Surfing around on kayak.com for affordable destinations for my planned, hopefully then-deserved post-master's-thesis vacation, I browsed through the list of travel destinations, glancing over Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, ....

Wait a minute. Cuba?

Sure enough I was curious, so I clicked it and got the following message.

Ah. Everything's still in order, the trade embargo hasn't been lifted without my knowledge, Pennsylvania liquor stores are still safe from the invasion of evil Cuban rum, cigar stores can still sell Dominican cigars with the slogan "taste almost like Cubans" with only mildly ridiculing themselves, and kayak.com saved itself from committing treason at the last minute. Phew, time to dry the sweat off my face.

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So there is this guy, who says he has eaten 23.000 big macs over the course of 36 years and obviously, kept all the receipts.

If these were the presidential elections, I would demand a recount, but in dubio pro reo and all, let's assume he is right. Of course I wanted to know how many big macs that totals per day, so I entered into Google:

23 000 / (36 years)

and what did I get back? Obviously, big macs per second:

By the way: Using more conventional units, this totals between 1 and 2 big macs a day.

PS: Random fact I am sure none of you wanted to know, Heinrich Hertz, the guy whose name became the unit of frequency "hertz", was a professor at University of Karlsruhe (my home uni), where he discovered the electromagnetic waves.

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As I signed up for twitter during a period of "high maintenance" (that's polite for almost-constant brokenness), I encountered the fail whale quite often---and learned to like it, in its own way, because it had become a tradition of sorts, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

Twitter's Charming "mascot", the Fail Whale

And funnily, every time I visit the page in my Firefox instance, the Awesomebar keeps reminding me of the times when the whale was ubiquitous:

How nice: Nostalgia 2.0.

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Look at this way awesome "CERN rap" explaining particle physics and the CERN's Large Hadron Collider (which was switched on just today):

Looks like they've got awfully little to do down there in Geneva ;)

Yo! (And by the way, if you understand very little of what that all means, don't feel too bad: I just noticed my last physics class was a while ago as well).

(Thanks for the link, Christian!)

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I promise, my blog is not going to turn into a "desktop wallpaper collection", but this one is too cool not to show it to you:

"Ceci n'est pas le fond d'écran officiel de Firefox / This Is Not The Official Firefox Background Picture"

By the way, the photographer Denis-Carl Robidoux publishes a picture per day, all of which in different sizes to fit your screen, and for free, too.

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Yup, not only the cars are fast on the German autobahn!

Crazy Skateboard Downhill German Autobahn

Oh, and now the police try to find him so they can give him a ticket, tsk, tsk...

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Just found a nice red panda pic that works as a desktop wallpaper:

The picture was made by meantux on flickr, and is licensed under a CC by-nc license.

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This is a meme I borrowed from Freya. It's a Google image search meme. Search for your answer for each one, and pick your favorite from the first 3 pages.

Feel free to pick it up if you like, and don't forget to trackback!

While Freya got a bunch of "naked chicks" in her search results (and neglected to include them, much to the dismay of her male readership), I got a bunch of muscular models that share my first name--who I conveniently chose not to display here either (sorry female readership :) ). Here we go:

Your first name:

Your middle name:

Your last name:

Your age:

A place you would like to visit:

Your favorite place to be:

The name of a past love:

Your college degree or concentration:

Your grandmother's first name:

Where you grew up:

Your childhood pet's name:

Your best friend's nickname:

Your first job:

Your favorite food:

Your favorite color:

What you're doing right now:

One of your bad habits:

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When I recently watched a slideshow on flickr, I noticed this in the slideshow settings:

It seems, flickr developers watch the Simpsons too. The word embiggen, along with cromulent, was introduced (read: made up) in the episode "Lisa the Iconoclast" and has since been widely used in popular culture. So widely even, that at least cromulent made it into Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English as a slang term.

Hm. Flickr is re-gaining some sympathy here (for this and other reasons I may soon blog about).

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Today was the last day at Mozilla for Alex Polvi, web ninja and one of my favorite colleagues at the OSU Open Source Lab and later at Mozilla.

But it wouldn't be our Alex if he didn't leave with a bang, so he made a "Hampster Dance" style website named "Foxkeh Dance", featuring the cute Japanese Firefox mascot "Foxkeh" and celebrating 10 years of Mozilla along with 10 years of Hampster Dance:

I just warn you, if you're like me, you'll have trouble getting that catchy tune out of your head for the rest of the day -- much like the first time when you looked at Hampster dance back in the 90s.

Take care, Alex, and I hope our paths will cross again sooner rather than later!

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