Now that just about every serious blogger has speculated about Google's initial public offering (and others already being fed up with), I'm finally joining the crowd with the final number:
They filed a $2.7 billion IPO today. CNN has some pretty nice charts and even IPO Quiz :)
Their article ends as follows:

Google could have a market worth of about $24 billion.

Edit: $2.7 billion? Mais non, $2,718,281,828. :)

There's a couple of E-Education conferences taking place in Switzerland this year.

• ICNEE
  International Conference on New Educational Environments,
  September 27-30, Neuchâtel.
  
• 
  
• ED-MEDIA
  World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Teleommunications,
  June 21-26, Lugano
  With several papers about blogging.
  
• 
  
• e-education 2004
• Communication, Collaboration, Knowledge Transfer, Education and Training,
  October 27-29, Basel (together with Worlddidac )
  

I'm submitting a paper for ICNEE (on our work for medienkunstgeschichte.ch), so there's a slight chance of seeing me there. If you also plan to attend, please drop me a line.

And there's a whole lot more conferences and events.

Today was the first day of my holidays.
Today was the last day of my holidays.

While I had spent the rest of this week of easter holidays doing all kinds of (work- or study-related) stuff, I took today off.
My vacation in sunny Basel started yesterday evening when I went to [plug.in] to watch a selection of video art projects from Transmediale.04.
The plug.in is a nice place indeed, it's wonderful to have such an open and well-equiped media art institute, at a location that couldn't be better in any way: right beside the Museum of Contemporary Art on the bank of the Rhine river.
I'm not actually used to reading contemporary video art, so this was kind of difficult and exhausting, but still pretty interesting.

Most of today I spent in some of the cafés, reading 'Spinning the Semantic Web' and my most recent acquisition, Natural History, the catalogue for the exhibition "Herzog & de Meuron: Archeology of the Mind", which will be shown at the Schaulager Basel from May 8 to September 12.

What they call a catalogue is much more than cheap brochure. It's a true marvel of a book. If you follow the above link, you'll see its cover, which already is a magnificent work: Colour, texture and the 3d imprints make it clear that not only architecture, but also bookbinding closely related with arts. And then the pages: solid, heavy paper, the quality of the 800 pictures and illustrations.
As far as the actual content is concerned, I can't tell you much yet, I'm still digesting the foreword. But the table of content with names like that of Boris Groys is more than promising indeed.

If you supply me with a good book, a latte macchiato freddo and Bachmann's Schoggiweggli, I do not ask for anything more. La dolce vita :)

But, alas, I'm back home, online again and Monday is coming soon. I'm still enjoying that book all the same :)

F/OSS does apparently follow some religious patterns: there's the Church of Emacs (vs. vi), there's Gnome vs. KDE and, I guess, the idea as a whole.
And of course theology has quite a bit in common with the open source movement: Its business is all about discourse and services around open texts which both seek to propagate and develop further. But I'm digressing..
I simply wanted to tell you about opensourcetheology.net, a new online community trying to bring the openness of OSS to theological discourse and to "collaboratively develop an applied theology".
In times of oversimplifying religious explanations being trendy, open (and international) discussion seems both promising and necessary.
It fits well that they're using (open source) drupal for their website.
To conclude: No, I'm not a believer.
Not even in Emacs. ;)

A9 seems to be pretty cool, amazingly enough the results seem to be at least as useful as Google's.
Therefore I quickly hacked together a search engine plugin for Mozilla Firefox.
If you use this browser, you can CLICK HERE TO INSTALL IT.

It's a 2-minute hack -even the icon is crap- but it works for the moment. :)

[via nicolas]

A9 is here. Several interesting features. Quite interesting, but let's just wait and see how this develops. Nice to see this news item spreading through blogs before the big news sites have it, though.

I finally joined ACM these days. This does not only allow me to access their huge archive, it also makes me a proud member of a community of professionals with a strong code of ethics and conduct, adhering to noble principles:

All ACM Members must subscribe to the Purposes of ACM. ACM is dedicated to:

• Advancing the art, science, engineering, and application of information technology;
• Fostering the open interchange of information to serve both professionals and the public; and
• Promoting the highest professional and ethical standards.

Sounds impressive, doesn't it. Like some noble knightly order or secret society… but very likeable indeed.

Right, one of my favourite toys tools is my Treo.
It's my mailclient, my calendar, my mp3 player and my cellphone. I take those silly pictures with it (they call it moblogging ;)).
It crashes sometimes, but it works. It's a smart phone that does most of its jobs pretty well, but as a phone, it's… suboptimal.
The Treo works fine with my earphones, but the built-in mic is quite noisy.
Soo… here's what I'll have to get:

Shure QuietSpot™ = a fine E2 earphone + a probably great noise-cancelling microphone. Made by a manufacturer of professional audio equipment, not a cellphone maker. It scores 9/10 at Designtechnica, and it ain't that expensive at all. And it looks awesome, really sexy, doesn't it?

Only problem: Who's selling it in Europe?

I was just browsing WayBackMachine, trying to the trace my own my way. I remember that day when me and dad went to buy a horribly expensive US Robotics modem, both without a clue how to handle that highly exciting pandora's box.
That must have been 1994 or '95, I was about 14. I had no idea of computers or electronics, I was more into books those days, I wasn't even involved in computer games. Spent some days with classic "Civilization", but it was far from getting obsessive, comparatively.
Programming? Not until I was about 18 and had my own tiny flat. :)
The background of my early days in the WWW was arts, not technology. Indeed I did spend my first time online at nEthos, which was
known as The Thing GmbH/THE swiss THING before.
Those early companies are all gone now, but, interesting enough, they seemed to be both cultural platform and commercial venture.
I remember the Web of those days as consisting of what could be reached from Yahoo plus a bunch of strange corners. There be artists…
Well, as far as I understand, those early ventures that brought young Hannes online were mainly run by (organiser/artist/networker/writer/…) Barbara Strebel. I don't know her. But thank you, Barbara.
(pathetic rest of text deleted.)

If there's a right date to go see POTC, it was yesterday. So I went.
It was even worse than I had expected.

I had expected to see a historizing movie very close to the sources, reading The Book as a historic report, and not a theological text, a sermon. I couldn't help laughing when the Miss Satan appeared in Gethsemane :)
And of course I shouldn't have been expecting a less shallow interpretation of Judas Iscariot's character. His name is traditionally used as a synonym for betrayer, but there are interpretations that see in him a great martyr, the one that made all the passion and gospel possible at all. He gave his life for his master's glory, taking upon him eternal shame. But those interpretations seem to be much to modern for medieval Mel.
Well shure, I couldn't seriously expect such kind of arguments.
So the mean (and plainly ridiculous) jews make the romans (who speak a very understandable latin!) give Him a hell of a beating with all sorts of funny instruments. Quite a bloodbath, but His tight waistcloth remains perfectly in place during the entire martyrdom. How american.

All in all, the movie was simply boring. It'a neither interesting as a rendition of history, nor as document of today's christianity in the US of A, not even as gore flick.

Yesterday's winner in the category "medieval cinema" was another epic strip: Sigenot, anno 1470.



PS: I won't even mention anti-Semitism… that story you can read at jewishjournal.com.