Monitoring Dalager

I just came back from the hospital, visiting Christian & Christina and their new little peach, Silja/Asta/Selma girl, born 0530 this morning.

Had a mood peak when I left the tired but happy parents, walking through half dark almost empty hospital corridors listening to Bright Eyes: The Invention of Beauty. Goose bumps.

Hands and feet are amazing when scaled down like this. Should have given her a match in her tiny hand for comparison. Would have looked like a budo pole.

I am, from this day and to [*] do us part, using BlogLines for news/blog RSS-aggregation and blogroll display.

Mikkel Woo made me switch.

I’ve been using Sharpreader for a long time, but having two computers and no ability to synchronize your feedreaders simply doesn’t work.

[*]: technical problems, loss of faith, better alternatives, mental disorder, the end of the world and such. Did I mention Lawsuits? Lawsuits.

New feature: I’ve written a little reading monitor application, that displays your personal book-flow. Check it out in the right sidebar among all the other trivia.

It will be available for download as soon as I’ve hacked together an admin-page for it.

And He Will Be Calleth: ReadMon BookFlow!

One thing that bothers me is that I never really learned to master css. Which makes the maintenance and construction of stylesheets a living hell.

Another thing that bothers me is that one day this page will die from information overload. Or bad design. The two diseases will definitely race each other. (Personal note: must implement bookmaker-feature)

Notes from Classy’s Kitchen: New grassroots campaign on classy.dk - promises to stamp out Warnock’s Dilemma

About the situation you face, when people don’t respond to your posts.

It’s called Warnock’s Dilemma and it’s a common feeling for owners of commentable weblogs. Classy’s kithchen provides good background information.

Interesting.
If you use comments as a way to measure and display your status in the blogosphere, it will very soon influence your style of writing.

Since I hacked together the Google Hits script (in the sidebar) I have become more focused on the search-engine hits. If I need more google traffic I should go for populism. Again a style-modification.

My personal blog is listed on Blogbot.dk and our thesis blog is listed on JavaBlogs. To get hits from blogportals/metablogs you need to focus on a catchy subject and make sure that the first two or three lines are teasing as hell. It is also good to point to content that is not exposed on the portals,”this image was shot…” or “I just found out why I have no problem getting laid…”

All of this is influencing the way you write and the way you choose what to write about.
You must make a choice everytime you post an entry to your blog. Can you attract traffic without compromising your integrity?

This is not easy. But we try.

Software Fashion - Software Reality

An article about how to approach and understand hyped technologies.

Extreme Programming, VB.Net and Jakarta Struts are examples of a methodology, a language and an API that have been turned into religious silver-bullet solutions to any given problem at hand.

XML is also in the line of fire:

XML has suffered a similar mass misuse. As with web services, programmers use XML “just because”. For example, XML increasingly gets used as a language, via taglibs or (flinch) XSLT. XML is best at representing data in a clean and open fashion. Anything more is stretching the point, like sticking a saddle on a pig and calling it a micro-horse. Inevitably, books then start to appear that rationalize the industry’s madness, such as Micro-Horse Revealed, Micro-Horse Developer’s Guide, or Teach Your Micro-Horse to Sing in 21 Days!

I have a weakness (surprise, huh?) for hype. When people start jumping up and down I feel like joining them. Dear Lord, help me see through the Hype.

My name is Christian, and I’m a Hyper.

Now and then you notice the occurence of new and ugly expressions. At first you hate it when people keep using the same expressions again and again, but one day you wake up hearing the same nonsense coming out of yourself. Your own holy mouth!

The first few times you use the expression with a proper ironic distance. Looking can you belive that people are actually saying this???. This is the weakest part of your mental defenses — you might think that you are in control, but it’s really the other way around: you have caugth the word-flu and are by no means in control anymore. The flu has got you and eventually the ironic distance will turn into hahahaha this is funny and beyond that you will not notice anymore. Just spread.

After a while you will notice that people look at you with disgust when you use certain expressions, you’ll feel embarrassed and corny in a not so cool way. But you should celebrate — the fever is about to leave your body. And your disgusted friends have unknowingly become carriers of the virus.

These vira may seem extinct but one day they are back when you are most off guards and ill prepared.

The other day I used the expression “Top Dollar!”
And in a few weeks you will do the same.
Behold.

I’m reading Snow Crash by Stephenson at the moment. That’s where I got the expressions as cultural patterns and chunks of information. And the virus stuff of course.

I actually bought a car today. A nice Citroën BX 19TRS from ‘88. Black.

Tomorrow I will drive it from Copenhagen to Jutland (Århus->Viborg)

Ping me if you need a free ride.

This japanese car-review says:

“In addition, unless the suspension with hydro Ro something, the engine it is caught, it is the case that it cannot maintain the height. Therefore, when morning, it goes to the parking zone, the oil of hydro Ro coming out, height falling, the る it is is, but this becoming quite facing down, with like the dog which waits for the master, it is lovely, it is is, don’t you think?. Just a little, because the torso is long, it points, with like the ず め dachshund”
(translation by BabelFish)

So, what are you waiting for?

But I promise you: you will laugh.

Happy Tree Friends sounds like a nice community. But it is not.

Etchy and Scratchy meets Teletubbies. And Braindead.
I hereby baptize the genre “Animated Cute Gore”

Be warned I: this is violent stuff. Start out with “Eye Candy”.
Be warned II: prepare yourself for a catchy title tune.

If you’re not into ‘funny movies’ and stuff like that, you should probably leave this link unclicked. Personally I stopped after viewing two clips, but then again: I belong in the “faint of heart”-category.

Why am I posting this? Well, I kind of like ambivalence, and these awful but cute and funny animations make me sick and yet laughing. Peculiar state of mind. Mmmm…

Med fare for at lyde som en tøs, der skulle have levet (som i “været ældre”) i 70′erne…

Simon Jorsal og jeg lavede T-shirts i lørdags. Inspireret og vejledt af Stencil Revolution fik vi lavet et par kreationer, hvoraf jeg personligt er ret stolt af min nye MaryTee, der tavst byder den vordende dronning Mary velkommen.

Desuden blev Simons Terapi-Tee’s også kickstartet med en denne fine sag, der kan hanke op i en usikker sjæl under et restitituerende besøg på herretoilettet. Konceptet “Selvtillid TM” er fuldt konfigurerbart og vi ligger i øjeblikket i forhandlinger med Carl Mar om en masseproduceret “Min pik er stor!”-serie. Ja undskyld det meget direkte sprog, men hvad det angår, er Hr. Mar urokkelig.


Simon lavede et tryk med en ret fræk piktogramsekvens (her til højre).

Jeg ville have forsvoret, at jeg skulle komme til at diskutere forskellige typer af stofmaling med en hobbyforretningsekspedient.

Har planer om at lave Niels Bohr og Dostojevskij. Måske endda i kælent klammeri.

Update: Hvis nogen skulle være interesserede, så nap .psd-filen her: mary3.psd. Husgeråd: spar på blækket og nøjes med at printe en outline (vistnok med i et layer).

This is my gift to the soon to be married couple Frederik & Mary.

We should all contribute. They will be King and Queen to the people and so we must all give something back.

Oschlag started the initiative. (In Danish).