Logging the Switch

Posts

  • Feb 2, 2007

    Back to Berlin

    Als das Kind Kind war, ging es mit hängenden Armen,
    wollte der Bach sei ein Fluss. Der Fluss sei ein Strom.

    Und diese Pfütze das Meer.

    Als das Kind Kind war, wusste es nicht, dass es Kind war.
    Alles war ihm beseelt und alle Seelen waren eins.

    With these words starts Der Himmel über Berlin, a movie by Wim Wenders (who is from Düsseldorf). It is set in 1987 Berlin, the divided Berlin. At that time cracks were already starting to show, the Cold War was thawing.

    Since it’s a West-German movie from before the Wende and I have only been in the former eastern part of the city (except for the Kreuzberg quarter and the Anhalter Bahnhof which Peter Falk thought was a funny name), it showed an image of the the city which was new to me.

    While we were watching it during our weekly movie night, it made me decide I want to go back to the city again – I’ve been there a week in 1997 with a school exchange and returned in 2001 for holidays. This time to maybe see a bit more of the old western part.

    It’s always been in the back of my mind to return to the German capital city and this year it might just fit in the small eurotrip through Austria, Germany and Denmark I’m thinking of making…

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  • Jan 31, 2007

    News from the skating rink

    Since well over a year now I’ve been speed skating regularly, so maybe it is time for an update on the state of affairs up until now.

    Last week, I got promoted to a higher training group, moving up from the D to the C group. This year, Isis got only a few new members, so there was no direct need of an E group where I was in last year and I started in D right away when I came back from Iceland. So basically, this is my second promotion in one year :)

    The groups differ mainly in the balance of technique and endurance exercises. Last wednesday was my first traning in my new group and we started right away with a warming up of 8 rounds “full speed” (which in this case means at about 70% of your power), 2 rounds rest, 8 rounds full, 2 rest, 6 full, 2 rest and another 6 full. In the D group, we hadn’t done anything more than 6 at all… Ouch.

    Another change from the lower groups is that you are supposed to take on at least one partner to ride along with and to learn from eachother. In D group, you usually did your exercises on your own.

    So far on the news on the ice, along the track I wanted to do something back for the association, so I decided to do some work for the Crisis, the monthly newspaper.

    And someone must have seen my Iceland pictures, because he asked me whether I would be interested in joining the photo commission. This would mean I get photo gallery upload access at the Isis website and occasionally take pictures at activities of the club.

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  • Jan 6, 2007

    Uurtje IJsland #05: De Aller Allerlaatste

    Nou, vooruit, dit is dan echt de allerallerlaatste.

    1. Bang Gang – Find What You Can Get
    2. Jeff Who? – Barfly
    3. The Sugarcubes – Motorcrash
    4. Apparat Organ Quartet – Cruise Control
    5. Einóma – Hringlögun
    6. The Sugarcubes – Deus (remix)
    7. Bang Gang – So Alone
    8. GusGus – Purple
    9. Pendulum – Follower
    10. Ghostigital – The Heart
    11. Stafrænn Hákon – Rafmagn
    12. Stafrænn Hákon – Gorecki Magnus
    13. Sigur Rós – Refur

    Directe download: (offline)

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  • Dec 27, 2006

    Unicode mess

    Hurray!

    You might not agree (along with me by the way), but í (decomposition, Apple uses this in OS X) and í (UTF-8), í (UTF-16 and UTF-32) and í (HTML Entity) should result in displaying the same characters. I am actually talking about the Unicode character called ‘LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH ACUTE’

    We can be glad that there are many different ways to enter the same character and that there is no single way to actually enter the original character and then conclude that we actually want to see the resource under the same name but written in a different way. Who cares whether it is one character or a combined character‽

    Thank you Unicode! AARGH!

    P.S. If you’re wondering what I’m ranting about, these three URLs should go to the same page, two of them don’t:

    The nice thing that Safari manages to show the correct name in the status bar, so with resolved names for links One and Two – the latter one shifted up one pixel, very elegant (?) -, but not for Three, where I just see %ED in the URL. Ironically, this is the only character which actually shows the i acute correctly in the paragraph above. This is way above my head, many different systems at work at the same time, all trying their best to do something.

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  • Dec 22, 2006

    Boten Anna

    Nee, het gaat niet om een Zweeds liedje wat te vaak is gecoverd, maar om de website van IKEA (ook Zweeds). Je kan Anna namelijk allerlei vragen stellen over IKEA. Heel leuk, maar nu vraag ik me wel af, wie heeft nu wie geïspireerd en kan ze je ook zo hard verbannen (“och hon kann banna, banna dig så hård”)?

    Zo, de eerste post hier sinds ik weer terugben, met meer in het vooruitzicht.

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