Always forgot to tell you guys: I flew to good old Bern last week, speaking at LOTS, an Open Source conference / trade show. The second time is always hard for such an event, no doubt, but the organizer did a pretty good job again. I summarized my impressions (in german) on the LOTS open blog, my Moodle presentation is online, too.
There were considerably less participants this time, but I guess their overall "quality" improved. Chatting with folks like Stefano, David and Michi makes such events truely worthwhile indeed.

Berner Zeitung journalist Matthias 'This' Born is blogging, crossposting both into the offline newspaper and into his semi-private weblog.
He's so far primarily transporting stories from techie fringe groups (podcasters, wikinerds, lugs, ..) to the general audience. Surprisingly, he does this for a part of the newspaper titled "Showtime" - boring nerds in the limelight. Good luck!

Screenshot is showing Shredder on Wine (20041201). Great software, both
of them. I do like Shredder's analysis mode a lot, it discovers a great
many surprising variants (surprising and spectacular at least to me), a
lot to learn indeed.

In case you wonder: I started playing chess again some weeks ago, after
more than 5 years of complete abstinence. I'm quite a patzer, far from playing
competitively, but so far I can at least more or less cope with my
opponents on goldtoken.com and IJT.


This is probably absolutely irrelevant to most (if not all) of my
readers. How nice I don't have to care at all, hihi :)

I'm in Milton Keynes for workshop at KMI these days. When John an me arrived, we naively took a bus to the city centre. We drove and drove, it all looked like endless suburbs: an indoor skiing facility (see picture), garden center, huge shopping centers, etc.
Finally the bus arrived at some ugly, lonesome park-and-ride place, final station: We had been driving all through the inner city - which is nothing but a stand-alone suburb.
You see, it's one of those experimental "new towns", a sixties' utopian artificial city.
In fact it feels rather dead indeed. Where's the townsfolk?

[via Jeen Broekstra]

« In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline.
The "Fourth Estate's" fortunes have waned.
What happened to the news?
And what is EPIC? »

If you haven't seen it yet, do take the 8 minutes to watch the video.
Short, arguable, pretty.