Joy and Sorrow
These days are emotional indeed.
First we spent wonderful days at the Therme Vals , one of the most beautiful spas in the world, built and run by Annalisa and Peter Zumthor. For the first time Rachel and I managed to get one of the beautiful "temporary" rooms. We were lucky to attend two concerts of modern music, Steve Reich's "Violin Phase" played in the spa was wonderful. Finally some time being offline, me and my girl, water and music, snow and mountains and books ("Internet Art", "Philosophien der neuen Technologie") and a great cuisine(
).
Relaxing in luxury.
Then we went to see my family in Basel, my mother got a really fine little camera (she loves it already), my parents gave us "Cremaster 3", "The Right Way" and Das Bild der Menschenrechte". In a word: Abundance. Cornucopia.
But then: The Tsunami. No words for this.
Muriel is in the region, in Sri Lanka where there more than more than 10,000 people killed. More than 10,000 people killed.
If she followed the christmas plans laid out in her weblog, she was somewhere between Colombo (on the probably safer west coast of Sri Lanka) and the Kandy / Walapane area, which should be safe, far enough from the sea, I guess and hope.
But she hasn't replied via SMS for the last 17 21 hours, so I'm more than a little worried. I almost started praying.
This is horrible.
Relocating again
We'll be moving again next week, it will be a smaller but better flat just around the corner.
Our first flat with A DISHWASHER! Luxury, you name it.
It's only little more than 40m2, but as both of us will spend some month of 2005 abroad this shouldn't matter. The new address:
Sulgenbachstr. 20, 3007 Bern.
The amazing photorealistic rendering above was done by the current tenant, Manuel from
Pixelschmiede.
Raffael implements del.icio.us support
Raffael from Kaywa has implemented del.icio.us support into my blog, you see my latest links below on the right hand side. If I got them right, Kaywa will integrate this into their admin interface and soon offer this nice little feature for their other customers, too.
It's not an incredible innovation (has been there in other blogging systems for quite some time, and it's barely a dozen lines in BXB), but this has been the first visible change to the Kaywa platform for a pretty long time, so it is a good thing to see in any case. New features are always a good thing. ;-)
So thanks a lot and congratulations to Wanni! Just not sure whether I should perceive this as unpaid beta-testing or generous sponsoring :-)
L. Liang: Guide to Open Content Licenses
Tomorrow: BXE 1.0 final
Today on IRC:
<chregu> morgen kommt BXE 1.0.0 ;)
Haven't heard anything about a party, although it would well be worth
one. Congratulations, Chregu!
Currently reading:
* We don't have a
del.icio.us plugin here, so I have to
link to my links.
* We don't have a "currently reading"/Amazon plugin here either, like many other blogs have. So I have to write down manually the list of books lying besides our bed, halfway read:
Lovink, Geert: Uncanny Networks
Finally reading one his books after having heard him talk at VIPER.
Fröhlich-Bleuler, Gianni: Softwareverträge: System-, Software-Lizenz- und Software-Pflegevertrag
I finally should be able to feel more sure in those legal matters. Now Rachel bought this book, which seems to be pretty good.
Thommen, Jean-Paul: Managementorientierte Betriebswirtschaftslehre
Currently I'm reading about org-chart (will have to write a software for generating such in PHP) and about knowledge management (got another little consulting mandate in that area). Not my book, either. :)
Schneier, Bruce: Applied Cryptography
Finally something technical again.. I guess I'd better be ready to eventually apply those techniques when starting with my semantic-web-trust work.
Comments on these books might follow when they're read.
If you have comments or want to suggest related reading or good alternatives: please post a little comment!
Games for Hackers and Non-Hackers
Si Yuill's presentation at VIPER imho was one of the very highlights of the VIPER conference, the slides of his talk "
Games for Hackers and Non-Hackers" are online now. He did not only talk about his project
spring_alpha, but also a lot about its context and the intellectual framework dealing with social reality and norms, the role of software and, I quote, game development as critical enquiry. He was referring to "Computer Science and Law" by Bryan Niblett, I'll have to go fetch that one at the Basel library later this week.
