Even when reality disgusts you - go outside and try to enjoy it once in a while - you might find some new aspect to hate or maybe even enjoy.

CNN: Student ‘Twitters’ his way out of Egyptian jail 

This is a typical high-tech non-story. If this guy simply would have called someone nobody would have cared. But because he used a high-tech gizmo suddenly it’s a story.

I think for causing such a stupid commotion he should be jailed - and all his Twitter buddies and the journalists too!

*Thanks to Edosan for not Twittering this to me*

Ubu.com focuses mainly on poetry and Avantgarde - but is a great cultural repository for words, videos and images. Bring a lot of time to explore it all …

*Thanks to so many people for sending this one: Edosan, OliviaB and Mayamoi*

I think this excellent graphic explains it all. Too bad all this great technology is used for “funny” pictures and trivia. There never has been a golden age of knowledge, a highly intelligent and educated mass of people. But at least for those who crave knowledge live and learning has become much easier.

Let the rest blog and twitter about cats and American Idol.

If this propaganda website from NATO is any indicator for the current state of affair for the North Atlantic Alliance than it is bad … very bad.

The website feels so 1999 and really stinks. Who made this? The 14 year old son of a Polish General? Sorry, I am so incredibly underwhelmed by this …

Watch for yourself: natochannel.tv

UN Data is one of these websites that look REALLY boring, but offer a HUGE amount of interesting data - at least for people who want to know more details.

These official numbers are certainly not perfect - I am pretty sure some governments feed the UN crappy data. But at least it’s a global repository for important facts about our planet, the current state of human affairs and our societies.

MSNBC has a nice feature highlighting the “debate” Paper vs Plastic. Pretty idiotic: let’s get rid of these stupid plastic bags. Paper is the way to go - or simply use a reusable bag made out of cotton …

I always love it when I see even spammers having problems with their software as well. May I recommend some medicine or penis extension to fix your problem?

Stage6.com has been killed. It was the best video site so far, because it over high-quality viewing (based on the great DIVX codec) and - let’s be honest - tons of excellent pirated stuff.

What attracted me was the fore mentioned quality and many great user groups full with documentaries and arty stuff. It’s all gone now. So I have to do some housekeeping and delete the video links on my blog as well.

Goodbye Stage6 - you will be missed.

PS: I am pretty sure all that stuff will come back on another site.

At the moment the VERY painful video of Eduardo da Silva’s accident is all the rage on YouTube - and is a big hit with the kids. One has really to wonder why watching such a painful video is all the rage?

Scientists have long proven that we empathize and re-live such experiences simply by watching other humans doing (stupid) stuff. So I can only extend this idea in this way: we watch pain porn to train ourselves for such moments and try to cope with it’s consequences - even when it isn’t happening to us.

YouTube is full of fight videos that concentrate only on knock outs and bloody scenes, you can also find tons of accident and crash videos that show only the nasty bits.

Do we simply need some blood and nasty stuff from time to time? By watching terrible stuff happen to other does that help us to enjoy our less painful life?

Currently China has about 2100 million Websurfers - and the number is climbing fast. Soon they will have overtaken the US as the #1 of Websurfers.

But too most of us Chinese Internet Users are almost invisible - and not just because of the language barrier (the same applies to many other nations that stay within their language bubble - like Japan or Arabic countries).

China’s Internet is heavily policed and censored - thanks to companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco and Google content is filtered, websites blocked (most famously Wikipedia) and users are hunted down if they dare to protest too much.

The old High-Tech-Hippie argument that the Internet can’t be tamed or regulated has been proven wrong - and not only by the Chinese Government. Places like Cuba or Iran are also black holes in the net infrastructure.

Information wants to be free - people too …

More? The Economist “Alternative Reality”

Homemade video, talking … or rather singing to youself and the world. Perfect! Geo’s song "The Assumption" from the album Interrobang.

Thanks Edosan.

Shitsenders does exactly what the name says. They collect some nice poo, package it and send it to a friend of yours. You can choose between a variety of dung (cow, elephant or gorilla) - depending on your level of friendship and depth of message you want to send.

The price? About 20 to 30 US Dollars. The effect on the receiving end? Priceless …

*I will not mention your name - but thanks for sending in that shit*

A Day In The Life of Miss McDonald - just brilliant surreal consumerism combined with a dadaist performance!

Do you suck at organizing yourself and completing tasks? Here is a very simple tool to give you some easy to use goal tracking: Joe’s Goals. You can even share specific goals with friends or family - so you loved ones know how much you suck or succeeded in getting rid of some of your bad habits.

I have been a long time fan of Bloglines.com, but in recent weeks it had it’s fair share of problems and bugs. I am usually very tolerant with such hiccups, but I hate it when companies don’t react to problems.

Bloglines was pretty ignorant, lazy or simply stupid not to respond to many postings and requests in the forum. Since many people like me rely on their RSS Feed Reader to manage the daily information overkill for work - this was no longer tolerable.

I am not a big fan of using Google for everything - and the Google Reader is pretty ugly compared to Bloglines. But Google simply ‘works’ - although I can assure you that Google is also a company that hardly responds to User requests. It’s forums are also filled with screaming users - often begging for attention or help when their GMail accounts have problems or data is lost with some other Google application.

Overall I am less and less a fan of web based solutions. When Google Reader or GMail load in my Firefox they use more memory than my good old Outlook. Web applications often load slower than their desktop counterparts as well. And making backup is often impossible.

Scott Johnson has created this great series of the 56 Geek types. it’s just brilliant and such a homage on modern day geeky lifestyle.

So here are all 56 geeks - check out which subculture you belong too - I have listed mine above (as much as I can find myself in there).

What is seriously missing is: porn geek, websurf geek, google geek, notebook geek, blog geek, art geek, green geek, nature geek and office geek.

As an European I am used to being ignored by American media companies. Most of them block foreign access to their web video players. The BBC has done the same with the spanking new iPlayer as well.

I find it very annoying that in the age of international media consumption markets are still protected so fiercely. On one side media companies like to have a global hype to sell their wares (in that case DVDs and TV rights around the globe), but they don’t want an international audience to join the fun at the same time. They are only allowed to join the ‘local’ party - organized - or better say licensed - by some national broadcaster / company.

This is boring. For example ‘Heroes’ arrived two years after the hype started in the US. People read about that a long time ago, but had already forgotten about that ‘cool new thing’ once it arrived 24 months later. Not so cool anymore.

Many movies are released on the same day worldwide. Movie companies now understand what it means to have a global audience. TV broadcasters are still on that national mindset - that seems to directly program their firewalls to keep people like me out.

It is amazing how much Kitsch animations like that are on the web. I can understand when a little girl likes such crap, but when so called grown up woman indulges in such little dream worlds it becomes a case for a therapist.

Still waiting for your knight in shining armor too?

With the Web and eMail revolution our life’s got suddenly flooded with bizarre, cute or funny pictures. Then we added broadband DSL a few years later and we got even more picture and additionally videos.

Weird and bizarre stuff was before that time pushed into the funny section of your newspaper or made it sometimes on the TV news when nothing else was important.

Today we seem flooded and addicted to the bizarre and weird moments on this planet. The more bizarre the better. YouTube and many image galleries are monuments to the stupidity and addiction of humanity to weird stuff.

I think we like to watch extreme stuff other do (to themselves) to reassure ourselves what is normal and that we ourselves are normal. Each bizarre image or video is a marker on the scale of human madness - and we constantly check where we stand on that range of weirdness.

So it all basically boils down to checking your own social conformity and some amusement. Would you do that? Did you laugh about that? No? Yes? Check your own weirdo factor …

Forget about buying stupid plastic robots to make your kids happy. All you need is this website, some paper and a printer. Paper Robots has a great selection of robots and plans to make them yourself.

I think this qualifies for a nerdy: Awesome!

Google founder Larry Page married last weekend. All the best to him and his lovely wife.

The company itself made a big PR coup by joining to War on Climate Change by developing alternative energy sources, especially for it’s global power hungry server farms.

Good thing that the wedding was total eco disaster: flying in all the guests with private jets to a small island, using huge amounts of electricity to keep the party and the drinks cooled.

Nice work Mister and Misses Google. I guess working on climate change and changing your lifestyle applies only to the little people?

So much about the famous company motto "Do no evil"?! It just proves that most rich people preach modesty to the rest of us, while they indulge the glorious wasteful lifestyle in privacy.

Instead of blogging something - I finally made the update to WordPress 2.3.1 - which included the usual screaming and shouting when something doesn’t work out of the box. It’s certainly not WP’s fault - it’s just the complexity and fuckups created by plugins and custom made code … after several hours of tweaking and bitching (I hope) everything is working again.

New Tags

Every postings gets now tagged with keywords. I try to keep my usage of keywords consistent. But I haven’t finished crawling through 800+ postings and tagging each one of them. The categories for Classic & Asian Art are done - and I think it’s worth the extra effort, because it allows my readers to browse the blog in new ways.

Under each posting (on the single pages) you find a list of all tags related to that entry. You can click these tags and find related posts.

New Related Posts

In addition to the tags you find also related posts under each entry (on their individual pages). I already implemented that function some time ago - but it didn’t work without proper tagging - but we are slowly getting there …

New Tag Cloud

On the right sidebar you find a nice & trendy tag cloud, which shows you the most used tags. If a keyword is used a lot the tag appears bigger.

My Questions to you

I am just wondering if anyone is missing a search function to dig up certain topics, keywords or entries? I removed it a long time ago - but I am happy to implement it again - IF anyone is using it. So please leave a comment if you want it …

Any other functions you are missing? I always happy to improve my blog! Thanks for your input.

PS: If you like or dislike an entry please do me the honors and rate it by clicking the little star under each postings. I am a slut for feedback!

Update: Found an even better tag cloud plugin with more control. Did some more tagging - which is very time consuming.

Thanks for your patience - all seems to be working. At least on this blog … some other stuff is f******** …

Since the server this blog is living on has some serious problems my ISP is moving my account to a better machine. This will happen tonight (so they say). I just want to wait and see if all will work normally again after the move - so keep your fingers crossed.

So new postings on Saturday - or I have to rebuild the broken blog.

Let’s hope the digital Gods are in a good mood!

Here Americans can leave an apology for the rest of the world. Some of these statements may break your heart or boil your blood with anger. Most of the time I want to give these people a hug and tell them it’s all just a bad dream - but it isn’t.

I only hope that this mousetivism will result in some political action as well?

More? www.sorryaboutourpresident.com