Quarter Life Crisis

Mac OS X.6 Snow Leopard available now!
[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Outrun¶

665 words

• Despite its seeming defiance of respectable society, there is no shortage of folks who would canonize Licensed to Ill– hence this new edition, replete with commemorative DVD. For Miller's sake, it's the Beastie Boys' worst record. (Even though we all secretly know it's their best.) Yet, there's something impressive about tapping into the secret language of the immature and terminally slack. All these years later, with every listen, it becomes clearer to me that you can never really outrun your inner idiot.

  Um – whatever.

• Er hatte die letzten Aussichten für einen Ausgleich im Nahen Osten zerstört und den letzten Rest an Amerikas Glaubwürdigkeit in der Region ruiniert. Gleichsam im Umdrehen zertrat er das zarte Pflänzchen der Hoffnung, die manche insgeheim an ein Gelingen des Demokratie-Experiments im Irak geknüpft hatten. Und nebenbei schuf er eine neue Generation von Terroristen. Nicht schlecht für eine halbe Stunde Arbeit.

  Sueddeutsche Zeitung on the U.S.'s highly efficient president.
• Not only the computer industry nurtures its myths, the economy may do as well: Die Zeit suggests that the problems of the German economy don't have to do with high labour costs or the country being over-taxed and over-regulated. In fact, there are hints that some of the most deregulated and low-wage areas of the economy perform worst.
• A discussion of the differences between German and (rich) U.S. universities, including hints that only copying the concept of having shorter degree programs – as is currently popular in our universities – won't help German universities.
• Talking about universities, there is a recent ranking of the universities in the country. Of course anyone affected known that such rankings aren't worth the paper they're printed on (hail to the internet!), but they may still serve as rough guides – both for universities and for vastly inefficient (and partly irresponsible) display of statistical data. A fun thing about this rating was that they do seem to have a lot of data. Simple things like student numbers seem to be terribly hard to extract out of the bureaucracy (and they're of course not posted on our website...), so we learn things about our very own department there... on the other hand, we learn that our students rate our library as average while it definitely is one of the best in Germany, and that students at private universities who pay a lot for their degree tend to rate its quality very highly.
• Contact to the professors is rated as being bad. I don't know how that happened. Even when I was an undergraduate there was never a problem to simply go and see any of your professors by knocking on their door. Mostly this works immediately. And if people are busy at the moment, you'll usually be able to see them later the same day. I never saw anyone telling people to return when their official 'office hours' are – as seems to be standard procedure in other departments. The only thing you have to do for that contact is go there... but that's really something students have to do themselves.
• I had almost given up hope – but yesterday there finally were 45 minutes of enjoyable music television again. You see, it can be done. Enjoy the playlist, it's scaringly similar to my Waster compilation CD:

  "Jerk It Out" The Ceasars
  "Sheepdog" Mando Diao
  "Up The Bracket" The Libertines
  "So Alone" Whyte Seeds
  "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" Jet
  "Ride" The Vines
  "C’Mon C’Mon" The Von Bondies
  "Date With The Night" Yeah Yeah Yeahs
  "Mr Your On Fire Mr" Liars
  "MF From Hell" The Datsuns
  "Bandages" Hot Hot Heat
  "Reptilia" The Strokes

• When design became style, engineering became something else

  An essay on design, engineering and programming with a historical perspective. Interesting in there – the explicit statement of the time scale of projects: a few months for web projects vs. 14 years for the Brooklyn bridge. Just this juxtaposition of numbers makes it obvious that we should expect a huge difference in the amount of effort and details that have gone into the respective projects.

April 16, 2004, 19:56