“Don’t fall asleep!” — a nice reminder for the drummer of the big band I play in, on the 1943 Tommy Dorsy piece “Opus One”.

And because you’ve been such a good readership lately, here’s the original record for you. Enjoy!

Just to give you a piece of unwanted knowledge, I just passed my last exam ever! It was about parallel programming, by the way.

Now it’s really only my masters thesis that stands between me and graduation. Yay!

Unbelievable: This coming week is my last week of classes, ever. It will be followed by an 8-week period of exams (with 1-2 weeks in between every two exams).

Then, provided I pass them all (which I like to hope), I will have done all requirements but my master’s thesis in order to graduate from college with a degree in Information Engineering and Management.

I can’t believe I am almost done studying — it still feels like I’ve only started attending university just recently. Time flies, I guess.

Dear readers!

I wish you a merry Christmas and a good and successful year 2008. I hope you had fun reading my blog this year and thank you all for your helpful comments and constructive input. I hope you’ll still bear with me for a long time to come!

Now get back to your Christmas feasts but make sure to not drink and sing (instead, always choose a designated singer!), or you may end up like this guy:

(The song being so graciously interpreted here, by the way, is a German Christmas song that goes “silent, silent, silent, because the child wants to sleep…”)

Yesterday, Apple released a system update that is supposed to fix the severe “keyboard unresponsive” bug in OS X Leopard:

With hardly 800K in size, the patch is a lightweight that could have a big influence. If that’s not the right place to use the word of the year, where else: W00t.

I just installed it and so far, the keyboard works fine, but of course I haven’t sent the box to sleep yet, so by now I can’t tell yet if the patch actually fixed the bug. Of course, the reboot the update asked for promptly resulted in a kernel panic (great start), but luckily, another reboot went through without problems.

If you like, please let me know in the comments if the patch worked for you or not. Good luck!

(Thanks Justin, Jean Pierre and Marc, who all told me about the update being available.)

It seems to me like some people have a little too much time at their hands: I recently notice a bunch of hand-crafted spam coming in to my blog, mainly as comments to the famous (infamous?) cake article.

The comments look something like this:

Some hand-crafted wordpress spam, notice how the comment makes sense but the supplied URL is quite apparently promoting spam content.

Interestingly, most of these comments actually link to pages that promote some sort of shady pyramid scheme. Looks like these people desperately surf the web searching for well-visited blog posts and drop spam in there — by hand.

Yet, even if they manage to get through comment moderation, they are not likely to squeeze any “search engine juice” out of it, since Wordpress marks commenters’ homepage links as nofollow by default.

And though I would like to tell them they can save their keystrokes and that they are wasting their time (and, more importantly, mine too), I can probably drop that, since chances are, none of these people will ever actually read the blogs they are spamming…

See, people, I am not that bad I am just 58 percent geek:
58% Geek

(Yet I need to say “did you ever solve a complex computer problem while in the shower” is a mean catch question and a geek dead giveaway that I stepped right into )

(Thanks for the link, Kai!)