OSLUG Planet

I took this photo earlier this evening from the roof of my apartment building along with a few others. This place has a pretty good view of the city which should be nice for fireworks tomorrow. :-)

Now it has happened: As an effect of the urgent need for a weekend, I registered with twitter. Only adding people I could think of easily, I am not “following” 37 people

Of course, my twitter experience started all peachy right off the bat, by first giving me site errors:

 
(hey, at least they are pretty)

… and then I noticed something weird about the times they show on every page:

“ungefähr 1 Stunde ago from web…” … is that… Germenglish? Englerman?

But let’s not be discouraged. They probably just started their announced maintenance window four hours early

Anyone else think I forgot to “follow” them on twitter? Leave a comment.

Heute in meinem Postfach:

Mit Wirkung vom 11.07.2008 wird keine Werbekostenerstattung mehr für den Amazon.de DVD-Verleih gezahlt, da der Verleihservice eingestellt wird.

Wie es aussieht, klappt Amazon seinen DVD-Verleih zu, und übergibt das Geschäft an den britischen Verleiher “LOVEFiLM”. Dazu auf der Amazon-Webseite:

Frage: Warum überträgt Amazon sein Geschäft an LOVEFiLM?
Antwort: Genau wie Amazon.de ist auch LOVEFiLM bestrebt, Ihnen den besten Kundenservice zu bieten. Durch unsere Investition in LOVEFiLM werden wir noch besser Kundenwünsche befriedigen können. LOVEFiLM bietet Ihnen einen umfassenden Katalog mit zehntausenden DVDs von Neuerscheinungen bis hin zu seltenen Titeln.

Ich bin gespannt, wie sich der DVD-Verleih per Post in Deutschland weiterentwickelt. Wie wohl die Marktanteile zwischen Amazon/Lovefilm und Amango.de verteilt sind?

Preislich sind die Anbieter exakt gleich, nur bietet Amazon/Lovefilm zusätzlich günstigere “1 DVD pro Monat” Anlockangebote an.

Die Unterschiede sind also nicht groß, ganz im Unterschied zu den USA, wo sich die beiden “großen”, Netflix und Blockbuster, mal mehr mal weniger friedlich um die Vorherrschaft auf dem Markt prügeln, auch beim Preis: insbesondere bei den “großen” Verträgen ist Netflix günstiger, die Anfängersparte geht hier jedoch an Blockbuster. Letztere rühmen sich zudem damit, dass man DVDs in deren Verleihläden tauschen kann, was Netflix nicht vorweisen kann. Das ist natürlich ein Zeitvorteil (insbesondere bei der bisweilen seeehr langsamen Post in diesem Land), andererseits fangen auch Amerikaner an, bei 4 Dollar je Gallone Sprit den 8-Zylinder öfter mal in der Garage stehen zu lassen.

Ich dachte immer, DVDs per Post sei nicht so der Bringer in Deutschland, weil man immer persönlich zum Postkasten laufen muss und seine Rücksendung nicht einfach dem Postboten mitgeben kann. Alles in allem scheint das Geschäft aber dennoch ganz interessant zu werden.

Yesterday on Discovery Channel:

Most regular toilets flush in the key of e-flat.

Well, add this to the list of things I am not sure I needed to know.

Still, I am wondering if that means from now on I should set my tuner aside and just tune my trumpet after the toilet? Of course I’d need to call the plumber about once a year when the whole thing is out of tune

Yeah, me and my silly mind. I know.

(The picture above CC by-nc-sa licensed by hll!H on flickr)

I am in the process of settling into my new home having all sorts of adventures but this one tonight is stupid enough to deserve a blog post. It turns out if I turn my air conditioner on the coldest setting and let it run for a day it tends to turn into a block of ice. The photo below was taken just a few minutes ago during the thaw process, and this is after an hour and scraping some off.

Userfriendly.org published a funny little picture about the second Microsoft cake:

They should have covered the Firefox 2 cake instead: After all, it still rendered in black and white

(Thanks for the link, Jean Pierre!)

Students from the OSL and OSEL giving a 30 minute presentation about open source opportunities at OSU.  If you have or know of open source opportunities on campus or in Corvallis (preferably available to incoming OSU freshman), tell us!

E-mail things we should talk about, ideas, etc.  to the OSEL mailing list or Sarah Cooley at cooleys at engr.orst.edu.

At the local dry cleaner’s:

The Firefox world record attempt has just weighed in with a whopping 8 million downloads (plus change) in a 24-hour period.

And, as I recently noticed, each Firefox instance carries my name among the men and women mentioned in the credits list (for my work on the Mozilla Add-ons project):

Awesome (did I mention I dig my name being spelled correctly?)

If you want to see who else is on the list, click on “About Firefox” in the help (or Firefox, on Mac) menu, then “Credits”.

Thanks to Mike Connor (who I believe put me on the list) and to everybody who made Firefox 3 such a great product.

As contradictory as it may sound, finding a good mindless action movie is actually a rather challenging task.

A quote from an IMDB user review on Hitman (2007). Oh how right they are.

Here’s a funny commercial for a German mail-order company:

(it hurts even watching it! )

Thanks for sending this to me, Tara!

Jean Pierre pointed out a fabulous little extension for Firefox 3 on OSX:

The firefox-mac-pdf extension embeds PDF files right in the browser, so you don’t have to download them, open them with Preview.app and remove the file off your desktop afterwards. It works much like Acrobat, except it uses OSX’s built-in PDFkit.

That’s definitely an extension I’d like to see on AMO.

I am in the process of cleaning out all my stuff so I can move to Boston with a fairly minimal car load. I tend to collect all sorts of random things over the years which makes this process a bit difficult. (Why on earth do I have my pogs from elementary school?) On the up side I've found a few amusing things in the process. One such item is below. Way back when during my freshman year a couple girls compiled these "Rules of Engagement" and presented them to a group of guys including myself in a meeting of sorts. And yes, it does in fact start off with a quote from "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

Sorry for the poor quality, I don't have a scanner at the moment. Click for a larger version.

Semi-finals!! Need I say more?

Oh, hello! The MSIE team sent us another cake. This time, sadly, I wasn’t around to taste it, but it looks much nicer than the old one! Internet Explorer just started getting color, it seems like!

Here it is, photo courtesy of robcee:

I hope it tasted as delicious as the first one!

Nice, I ordered a “radioactive” t-shirt from Assault last week and it was just delivered. Here’s the design:

Looks like a pretty nice piece of fabric, doesn’t it?

The shirt is made by American Apparel — usually I don’t like AA, but I gave them another try. Why I don’t like them? Because the shape of their shirts is kind of weird, and they are usually way too small: In particular, when I get an M it fits pretty well the first day, but once I wash it, it shrinks far enough to resemble a small, making it a perfectly fine… cleaning rag. A colleague of mine once got a Women’s S and after when it arrived, it turned out so small she passed it on to her 7-year-old daughter (!). They even offer women’s XS and XXS. These must be either baby clothes, or they want to cater anorexic hollywood stars. Either option weirds me out.

So anyway, judging by this logic, I ordered an L, which is just a little too big on me right now — let’s hope it shrinks to a perfect M when I first wash it. If it shrinks further than that (and no, I am not washing it on “hot”), I’ll have to take it to the office and put it up for grabs–somebody sure has a kid at home it’ll fit.

For none of my other shirts I ever needed such elaborate considerations, so I am sorry but American Apparel sucks. While they are perfectly aware of their shirts “running small”, it will probably forever remain their secret why they don’t just go ahead and make shirts in the right size from the get-go…

As many of you may already know, tomorrow, June 17, Firefox 3 will be released to the general public.

But that’s not all: In an event called “Download Day” Mozilla is trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. You can help set the record!

All you need to do is download Firefox 3 tomorrow within the first 24 hours of its release.

Need more info? Hop over to the Mozilla Blog or read the official Download Day FAQ.