“Imagine a conference podium with four micros. After pressing the button of one of the micros, there is a little red light on the very same micro. Guess which of the micros is switched on.”
* DAU = Dümmster anzunehmender User; being short of a direct translation, the DAU is best described as the person you have in mind when thinking about idiot-proof systems. If there were such a thing.
Ahh, the joy of sequels…
Seriously; it is not that I didn’t have other things to do – like preparing this conference next week, or dealing with this cold – but some things just have to have priority.
Bloglines being closed down, bothered me enough to spend valuable time on annoying colleagues and searching for something else. To no avail…. Until I realised that there was probably no Internet related issue to which no Firefox addon existed. Thought – done – found: Feedly!
Which first scarred me as all, but all my feeds were already there the moment I created an account including the folder structure! After a short moment of big brother paranoia, I realised that it links straight through to Google Reader where I exported my feeds to on Sunday. Huh…
Anyhow. Feedly has a nicely designed interface – the digest view being my favourite for now. It is intuitive enough to manage, integrates Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and all other kinds of social net tools (exactly the developments the idiots from ask.com missed!) and is yet another proof nobody needed that Firefox beats Explorer by miles.
The announcement alone was impertinent: “As you may have heard, we are sorry to share that Bloglines will officially shut down on October 1, 2010.” I’m subscribed to the freaking bloglines news feed; and no, I did not know…
As it turns out; ask.com acquired bloglines in 2005 and is now shutting it down. Apparently because people prefer Twitter, Facebook and heaven knows what else. I can’t help it but the reasons they bring up sound hollow to me. If you loose money, why don’t you say so?
I liked Bloglines very much. Now I need a new; well designed feed reader – and for once, Google isn’t an alternative. If you have one; let me know.
How does it come that absolutely no results in the anti-virus scan – instead of the usual few tracking cookies – make me slightly nervous?
They say: “It’s a character building experience.”
The problem is that usually during character building, life sucks.
20 years after the fall of the wall, the democratically elected German government has possibilities of surveillance, the East German state was only dreaming of.
Every phone call, every email, ever visited website – it’s all saved for 6 months and can be traced back. With regards to a crime and under judicial control? No, from every single web user, in advance, turning up side down the presumption of innocence. But it is all to our best and will never possibly used against us.
More information on the situation and debate in Germany and in the European Union.
Or: Where please can I get my money back?
Friends and colleagues had warned me with a pitiful smile. If a Belgian service provider says that the installation of phone, Internet, TV, whatever, will take place between 8 and 12 in the morning; the chances of the installation team showing up are hazardous at the best. Based on the experience of other people, it is apparently perfectly possible to spend two if not three mornings at home waiting for a service provider never to come.
However, once they had entered my apartment, it was a bit weird to have these two guys there , talking about their job, the color of the company t-shirts and the annoying boss as if I were simply not present. They only realised that I eventually was when I had to sign several papers with the mention “read and approved” signing my soul over to the devil finally getting my very own high speed Internet connection at home.
It was about time.
La puce, die Welt and everything else 