Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

Amusing¶

533 words

Regarding the couple of questions that made the round lateley, this is a nice Google search to learn something about writing times and the feeling for time people have.
John Gruber is more than a week late with his April fools' joke.
Useful, even: Die Zeit now offers a full PDF version of the paper. They seem to offer their 'value added' online services such as these PDFs or the MP3 downloads of selected articles for a monthly subscription charge now. Access rights seem to be included if you have a paper subscription, though. Perhaps that's a reasonable model.
CNN shows more greenly tinted 'footage' of fighting in Iraq. What kind of information is that? You can't see any details of who is doing what where. And neither will these images be uncensored. So they're likely to distort rather than improve the reports they accompany.
Similarly, I recently saw 'interviews' with people who didn't want to be identified in the 'news'. They sat with the back of their head to the camera, even the back of their head was distorted, as was their voice – and their names were changed as well. What's the friggin' point? Don't 'journalists' learn how to paraphrase anymore?
Chris on Longevity in CD players. Very true. My parents' old Philips player still works fine (and fast). By comparison, both my brother's and my own Philips and Sony compact stereos had built-in CD players which are broken today. That said, Sony is often translated into German as So-nie. Indeed, Chris says [...] Sony, a reputable brand [...] which is a subtly good statement if you acknowledge that brands are mostly vacuous and have nothing to do with the company or its products.
Actually, Dave and me whined about a similar topic a while ago. And notice that there is a subtle difference between the meaning of 'random' and 'shuffle'. I think my current CD player can do both – and I use neither.
The funniest CD player I have seen was that of a friend with an actual turntable inside. It also needed the discs to be put on the turntable face-up for obvious resaons.
In the not-so-funny department: After there had been a slight crack around the headphone jack on my Powerbook for a while, now its 'frame' is properly broken all the way through. This should be fucking metal which doesn't break. Once more all those statements about the material computers are made of are solely based on marketing rather than engineering.
Perhaps I should refine the answer to one of those questions to Kill all lawyers. Which I would subsequently refine to Kill all lawyers and marketing people. Which I'd in turn refine to the less violent but more efficient: Change the world such that there is no need for lawyers or marketing people.
I just spend more than €200 on wireless networking equipment. Perhaps we'll have to invest even more. Nontheless, compared to a DSL subscription this will actually save us money after half a year or so.
g with hints for improving your e-mail.
Buzz Anderson on invoking AppleScripts from Cocoa. This may be handy sometime.