Surgery Mixup

Apparently, a Tanzanian man died after his knee was operated on. Sad but that happens, I guess. What is worse is that he was scheduled to get brain surgery instead. Consequently, the guy who actually needed his knee fixed got his head worked on and now is paralyzed but slowly recovering (needless to say his knee is still bad).

What the...? As the average patient, this can only mean next time you need to go to the hospital bring a big sharpie and clearly mark the spot that needs to be worked on. For added security, you should also consider covering your entire body with arrows pointing into the right direction. Just in case.

Meanwhile, the family of the guy who died does not seek to sue the government for the unfortunate mix-up, the article linked above mentions; instead, they have "urged the health ministry to employ qualified and compassionate medical staff." Now I wonder -- shouldn't medical staff always be qualified in order to get employed somewhere? But maybe it's just too much asked that medical staff double-checks the files before performing brain surgery on a knee patient...

November 19, 2007Fred Wenzel

Chuckabee

Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee made an interesting election commercial featuring nobody less than the actor that all other actors are merely imitating, everybody's favorite idol and the guy whose fists are faster than light: Chuck Norris.

I know what you're thinking now: "Where can I vote for Chuck, and who's that other guy in the commercial anyway?" (after all, you American voters have made an actor president before, and the Californians have made one governor, so this seems to be the logical career step for American actors). Maybe next time he'll have a heart and roundhouse kick his way to the Oval Office?

(Thanks for the link, Tara!)

November 16, 2007Fred Wenzel

Aggrandize

When I read dictionary.com's word of the day today:

aggrandize: To make or make appear great or greater.

... I thought, ah! That must be the same as embiggen!

However, I wonder: Is "aggrandize" a perfectly cromulent word? ;)

October 27, 2007Fred Wenzel

GMail introduces IMAP

GMail Oh, how long have I waited for this! Almost three years ago, I blogged about the then newly-introduced POP access for GMail (German) and, to summarize it for you, my conclusion was that POP does not sufficiently support GMail's specialities, in particular the big storage capacity (downloading tons of mail is no fun) and tagging (which could easily be replicated in IMAP folders).

Now, three years later, GMail implements IMAP and with that, in my opinion, GMail has become a global player in email that now actually deserves the name.

IMAP features are mapped to GMail features reasonably, for example tags to folders as I suggested, or IMAP flags to GMail "stars".

To test, I connected to my account with Thunderbird, and as far as I can tell now, it works nice and quickly. Good job, Google!

According to Jean Pierre, IMAP is not enabled for all users yet, but I assume everybody will get the feature soon. Once you do, make sure to check it out!

October 09, 2007Fred Wenzel

Firefox Cookies

What do Firefoxes snack on? Cookies, of course. So somebody went ahead and baked these Firefox cookies:

Firefox Cookies

Yummy!

But, even though Firefox is clearly a web browser from outer space, let's still not assume these were space cookies ;).

(Thanks for the link, Jean Pierre!)

October 02, 2007Fred Wenzel

Neue Suchmaschine

Mit der möglicherweise kommenden Erweiterung der BKA-Kompetenzen um die so genannte "Online-Durchsuchung" soll auch gleich eine neue Suchmaschine gegründet werden. Die Benutzeroberfläche ist bereits an die Öffentlichkeit gesickert:

September 29, 2007Fred Wenzel

Best-Selling Albums of All Time

Our beloved RIAA is usually up to no good, but they have an interesting list of the 100 best selling albums of all times:

Place #1 goes to the Eagles' Greatest Hits (which surprises me a little bit), followed by Michael Jackson's Thriller and Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Makes for a nice iTunes shopping list (with an interesting mixture of all genres, for obvious reasons).

September 27, 2007Fred Wenzel

Amazon MP3

That's right, Amazon's new DRM-free MP3 store is an awesome alternative to the iTunes Music Store. All files are 256kbit and usually cost 89-99 cents each. This is the same quality as Apple's "iTunes Plus" but at least 30 cents cheaper.

Now we only need this in Europe too (where we are currently paying 99 Euro cents for DRMed and 1.29 for not DRMed songs which, at the current weak dollar rate, is an ugly 1.40 USD and 1.82 USD, respectively).

And I am curious to see how Apple will react to this. Bring it on, Steve!

September 20, 2007Fred Wenzel

For Mor^H^H^H a colleague

I just noticed that youtube is an excellent resource for all things Care bear:

Good to know! ;)

September 11, 2007Fred Wenzel

Animator vs. Animation

Check out this cool animation:

The author writes:

An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find - the brush tool, the eraser tool - to get back at his tormentor. It's resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself.

This is just awesome. But sometimes I am glad I'm not in the animation business. :)

Oh, and if you can't get enough, there's a sequel, too! (And it features Firefox :))

(Thanks for the link, Jenny!)