Viewing posts from 2007
One of the following statements is a blatant lie, which one is it?
As a frequent traveler to the US, employee of an American corporation and by being active in the furry fandom I think I understand at least a small bit about the US culture, who things work over there and why things are the way they are. I'm also increasingly annoyed by popular opinion about the US of A here in Germany, which is quite often based on incomplete coverage by German media. The media, especially Der Spiegel, usually fails to do what is part of responsible journalism: put things into perspective by providing all necessary information. For example: The President refused to sign legislation that would, in a nutshell, finance health care for poor children with federal money. How heartless, isn't it? From a German point of view and without further information, it looks like that George W. Bush is refusing to give poor children important protection. However, the actual point of the debate is: who is supposed to finance health care for poor people? The states themselves or the federal government? Currently, state or local programs at least partially cover the costs. Not signing the law doesn't change the status quo. It is a very complicated topic, as the Wikipedia article shows. But reducing the current debate to "Bush refuses health care to poor children" isn't right.
Ich war heute nach längerer Zeit mal wieder bei meinem House-Arzt. Man merkt ihm an, dass er sich die zynischen Sprüche nur sehr mühsam verkneift... Naja, ich war ja auch nur zu einem allgemeinen Check und für Impfungen da.
So most Linux distributions are moving to texlive for their LaTeX package. Unfortunately, some widely used styles aren't included anymore and replaced by others. For example, the fancyheadings style was replaced by fancyhdr. To whoever is responsible for that:ARE YOU COMPLETELY OUT OF YOUR MIND?! I have to adjust some hundred documents now, the new style gives different results and has a non-intuitive, hackish abbreviated name. Worse, nobody will be able to translate old LaTeX sources shortly without a huge amount of work if the macro packages keep on changing. The whole point of TeX and LaTeX was stability, now its going down the drain like all other text formatting, type setting or office document formats. Thank you morons for your continuous work on destroying the literary heritage of the last 50 years.
I had ordered a Nokia N73 along with a renewal of my mobile phone contract. Unfortunately, what the online shop didn't say was that the phone is locked to my provider's SIM cards. It does say now, but I could swear that it wasn't mentioned when I ordered. Anyway, I'll send it back tomorrow. It is useless for me. Apparently, I need a quad band cell phone in Southern Utah / Northern Arizona and the N73 is suitable for that, but roaming doesn't work properly with my provider in that region. Thus, I need a quad band phone which works with a US SIM card. Which obviously isn't the case with a network-locked phone. Luckily, I can cancel almost any online order in Germany within 14 days after delivery.
It occurs to me that I never took the Which House M.D. Character Are You? meme before.
After several months I saw the Funday Pawpet Show again. Folks, you really are the masters of pawpet improv!
As skunki's friends list and mine are slightly disjunctive and to spread the word, here it is again: the link to the article at sueddeutsche.de about 2 the Ranting Gryphon (German language.) Sueddeutsche.de is the online edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany's most renowned daily newspapers.The author praises 2's style to be comparable with Woody Allen's and David Byrne's. The live recording was filmed at Eurofurence 12, by the way.