Category Archives: General

Absurdistan

FÃ¼r Leute die immer noch glauben das die FuÃŸball-WM eine tolle Sache ist und man das doch eigentlich auch gut finden muss, trotz allem Kommerz, von wegen der VÃ¶lkerverstÃ¤ndigung, dem Tourismus, dem Umsatz und der geistigen Einheit des vÃ¶lkischen Wesens das sich um ein hohes Ziel schart: die Anweisungen des Veranstalters zum Umgang mit Marken, Symbolen, Maskotchen und Ã¤hnllichem. Man beachte das es eigentlich “FIFA WM 2006(TM)” heissen muss und vor allem die tolle “Signature Pose” des Offiziellen Maskottchens auf Seite 5.

Entschuldigt wenn ich in lautes Lachen ausbreche wenn mich nochmal wer Ã¼berzeugen will das die FIFA WM 2006(TM) doch eigentlich ganz toll ist.

Back in Sao Paulo

(Trying out a new language scheme. Podcasting in german, text based travel-blogging in english. Lets see if you like it.)

I am back in Sao Paulo, Brazil for a week of work. The security situation in Sao Paulo is not funny, when you look at the media. TV and newspapers are full with discussions about police shooting smalltime criminal favela-inhabitants in revenge for the organized killing of a substantial number of police officers. Politics is reduced to more or less veiled best wishes for the police in their hunt. Apparently the local government has made a deal with the organized crime forces and police is now killing not-so-organized criminals to get revenge. It does not look like the PCC-gang that incited the killings is suffering much, probably part of the deal.

But as I said, this is all out in the Favelas. Here in the more well-to-do areas nothing is visible. I haven’t seen an armed police man after leaving the airport.

Old VW busses are in pretty good shape here and a backbone of individual group transport.

Typical high-rise building on the road.

This is how my current improvized podcast setup looks like. Works basically and give a little better audio quality then the built in microphone.

No Flickr

Recently, two people in a row asked me why I don’t put my pictures up to Flickr. Come on, everybody’s doing it…

Here is why not:

1. Every time a cool new service comes along that allows me to do something net-based that I might find interesting it ends up getting merged into some sort of Ã¼ber-ID scheme that wants to merge all my online data. It happened with Orkut (now googlified). It happened with Skype (now part of the evil eBay empire). It happend with Flickr (now part of Yahoo). It happened or will happen with countless other services.

With the takeovers come new rules for privacy and ownership of data that most of the time make the situation worse for the user. Additionally, having all your online life aggregated under one or only a few easily to track IDs carries a substantial privacy and security risk. I prefer to keep things separated.

2. The overall security situation of web-based applications is bad and it gets worse the larger they get. Random Jane Hacker has described the problem in detail, covering a number of aspects that may surprise you. I prefer to have knowledge and control over who does the backup, maintains the security of the system etc.

3. In principle (and reinforced by my Orkut experience), I have a healthy distrust for things ‘everybody’ is doing. Socio-technological progress is not always a universally good thing, so I try to keep some distance and wait a bit till the others have made all the usual mistakes and then take a look what is useful after the hype is over.

(Thats not the reason why there are no podcasts here, btw. The reason is that I have so little time over the day where I would like to listen to spoken word that I don’t see value in producing spoken content myself.)