just to let you know

my favourite Edinburgh pubs

I've recently put my all-time-favourite Edinburgh pubs onto a german Scotland forum and thought this could be of interest to more "puboholics":

Entertainment Heroes

Sal and me very often talk about past TV and radio shows and entertainment heroes. In the early days (when we were 'courting' - as they used to say), this always ended in the same way: we were both telling each other who the TV entertainment heroes were during our youth years in separate countries.

After more than 6 years in the UK now, things have changes a bit for me - I am used and accustomed ( and bored with !) to most current TV celebs and presenters. However there is still the odd old TV persona that throws me (like Jimmy Saville :-)

What amazes me is that most TV presenters more or less have remained "prophets in their own countries". People here are surprised when I tell them that no one in Germany has ever heard of Michael Parkinson (top left), Terry Wogan or Jeremy Paxman. But has anyone here ever heard of german TV greats such as Thomas Gottschalk (top right), Guenther Jauch or even Harald Schmidt (yes, this name is real !).

A weird thing to get your head around when you grow up and you think that your whole entertainment world evolves around those people (or at least that's what you're made believe!).

So the final question for me then is: is there no european or world-spanning TV presenting celebrity in the same catgegory of those men above? David Letterman perhaps - he certainly has the farthest reach into global househols, I'd say.

image preload using CSS

While working away on my latest website for a young and aspiring, Midlands-based photographer ;-), I discovered these 2 easy but very helpful hints to preload images using CSS.

• image preload on Netmechanic.com


• and of course something from the unbeatable Zeldman.com (March 2003)

Being the Office German

I really enjoy being the office German. It has so many advantages, you know. Because of the underlying assumption that Germans are ruder than Brits, it can be so easy to break taboos without having a bad conscience.

Take office sweets, for example. Colleagues bring back sweets for various reasons and different places: holidays, business trips, because they have too many at home or simply they want to lose weight themselves and decided you're not fed well enough. Usually, a formal queue is formed to make sure everyone is getting his/her share of the sweeties - until there is only ONE bit left ! Once the last lollipop is found in the jar this manic run for sweets suddenly grinds to a halt. "Surely, it would be rude to have the last sweetie.". This is exactly the moment when it can be so handy to be a German. - "Just 'ave it ! ".

Look Ma, no bad conscience !

Linkable

• An online article by the german Spiegel.de about the annual Edinburgh (Fringe) Festival. In my opinion it's tricky to throw all of the festivals together into one article (Fringe/non-Fringe), as they are *very* diverse, but there you go (article in german).
• Apple delays the european launch of iPod Mini.Us Europeans always seem to get the short straw, eh?
• The Brit who saved Volkswagen - Volkswagen honours Ivan Hirst, a british soldier who picked up the pieces at VW in post-war Germany.

Help ! I'm a blogoholic

Over time, I seem to become a "blogoholic" ! And one couldn't consider himself a proper blogoholic without using an RSS reader. Well at work I started using Feedster.com's "myFeedster" - simply because I wanted an online version rather than a frontend software. At home, I'm still trialling the Mac version of NetNewsWire Light.

I must say I'm more inclined to continue using the NetNewsWire - simply because of its impressive speed when used with broadband. Although I do miss the experience of viewing the indivdual blog's designs and layouts, I can spend far more time actually reading blogentries. Plus, I'm able to read more blogs as I spend less time clicking about surfing and searching. MyFeedster in comparison can be very slow at times - I also miss some functionality to customise the look and feel of the blog summaries.

The internet and the elderly

An interesting recent NY Times technology article - it shows just how important accessibility issues already are. Also, it made me contemplate how I will surf the net in years to come (admittingly a weird thing to think about when you're only 20 years old :-)).

has the Sunday Times become too big ?

It's been quite a while since I bought a Sunday newspaper for the last time. But today I felt in need of a good Sunday read and left the house especially to get The Sunday Times - and hell what do you get for you money ! About 150 pages of standard sections, 7 supplements and several plastic wrappings: altogether for £1.30 .

Excuse me, but who is able to digest all of this in a single day ? As much as I like to read a paper on the sofa with a good old frothy Cappucino, but this is just a little bit too much for me. I also seriously question if a paper is still able to produce quality if the output for a Sunday paper is that high.

I guess it's mainly end-consumer and expectancy-driven these days. People expect a certain number of pages and supplements each Sunday. In times where glossy celebrity lifestyle mags seem to take over the newsagents shelves, newspaper readers very much rate a paper by quantity than quality. I can still remember when reading a certain paper was linked to you personality, political opinion and general attitude towards life.

IT workers demand greater flexibility

This article from The Register is no big surprise to me. In my own experience a vast majority of IT companies and departments are still maintaining a very old fashioned viewpoint when it comes to working from home (Teleworking).

It seems to me that managers rather give non-IT staff the right to work from home. There also seems to be a misconception that IT staff involved in analysis and coding are not eligible for Teleworking as it doesn't fit into their day-to-day tasks. Quite frankly, I think exactly the opposite is the case. As IT departments do more and more result oriented work, it should free up more staff to work and achieve their results in their own time and space.

Funny enough, as the article points out, most IT staff is too scared to ask for Teleworking options as it might squander their career perspectives. A viscious circle.

Alemannia - the day after

As some of you might have gathered, my home town footie team Alemannia Aachen won their semi final last night and therefore is now going through to the final in Berlin on May 29th. Now the run for the tickets can begin !

I don't really care what the result will be - this is such a big occasion for the club and its supporters. Whatever the outcome will be, there is one thing they can't take away from us: "We made it to Berlin !".... and most liely into the UEFA Cup !

Spannung am Tivoli: Alemannia gegen Bor. Moechengladblach

Fuer mich und viele andere ist es DAS Spiel des noch jungen Jahrhunderts - zumindest das Spiel des Jahres. Heute abend trifft mein Heimatklub Alemannia Aachen auf Borussia Moenchengladbach im Halbfinale des DFB Pokals. Nachdem ich fuer das Viertelfinale gegen die Bayern die lange Reise aus dem heimischen Edinburgh nach Aachen antrat, habe ich mich nun dieses Mal dazu entschieden, bei der Familie zu bleiben und die Partie zuhause per Live-Ticker und WDR2 Livestream zu verfolgen - Fussball auf eine andere Art und Weise. Ausserdem plane ich noch, meinen Vater und meinen besten Freund per Handy zu erreichen. Somit sind alle Kommunikationskanaele abgedeckt.

Ich kann es kaum erwarten, bis es los geht. Ich habe selbst fuer diesen Verein ueber 10 Jahre gespielt und noch viele Jahre mehr gezittert. So nah waren wir halt noch nie dran - zumindest seit meiner Geburt.

Fuer die Finalbegegnung in Berlin habe ich schon Urlaub angemeldet - sollte bei Abpfiff der Sieger Alemannia heissen, werde ich unmittelbar danach mein Flugticket buchen.

Denn: "Eines kann und keiner nehmen - und das ist das Finale gegen Bremen !". :-)

The Darkness

It's The Darkness' debut album "Permission To Land" that keeps my iPod's hard disk busy at the moment. Although you hardly ever found me browsing shelves in HMV's Hard Rock or heavy section, this album is certainly "growing on me".

The released singles so far seem to suggest that the band opted for the mainstream approach. However if you give the whole album a go you'll be up for a surprise: Intelligent, straightforward heavy rock with non-compromising guitars is what I would call it in my no-mans-land music knowledge.

What appeals me the most to The Darkness right now is their no-nonsense approach to music and the way how they simply present themselves. In a weird way, Justin Hawkin's music and lyrics remind me of those of ABC in the eighties. Well crafted soap bubbles that seem to come with a washing label at the back of the sleeve but at the same time suggest hidden depth to you.

Linkable

• a wonderful contribution on the terrorist attacks of past, present and (unfortunately) the future by Jeffrey Zeldman.
• Germans still cling on to about 10 percent of the Deutschmarks that were in circulation 2 years ago.
• George Michael decided that he doens't want to take any more money from the public and will offer all his future music for free over the net.
• the latest Jamiri Comic deals with those TV programmes who hide or distort the Apple logo whenever they show one of their machines (german).

CSS tips & trouble shooting

As I do spend so much time recently trouble-shooting various CSS, I thought I'd compile a list of useful links that offer some help out of the designers CSS misery. Some of the stuff sounds pretty straightforward but - we've all been there - we've all misspelled rules, classes and ids wrongly and puled our hair out in disbelief why the CSS wasn't displayed properly.

• I'll start with a very helpful link from the Mezzoblue blog. Mainly about common mistakes when applying CSS.
  
• Next are two items from A List Apart (ALA). A first one on custom corners and borders and another one on CSS drop shadows
  
• ever been to the CSS Zen Garden? This website shouldn't be missing in any web designer's "CSS links favourites" folder. CSS Zen Garden is basically a concept that forces you to re-style an existing site by merely changing the CSS and leeaving the HTML untouched. This site is for advanced CSS developers, but taking part will result in a big leap forward in understanding and using CSS.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 7.0.1 update

This is amazing. Every now and then miracles and strange coincidences do actually happen. Didn't I whinge on about DW MX 2004's sluggishness here the other day ? Well, Macromedia seem to have sorted it !

There is an update available for DW MX 2004 that should rectify the following:

• Improved stability and performance across all platforms, especially on Macintosh
• Bug fixes
• Restored Timelines feature

Wehey ! I've installed the update this morning and found the app to be much snappier. However, a final verdict has yet to be made. But all I can say is: if you've been trialling the old version, get the update (it also sets the initial trial days back to 30 days!) and give it a go. On my eMac 700/640/40 it made a big difference so far.

Dreamweaver MX 2004, and make it snappy !

Anyone who has already trialled or even bought it might know what comes next. Everyone who hasn't: be warned... the new edition of Dreamweaver - MX 2004 is stupendously slow. An 800Mhz G4 with 640MB is struggling with and it became unbearable for me to carry on working with it. This is of course despite the advantages and bugfixes that were undertaken in MX 2004. It's such a shame, but how can something like this happen to a multi mullion $ company such as Macromedia who must be reliant on Apple Mac user on a much higher percentage than other software developers. What kind of tests were done? What machines were used to undertake the tests?

I have a suspicion that MM uses one of these G5 clusters for user acceptance testing :-) Anyway, let's all hope for a patch or update or something. The current version is unworkable.

P.S.: I've just read somwhere that decreasing the maximum undo-steps in DW preferences does increase performance. However I can't confirm this. Anyway - this shouldn't be really something a designer have to do in order to make DW more "snappy".

a Computer for Life ?

An interesting BBC technology article on computers and the failure of manufacturers to make them 'greener'. I remember many years back the media already warned us about huge piles of computer garbage we'll face in years to come. Seems to me that not a lot was done about it since then. Manufacturers of course are under such immense innovative pressure that there is no incentive for them to make their hardware greener. At the end of the day, that's what would increase the price tag for their offerings and hence push them out off their markets.

In my opinion the only way out here is by both law inforcement and changes in customer behaviour. Manufacturers should be forced by law to accept and re-use old hardware. Consumers should be given more incentives about changing and reconfiguring their existing machines rather than dicarding their old and simply buying a completely new one. "A Computer for Life" , maybe ?

Imagewell - digital hub assistant

I discovered this nifty tool through a thread on MacAssist Tosh the other day.

Some of you might have spotted these simple alterations I make to some of the pictures on this blog. Well instead of using the what I'd call the "Heavy Artillery", I now use ImageWell. It sits on the top menu bar and accepts any drag&drop items and is also drag&droppable itself. You manipulate pictures in size, add comments, change colours, FTP and save in jpg format. The only bit of functionality I miss is colour reduction to decrease file size.... but hey ! You can't have everything !

For those of you who wonder what the little cloud next to the imagewell logo is: that's Himmelbar another gem. But I'll tell you about this another time :-)

If you're interested in downloading Imagewll, click here

Linkable

• the Republicans launched a 'Kerry vs Kerry' website to demonstrate how controverse Kerry's opinions have been recently. The humour on the site would even dissapoint Germans, I'd say. As long as the Republicans come up with sites like this there is nothing to worry about for the Democrats.

Linkable

• A 3-headed frog was spotted in Somerset today

things I miss in the UK

It's an institution. When I was a kid, I knew what 10:45 on a Sunday meant (well, occasionally delayed by a live broadcast of the Ski Worldcup).

"Die Sendung mit der Maus"

And it was just divine - a true programme for the whole family. I sometimes even wonder if it's not the grown-ups who have kept it alive and kicking for so long now.

For those who have never heard about "Die Sendung mit der Maus before": it's a children's TV programme with a cartoon mouse (well), an elephant and a duck. Viewers witness the adventures of this tremendous trio and also see some clips with other cartoons or real-world issues and things. memorable episodes for me will be the one where they explained how holes get into the cheese or what a chain reaction is.

How do you explain a chain reaction to a kid? Simple, put a room full of mouse traps fitted with ping-pong balls on top. Then throw one ping-pong ball into the room so it hits another on a mous trap - eh basta! There is your kid-friendly chain reaction.

Such a shame there is no real british equivalent for this...

Apple's iBook Recall Programme mk II

Some of you might have read my first episode on the iBook recall programme story. Well the news now is - there are not a lot news actually. After 18 days the iBook is still with Apple and appararently parts are ordered (hmmm... that'll be the main board then - I hope !).

The frustrating part of it is though that no one is actually able to give me a status update. My friendly local Apple dealer gave me Apple's contact details and I spoke to a friendly, oriental sounding lady somewhere on the other end of the planet. She found a message on the system that "repair has begun". But that's really all she could tell me. No indication how much longer it would take - nothing. I mean, she has no options either: after all, the iBook is in a repair department somewhere in Europe and she sits probably somewhere in India.

This is actually a phenomenon I have come across fairly often recently: Companies set up these call centres somewhere far away and route all annoying calls there. Call centre staff usually speaks English with a very strong accent so communication with them becomes somewhat difficult. I call this "One-Way Customer Service", because whenever you ask these call handlers to speak to a manager or superior person if you have a complaint, the reply is the same: "Sorry, sir, but there is no one here to speak to. Our managers are not customer facing.". In addition, if you ask for an address to direct your complaint to, they only tell you that this wouldn't make any difference.

How hopeless does this feel ? You have an issue, you feel treated unfairly... and all you can do is speak to someone who can not make a difference at all.

I really have to criticise Apple as far as this is concerned - they might have great products but their customer service and dealership communication has to be rated as poor, in my opinion.

Linkable

• Oi, you paperback writers! Publishing-On-Demand becomes more and more affordable
• I should have checked the rules & regulations before I got married, I think. The German Embassy in London spells it out for you.
• the german participants in this year's pre-selection for the Eurovision song contest in Istanbul, Turkey. A decision on this life & death topic will be made by the teutonic public on March 19th.