Another quick one with a finding from the net:



Obviously this is an ad for Tipp-Ex, but it's utterly cool and definitely funny enough to be mentioned. Be sure to try out "talks", "eats", "kicks", "marries", "shoots", "pictures", "cuddles", "urinates", "washes", "Tipp-Ex" and (of course) "humps". Even though there seem to be a lot of things to do with the bear, I miss some internet memes likes "tazes" or "blends", but well, I guess you can't have 'em all.
Also it's kind of cool that more companies seem to realize the possibilities of Youtube and the Web2.0 instead of just doing what they did all along. Let's get nerdy!

P.S. Please leave a comment if you find more cool things to do with the bear!
P.P.S. Funny comic is funny!

After several months of waiting, the most mighty Fitbit has arrived today! When I read about the nifty little toy in late May, I didn't think it could be much of a problem to get one of these. Well, of course I was wrong.
One of the main issues was that (due to missing radio approvals) Fitbit doesn't ship to countries other than the U.S., so Markus and I asked the guys from Dollarpig for an offer. Their offer sounded reasonable and we agreed. That time the Fitbit website said that they have to fulfil queued orders and distribution of new orders should start on June 15th.
Now it was just some "minor" supply bottlenecks, exchange rate fluctuations and the German customs that stood between us and our toys and it was only three months later when they arrived. /me is a happy boy with a brand new toy. /me will post more after trying out everything.
All in all ordering stuff from the U.S. still seems to be a bit of an adventure. For goods not to be delivered directly to Germany, I can definitely recommend Dollarpig, they did a good job and the delay wasn't their fault at all!

Last week we went to the movies to see Inception. Karsten called this one a complete mind-fuck and I couldn't agree more. It's been a decade since I saw an action movie that complex and that layered. Even though you constantly have to concentrate on all the seemingly irrelevant details and a running time of nearly 150 minutes, Inception didn't feel long-drawn-out or even tiring for a single second. The movie is beyond brilliant, don't miss it on the big screen!
By the way: Most of you might have missed Kevin Smith's latest movie "Zack and Miri Make a Porno", because it didn't make it into too many German cinemas. It surely enough is not as good as Clerks or Dogma, but it's still a hilarious funny and also romantic movie, so give it a try!
Today David presented me a piece of ancient technology for my collection of CPU's - an IDT WinChip C6 from 1997 that he recovered from some office PC. How cool is that? Many thanks! Gosh, I wish I didn't give away my mighty Slot-A Athlon as a "loan", these beauties seem to be hard to get nowadays... that'll teach me!

P.S. It's been awhile since I successfully destroyed some of my non-IT equipment, but yesterday it was about time. When I brought back my stuff to kitchen after having lunch, I found my stalwart pot red-hot and totally annealed. Obviously I forgot to turn of the heat after pouring of the spaghetti. R.I.P. poor little fellow... you've been a trusty friend through countless packages of pasta!
P.P.S. One more for the road. I chose rather not to think about it and giggle painfully embarrassed instead. It's a mad world...

It's done! Tonight I installed a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 as a replacement for my (literally) broken hard disk. With the help of the extremely useful DiscWizard tool from Seagate I cloned the old HDD's data within two hours time and now my box is back as if nothing ever happened. I love it when a plan comes together!

Karsten, who returned from his trip to Scotland, today pointed me to this video. Even though we didn't play Quake 3 at a very high level it's just awesome to watch this guy play, to hear his explanations and to see how he's been completely in control of the game with all it's complex mechanisms and timings.



I think this is a must see for everybody and it shows very clear why gaming can be real sports. If you ever played a shooter at a certain level yourself, I think this is even more mindblowing.

On Friday - just one week after Jamba's summer party - we went to Leipzig to visit 5C Basic at their first annual (;)) summer party. The guys also invited a suckling pig which happened to be a very tasty conversationalist. Despite the return run being not exactly edifying we had a very, very nice evening at the fireplace, thanks for having us.
On Saturday I had quite a hard time getting up early enough to get some new parts for my computer (Why do computer shops close at 3 p.m.?!?!) but with the help of Micha I managed to be there in time. I bought the new power supply unit (Your right Arno-Lars-Micha, it is always the power supply unit...), took the opportunity to clean my case and physically killed my hard drive's SATA port. D'oh! Fortunately I was able to somehow attach the cable to the electrical contacts and run a backup. What was meant to be gaming weekend turned into a torturous backup party. But folks I won't complain, 'cause I sweated blood when I fist spotted the whole cable mess and I am kind of delighted that I was able to secure my stuff anyway. Don't be as silly as I am, disk it or risk it!

Yesterday was the first day I regularly went to work by bike - and of course it rained cats and dogs. When I came home after having dinner with Marcus, who happened to be in Berlin, I was wetted to the bones and therefore seriously pissed. I towelled myself and wanted to quickly check for mails and enter the track I drove at bikemap.net, when my computer screen suddenly went all black.
Of course I did what every IT expert would do in such situation: I jiggled all cables, used a lot of swearwords and repeatedly tried turning it on and off but nothing seemed to have an effect. Obviously something is fucked up beyond any "repair". What annoys me most is that I have no idea what exactly that would be and how to find out. Where are the good ol' days when Manu and Karsten (and their computers!) were just a few steps away?! We always found out what's wrong by quickly replacing one part after another with parts from each others computers - or with spare parts that seemed to lie around virtually everywhere... glory days.

If you want to show your sympathy please don't hesitate to push this button:

Some time ago I decided to stop giving tons of money to the BVG just for getting at work and go by my bike instead. Unfortunately my wheel was kind of hosed and needed some loving care. Today I got the bike back from the local bike-fixing-place and everything works like a charm now. Sweet! When cycling back from work I took the opportunity and extended the trip a bit. Seems like a nice thing to do if I am too lazy for a real workout at the gym. Or maybe a cool balance thing to do after a real workout. One way or another I can see some cycling and a sore ass coming up.
Also the ultra-cool posters that Markus and I ordered when the Oatmeal turned one year old finally arrived. But instead of putting them to the next best wall I spent most of the evening tagging terrible old MP3 files and jawing with Ronny. Let's see how long this task will keep me busy...

When it comes to numbers, things get a little boring for most people. Statistics however seem to be a different matter altogether. What People love about (pie)charts, is not just the almost hynotic simplicity, but also the idea of breaking down even the most complex issues to a point where an everyday normal guy is able to form a wrong opinion.



Hence I was exited when Matthias pointed me to this story at Gizmodo. A story about sex, photography, cool gadgets and statistics! What more could a nerd possibly ask for?! I strongly recommend to read the original post since some of the widgets didn't seem to work at Gizmodo and there are more posts worth reading.

In my last post I forgot to mention that the guys from clan ~X~ phoned me right after coming back from Hungary and asked if I could play a match for them. I didn't think much and accepted. Not less than six years after my retirement from TFC and with many configuration files being lost I had quite a hard time defending our base, but our offense was kind enough to drop us some flags. So LordKharn and I were able to polish our scores a bit. Thanks for having me guys, it's been a pleasure! Let's do this again in the near future, there is still no game that kicks ass like good, old TFC.

Last weekend yet another one of those summer parties at Jamba took place. Although this years location was quite exotic, everything was well organized. We enjoyed tasty food, danced a lot and even the band got exited about us. I think our people wasn't exactly what the guys expected when signing up for a dull company party.

Reminder: Just four more days until I order tickets for next years "Songs an einem Sommerabend". Make a decision folks!

Overflow: Moar on statistics by XKCD. The result of making up numbers. Hilarious funny post: World War II on Facebook.

Since I once again missed "Songs an einem Sommerabend" this year, Marcus and I decided to order tickets for 2011 quite early. Besides Bodo Wartke, who will be the host of the show, and some very talented younger folks Reinhard Mey, Hannes Wader and Konstantin Wecker - the three icons of the German singer-songwriter scene - will be there.
If you want to join in and come with us please tell me before the 15th of August 2010. I'll place the order on Monday the 16th of August 2010.

Add this event to your Google calendar:

Just a short notice on two of the most use- and senseless things I have ever seen.

First: An Application that keeps track off all the women you dated and had sex with. The basic idea of the application is that it allows you to enter details about your partners like birthdays, contact information, silly things that you should recall and track your encounters with them. Also you are able to rate these encounters and create nifty little statistics from the data. Read the whole story at Gizmodo or just watch the video on Youtube:



The second and even more useless thing is a technique by Gigabyte that is called "Cloud OC". "Cloud OC" enables you to overclock your computer via internet. Yeah right, countless times of thinking "If I only could overclock a computer I don't currently use..." now come to an end! At last!
Srsly people, no one ever asked for such shit. While I do understand your need to present unique selling propositions for your run-of-the-mill products, I would very much appreciate if you try to get my money by promoting features that aren't completely useless and insult my intelligence.



On a more funny note: Yesterday I found one of the biggest "donks" I ever played Poker with. After seeing the river card he called my all-in with nothing but high card ace. I might add, that the ace in question was the turn card and he therefore had to know that he hasn't the slightest chance to win anything. I love stupid people. Gimme all your money folks!

Being at home in Chemnitz is always this annoying "same shit, different day" experience. Every time I come around, I hope that some things might have changed as if by magic, but of course they didn't and they never will. While we had a real cool time last week in Hungary I didn't fancy coming here, but I braced myself up and did it anyway. I should have known better...
Just to make the bad things a little worse I did fell ill with an bronchitis. The doc prescribed me some drugs but neither do I feel better nor do I see colourful lights at least. Gnarf!!!
Anyway I do look forward to meeting Ronny this week. One of the rare good things about being here.
To cheer me up a bit, I bought the beautiful and most luxurious Collectors Edition of Starcraft 2. Even though I'm usually not into real time strategy games, I used to love each and every RTS game done by Blizzard. Right now I didn't play much more than two missions, but the game already made a very good impression. The collectors edition is armed with a lot of cool stuff like a 2GB USB flash drive replica of one of the games characters dog tag, which comes preloaded with the original StarCraft and the StarCraft: Brood War expansion set, the inevitable soundtrack CD, a comic book, a gigantic art book and a vanity pet for each of my World of Warcraft characters. All told this box is kind of expensive but well worth it. It's just awesome, so get this game! (I didn't expect anything less Blizzard!) Now I go for some more slaughtering, I can't sleep anyway, because of the stuffed-up nose and the shortage of breath. Damn bronchitis!

With yesterdays news being kind of depressing it's time to take a look on the bright side life. Today our team went playing golf at the Golf Resort Pankow which was great fun. We practised the most basic things on the driving range before we moved on to a 3-hole training course where everybody is allowed to play. Of course we played like shit, but it's good to know that there's a place nearby, where you can practise golf without having a licence or having to pay club fee.
Also the HTC Hero I carry with me got an update to Android 2.1 today. Even though this update isn't officially released for Germany, David found out a pretty easy way to get it anyway. I just had to set the phones date to 2011 and instantly a message popped up, telling me of an update being ready to download. When I chose the HTC Hero as one of our test devices, I was pretty confident that over time HTC would give a lot of sweet love to what was there flagship phone back then, but the exact opposite did happen. Prior to this 2.1-Update the Hero was one of the last devices that had to deal with crappy Android 1.5, there were no updates to 1.6 or whatsoever. Now it seems as if the old Hero is back into play with free navigation, Google Goggles and all the other cool stuff that comes with Android 2.1. YEEEHAW!
And to make this day even better my World of Warcraft druid got the ultra-cool and pretty rare blue protodrake mount dropped at the Utgarde pinnacle. Yeah, another rare mount for one of my chars, even if it's not my main char! Hey fate, more of these days please!

Yesterday Karsten pointed me to an animation done by Isao Hashimoto that is apparently seven years old but which I didn't know until now. The animation is named "1945-1998" and shows each and every detonation of a nuclear bomb in the same years.
While everyone is well aware that nuclear weapons have been tested over and over again, I was kind of shocked that "over and over again" doesn't refer to a number like two hundred or maybe even five hundred. Not that anyone on earth would have needed to detonate two hundred nukes for any reason... but what the nuclear powers did is worse. They ignited more than two thousand nukes from 1945 to 1998. Watch the animation here, it's a must see in my opinion!
As if that's not enough madness for one day I stumbled into web forum for Nazis*. Reading the crap those shitheads spill into the world is just sickening and stresses my strong belief in absolute freedom of speech a lot. People discussing about "racially incorrect" couples and Jewish people being congenital bonded to be criminals feels so disgusting and makes me rage in helpless anger. It makes me want to cry "Somebody DO something about this..." but I know it doesn't make any sense to ban such stuff. Those people just move their servers to another country that does not forbid and suddenly internationalisation is not that bad any more...



So, everybody: DO something! Talk, educate, be cross and maybe most importantly: Don't turn away but intervene! Sage NEIN!

*I thought long about linking to this crap, because seeing is believing and maybe it would have helped raising awareness. Also I am quite confident that non of the people reading this will be seduced by the simple "truths" of these people. But then again I am responsible for the links on my page and I decided not to take any risk by linking to anti-constitutional and prolly indictable stuff.

Even though I am not (yet?) into this whole microblogging thing and even though I definitely do not need more things that are able to distract me from work, I created a twitter account today. What for I really don't know, but maybe it's a exercise being confined to 140 characters. Maybe it'll help to polish my texts, to make them more slender and more precise. We'll see.
Unfortunately the nickname "Riipa" was already in use and I had to find another. Neither was I ready to abandon my nickname completely nor did I want to use one of those cryptic names like riipa77_de. After something like an hour of try and error I remembered Neil Gaiman's account Neilhimself... hence I proudly present my Twitter account Riipahimself.