Jan´s Blog Spot

When Microsoft announced the launch of their new search decision engine Bing! a bit over a week ago my first reaction was something like “right - here goes one more failed attempt of someone trying to catch up with Google…”.

Still it was of course mandatory to try the new site, for curiosity on the one hand, all the buzz on the other hand and last but not least because an old friend of mine recently switched his propeller hat for something else and is now working at and for “project bing!”.

So I have been playing around with it for some time now and must say that there are a few things I did not expect. First up the design, is it just me or is this actually the first time MS launched a website does not try to mimic Windows or any other Microsoft product, as e.g. Bing’s predecessor, the less fortunate Live Search did? To me it simply looks like a neatly designed web2.0 site and if it wasn’t for the copyright notice at the bottom I would not have expected Microsoft to be the owner of the site. In my opinion a very welcome change in politics.
The second and far more important thing is that - again other than Live - the service works surprisingly well and they even implemented a few new features that are unavailable elsewhere, which also is a very welcome change to having “yet another google rip-off”.

For all I can tell so far MS has done its homework well this time and once again gotten it right (or at least working decently) in version three as Bing seems to actually live up to the promise of being a viable alternative in search (yes, search, I still prefer to make my own decisions). If MS continues the good work Bing has the potential to become a major inconvenience for Google and since (according to StatCounter) Bing had already leapfrogged Yahoo!’s search for one day it could also become an actual problem for Yahoo!. It’ll be interesting to see how the market shares develop.

With Bing being launched and Windows7 due to go gold in October, 2009 may become the year where Microsoft found some answers to some products of two of their more serious competitors (the second one being Apple and Mac OS X) and should be able to strengthen their position in the computer universe again. The rebellion on the other hand doesn’t sleep either, and rumor has it that the misfits have prepared a new iPhone for tonight…

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Upfront: just a short post that is above all for all Germans who might read this, but what probably is behind all this is simply the fact that there are a lot of elections coming up in Germany this year. As everybody knows this is the time where politicians try to get as much media coverage as possible and do not always do things that are in the best interest of anyone but themselves.

That is annoying but something we have (sadly) gotten used to. Still there lately was one thing I found to be particularly disturbing, which is why I’d like to draw your attention to it.

Our dear minister of family affairs has gotten a lot of press coverage by announcing to get tough on child abuse, above all explicit material found on the internet. A very noble cause that I fully support. The big problem I have is that the one means she/the ministry is trying to install is not only utterly useless to the cause but also against the German “Grundgesetz” (constitution), as it means simple censorship. If you read German and want to know more, I recommend you have a look at this article.

Abusing a noble cause for campaigning and weakening democracy

One small thing that everybody can do is sign this online petition against the current version of the law, in the hope that it will not pass and there will be measures taken that actually help. If you’re German, please have a look at the petition and consider signing it - it won’t take more than three minutes of your time.

If you’re interested in even more information, there are two more articles (again in German) I found interesting one interview on the issue and an article about how parts of our government do their PR.

And finally, more there also is more satirical imagery available.

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Living abroad usually comes with quite a few new experiences and if you’re lucky the locals will let you in on, well, local stuff if you’ve been around for a while. One thing that normally makes up for a good start for an intercultural discussion are prejudices - er sorry - the image that people from one country have about the others.

When you ask me what the cliché of a French person for Germans looks like I’d say that the drawing on the cover of a short language guide that teaches you how to swear in French is pretty accurate:

But the good old rule that a picture speaks a thousand words also works the other way round - in this particular case it ts thanks to an ad campaign of the SNCF (French railways). They are advertising their fast train connections to Germany which gives a bit of insight on how the French see their neighbors.

The posters put a smile on my face, so here you go:

Germany, as seen from a distance

and one more:

In case you were wondering, the ad text translates to: Germany from EUR29. Now is the time to go and see what's behind the platitudes.

And on a loosely related note, the connections really are pretty fast, Paris to Frankfurt or Stuttgart in 3h49 and 3h39 rsp.

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Well, I hate to say it but the fail of the month for April would be an “update FAIL” that goes to yourstruly, for not having updated my blog, i.e. it has been once again way too long since I wrote anything new.

That being said, I also have a candidate for May’s FAIL of the month (technically it’s two, but they’re kinda the same). I’d call them anti-theft FAIL:

This is why you always want to chain your scooter's/bike's *frame* to some fixed object

This also brought back a few memories of about two years ago when some bastards stole my motorbike and all I found back then was half of a link of the chain I had used. In the end I’m not even sure if the owners of the chains on the pictures above are better or worse off than I was…

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Things go wrong, a lot of them and each day - the short hand internet way of expressing this is by simple qualifying something as “FAIL”. As far as I know this has mainly been coined by this blog which has an impressive collection of examples of “fail” and is a good means of wasting a lot of time.

My personal fail of the week tipped up when I was trying to get a Canon printer to work over the network and got the following error message (also made me wonder again why network printing always has to be such a drama, but that’s a different story):

W [03/Mar/2009:18:20:24 +0100] [Job 100] recoverable: Error Number : 311
Printer is in use or an error has occurred. If an error has occurred,
eliminate the cause of the error.

Remarkably useless, really (and no, the printer wasn’t in use…).

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The days that I actively played are long gone, but I still like Baseball as a sport, which is why I’ll post a little advertisement here. In case you’re in Germany and also like baseball, you might already know this but if not, there’ll be a small-scale baseball world cup in Regensburg later this summer, from the 9th to the 13th of September.

The four nations that are planning on each sending a team are the USA, China, Venezuela and Germany, so in case you share my passion for this sport, this probably is your best chance to go and see a couple of decent to great games live. Details and tickets can be had from the official site:

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For those who have read and liked the post I did last year discussing brand names and the perils of internationalization, there’s an update on my favo(u)rite for frozen diet food (in case you don’t speak any German: the other post also explains why I think this is funny). Things seem to be working well for them, as I recently discovered they opened their own stores:

Probably on of Paris' finest frozen food stores: KOT

This is a picture taken in St. Germain (here), and apparently they do also have a second store in Paris called the “KOT Lounge”.

It looks like they keep expanding as they already made it to e.g. Belgium and the French speaking part of Switzerland. I’m kind of curious if they’ll do their homework properly before expanding further east, i.e. to Germany or the German speaking parts of Switzerland… :).

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Nothing big, but as it is pretty rare that I take a flight to Munich during day time I was quite amazed by the view I had flying in two days ago. Even though pictures of things like sundowns or views like this usually are a lot less spectacular than the real thing (and I still think the iPhone’s camera’s “below average”) I kinda liked this one, and so I thought I’d share it here:

The Alps from above 20000 feet

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No, this is not about the crisis in the .com world, but a site that is actually called www.despair.com - they do posters and loads of other things you can print on.

The theme is their very own (and slightly sarcastic) take at motivational posters as you can see by clicking the above link. I love them and in case your sense of humor is anything like mine, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy those. For those who are fans the TV show “How I Met Your Mother“: this is where Barney got his office decoration from. Thanks to René for pointing me to that site.

And then the internet wouldn’t be the internet if you couldn’t take parody one level further. There is absolutely no arguing with this:

Couldn’t agree more.

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In case you are impressed with your iPhone’s user interface and/or liked the movie Minority Report and the way Tom Cruise’s alter ego John Anderton interacted with his computer system by simply gesturing in the air you might also be interested in watching this video that I stumbled upon today - it’s about the work of Jeff Han and his company PerceptivePixel :

The interesting thing is that this was recorded February 2006, i.e. ready almost one year before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone’s “new & revolutionary” interface. I’m really interested to see what will become of all this.

And while we’re that the subject of Ted Talks: there is one related video about images and new ways of handling them, IMHO also well worth watching.

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