..." blog I will NOT open new windows on any of the links.

It's something I dislike on other forums and blogs - particularly when working with smaller screens on laptops - and I do believe that the control should really be with you, my reader: if you want a new window, Ctrl-Click the link - "e basta" !

Linkable

a slightly different competition

I checked out the websites of (what seems to become) the main contenders in the US presidential elections. While George W Bush goes for the all-inclusive, slightly cluttered kind of site design, Senator Kerry mainly opted for an innocent white.

All in all - nothing special on both sides and no big surprises or even daring animations. A bit like real life really. Maybe a slight advantage for Kelly and the less confusing design. But what it shows is: even current and future presidents have to respect browser incompatibilities and make their site as accessible as possible. In front of computers we're all equal! Yieeeppieeh.

Animal Cruelty on "I'm a celebrity..."

In January and February this year, I was in for a double-whammy. During a visit back home in Germany, I had the pleasure to be able to watch the German version of "I'm a celebrity - get me outta here". In February then, the Brits moved into the Australian jungle in order to fry some more brain cells back home.

I was wondering during both shows what measures had been taken in order to keep any other wildlife out of the compound. Obviously I wasn't the only one wondering about this. Several worries and concerns have been voiced over the course of the last months. All wondering about the whereabouts of those animals that lived in this particular part of the rain forest.

There is not a lot that can be done now to prove if animals or insects were harmed in any way. But I am still concerned about signals that shows such as this are sending out to people here. In a BBC news article from October last year it is said that animal cruelty rates in the UK had gone up.

Chris Martin urges Americans to vote for Kerry

Whenever bands become political, their messages are bland and simple: "don't vote for A, go for B instead". With his latest anti-Bush message, the Coldplay singer did just that. How does he know who John Kerry is? In elections, don't we always only have the choice between the bad and the worst politcian?

Mix it, baby !

To me, separate water faucets are amongst the most annoying things a foreigner can find in the UK. My 2002-built house even has 4 of them and all you can do is either scauld your hands or wash them with freezing cold water. This article sheds some light on it. Apparently it all goes back to Churchill....

Germanizer

German radio world service Deutsche Welle World now offers the Germanizer service - a site which can help you instantly to become more german. - Caution ! Humour !

Posted by Michael at 06:17 PM

iVisit 3.0.4X

I've been playing with my new dlink firewire web cam for about a week now and had lots of fun using iVisit for any cross-platform video conferencing. iVisit is freeware and requires (free) registration with iVisit themselves in order to use the service. Once the straight-forward form is filled in and you've received your email with access password you're almost ready to go.

iVisit's UI is not what you would expect from a proper OS X app, but hey, connection and software are free with the "lite" version. Which part of "bargain" don't you understand?

iVisit is not a patch on Apple's iChat AV, but as long as iChat cannot be used on Windows iVisit remains the yardstick.

click here for Download for OS X version
click here for Windows XP/2000/NT/ME/98 version
click here for the iVisit web site

Linkable

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my "Just to let you know..." blog.

Some of you might now ask: "What is a Blog ?". "Blog" is short for Web log and describes web sites made by people who think or would like to share their opinion or findings with others over the World Wide Web. Over the course of the last years, Blogs have become very popular on the web. Almost as popular as web forums - which offer their users a more direct interaction with each other. In comparison to web forums, blogs are mostly focussing on a single individual who spreads messages to their peers.

Why oh why?
"So why are your running a blog now?", might be your next question. People who know me might even add, "You're an incessant talker already anyway - why try and take it even further?". Well, how about this for starters: Maybe I still think there are things unsaid. Maybe I think there are observations or findings I make that you and the rest of the online world should read about. Maybe I would like to use a blog to let off steam. Maybe because in some geeky way I regard this as fun.

Blogs to me are like home-made magazines or sophisticated do-it-yourself newsletters - you can be your own journalist, editor and critic. Emailing my stories and thoughts might have been an option. However, I think blogs are far less obtrusive and distracting. In addition, by using the web I can reach a wider audience. I'd like this place to be somewhere you can come to whenever you feel like it - why not visit the blog and have a break from the daily hustle and bustle of work, see something different or find some of the amusing stories the WWW writes every day in its thousands?

What will it be about then?
I'd like this blog to be about things that interest, move and concern me. This includes web development, web design, Apple Macs, the internet, new technologies, but also generally things that are linked to or are of any german / british nature. The latter is for a number of reasons. Firstly, I'm a German living in the UK since autumn 1997 - this in itself is permanently reason for me to recognize any news or issues arising from and concerning both countries or languages. Secondly, I have so far not found any german/british source such as this on the web. You can find the odd article about german/british issues from all different walks of life. There is however none that links to all of them or gives you an overview over what's available. Finally, I'm a dad since August 2003 and my (english) wife and I are trying to bring up our daughter bilingual; a fact which made me realise once more to what an extend I stand between the 2 cultures. I personally regard myself as being in a very privileged position: I can enjoy the best of both worlds!

Now what about the title?
I chose "Just to let you know..."? as the title for this blog as it's a commonly used phrase in everyday life describing something that is just mentioned in passing or "by-the-by". Despite this usage, I sometimes found people who use "Just to let you know..." to open a conversation are trying to say something of a much bigger importance, yet belittling it with this initial phrase. Quite surprisingly, the final outcome very often then reveals a story or fact of much higher importance. Now I'm not trying to imply that people using this phrase are always hiding something; I'd just like to point out that due to the fact that we live in a complex world, matters looking small and insignificant on the outset might have an unexpected, more important outcome. There's a line in a Tab Two song that says: "We're depending, because we call it understanding.", which summarizes this very well.

Authors
Articles will mainly be written and edited by me. However, my brother Sebastian is planning to make some guest appearances. Watch this space :-)

Blog language
Since I'm just starting out with this, I'm yet undecided to what the blog language(s) will be. For now, I envisage to write texts for this forum mainly in english - simply because more people speak english than german. If there however is a topic that's best suited to be written in german, I will certainly do so. Links to german web sites will be identified with a little german flag. (Just to prevent disappointment!)

In "Just to let you know...", I'm hoping to pick up on some of these little stories, these footnotes of stories the web writes every single day. I'd like put stories and links on here which amuse, entertain or even cause a discussion and would otherwise be forgotten or simply not backed up.