Quarter Life Crisis

Random Walks¶

595 words

Just a few points and questions that I need get rid of…

• The Wir sind Helden stuff I’ve got here has been surprisingly popular. Mostly for the English lyrics therin. While it seems unlikely that music that is neither English nor dumb will make it internationally, we can hope…
• At some stage, Caro came across my pages and offered to put up her complete translations of all the Wir sind Helden lyrics there are. That was fantastic and I created the Wir sind Helden in English post here for that. Caro then added all the lyrics as comments. Not the nicest method technically, but an easy one. To make all those lyrics more accessible, I added a linked index for all the lyrics to the page. So if you thought Wir sind Helden’s tunes were catchy but didn’t understand the lyrics, this is a good opportunity to catch up.
• While looking at my server logs to tell Caro how well her work is doing, I noticed that referrer logs changed from ‘dubious’ to ‘waste of time’ status in the past months. The first gazillion entries I have there are from people peddling phentermine and texasholdem – with the best of them hitting me several hundred times to leave an impression. Presumably just doing that is cheaper than quickly having a look and seeing that I don’t publish referrer information anyway… sigh
• My next idea to popularise the translations was to put them into the English Wikipedia page for the band. Unlike the other links there, content on my page actually is in English and could be quite useful for people who are interested. But I haven’t done that Wikipedia stuff before and adding a link to my own site feels a bit dirty. And I don’t understand what the ‘discussion’ tab on the top of the page is for and whether I could just ask about it there.
• Big things tend to be complicated.
• This afternoon will be the wedding of my colleague. While I’m not a big fan of that concept per se, the event has been anticipated for a while and sharing an office means I heard a lot about it. So this week Jan-Philipp lent me one of his suits – the first non-black one I’ll wear – which looks quite good. Time to practice a tie knot and get out that paper with the theory behind it. (If you have access to the Physica A journal, you can get a slightly longer version of the paper in issue 276 (2000) pp 109-121.) The table at the very end sums up everything, though.
• I saw there’s the tool HTML Character Converter. All it does is a tiny – but my favourite – feature of UnicodeChecker. And they’re charging ten dollars for it. Which irritates me. So now I’m tempted to leave a note on their macupdate entry. But while I wouldn’t hesitate doing that if it weren’t advertising our own tool, it’d feel strange doing it in this case.
• While I was in South Africa, we visited the AIMS and there was also a reporter there who wanted write about the institute. And less than half a year later – his report has actually been published. While I quite like his other articles on African politics, his writing about Maths is a bit – err – esoteric, to use his own words. And even while all those science things may look quite similar for a social scientist, writing that my dad is a computer scientist doesn’t win too many sympathies either.

August 20, 2005, 0:37