This fast food restaurant claims you can have things your way. However, your decision ends at the stubborn door. It's too bad ;)
(seen at Burger King, 4th Street, Corvallis, Oregon)
Obduzieren leicht gemacht
Das hat dem Internet noch gefehlt. Eine interaktive Autopsie. Coole Sache :)
Mozilla-Tag
Was für ein Mozilla-Tag.
Firefox One launched
How cool was that?
To celebrate 100 million firefox downloads, the OSU LUG and the NASA launched a weather balloon today called "Firefox One". I've been there on the MU quad with quite a bunch of other people who were celebrating the Firefox jubilee (or just thought "cool, what a nice balloon").
The balloon is a latex thing weighing something like 3 kilograms in total. It is filled with helium and will go up to the final height of 100 000 feet, which is right at the edge of space. During all its flight, the digital cameras mounted to the balloon will take pictures of where they are. Eventually, when going too high, the balloon will rupture and on a parachute, it will go back down to the earth. Someone will hopefully find it and call the number that's written on it.
And then - there will be photos of "Firefox One"'s fantastic journey :) I will keep you posted on that.
I made quite a few pictures during the launch today, too. I will post them as soon as I get home later.
The whole launch was also recorded by the Oregon State Webcam by the way. But as quite a lot (millions?) of firefox users clicked on it in order to see Firefox One launch, I am not quite sure if anyone was able to see any picture ;)
Go Firefox!
Update: I uploaded some photos on my photo page (see: USA -> 2005-10-22 Firefox...)! However, there are even more photos on the LUG website.
American Espresso
Kurzum: Ein Graus. Fast überall. (... in meinem englischen Blog)
Espresso, finally!
Being stuck in a country that - I don't quite know how to put this, but, ... hmmm ... - does strange things to food in general, I had almost given up trying to find espresso that actually deserves the name. I mean, regular coffee is mostly okay over here, even though you have to take care not to get a decaffeinated or oddly flavored kind by mistake.
However, when it comes to espresso, the americans seem to mess up totally.
Usually you can choose between one shot and two shot espresso (often hurtingly misspelled as expresso). One shot meaning like 6 ounces, two shots 12 or so. Basically, this is somehow three or four times as much as a usual Italian espresso, while being half as strong as it is supposed to be. Even Starbucks - though being supposed to know the coffee business better than most people in the world - contributes to this collective espresso-raping over here. What a pity.
But then, yesterday, I really found a gelateria (yes, it is honestly called like that) downtown that really has a genuine italian espresso machine, unbelievably making genuine italian caffè (= espresso). Woohoo! Now that was a surprise. (It's sort of excusable therefore, that the staff understands no single italian word, thus having to pronounce things like lampone (= raspberry) in a very american manner... ;) )
Anyways, I think I'm going to step by Francesco's more often now. It gives kind of a European feeling to me on diaspora ;)
100 Millionen Firefox-Downloads feiern
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Memorable Software Week
That's kind of nice. Two very nice pieces of software hit "magical mile stones" these days.
My favorite web browser Firefox finally got unbelievable 100 million downloads. Celebrations! It's one of the most wonderful open source software products I've ever seen. Go spread the word! :)
Another nice one - closed source though - is the voice over IP service Skype (not a google or yahoo toy, by the way, but soon an eBay one) that will finally break the four million users mark this week. In my opinion, it is still the best possibility to call home so far. It works unbelievably smooth even though the people I'm usually calling are roughly 5000 miles away.
So, it seems to be totally the right moment for me to get employed at the OSU Open Source Lab soon. It's a good week, really :) w00t!
Why not call your child Google?
Today, I read in an interesting small article on the web page of the German news series "tagesschau" that in Sweden, a new-born child was called by the name "Google".
In Germany, it is forbidden to name a child in a manner that encourages other people to make fun of the name or might possibly have a negative impact on the child's identification with his or her own name. But, unlike in my home country, this seems to be allowed in Sweden. So, it was no problem to name the little child like that. And, actually, Google is the second name of the baby, Oliver being his first one.
The only problem the father has to fear is that Google, Inc. sues him for unlicensed use of their company name. But by now, this does not seem to be the case.
By the way: As the father himself stems is a Libanese software engineer, he will be called "Abu Google" from now on. It's arabic for "Google's father".
However, now he seems to need a new idea for a second child they might have. How about Yahoo? I'm not quite sure though if this will lead to the children constantly fighting with each other. Just imagine Google playing with the earth, Yahoo constantly bugging him until he cryingly leaves to play with Flickr (the family dog). Only minutes later, both of them start to annoy daddy until he buys them some candy. Google chews blogger gum, while Yahoo enjoys a nice Konfabulator granola bar.
Imagine that.
Bad, bad, reeeally baaad idea! ;)