Occasional Observations

They're known locally as "Erlkönig" cars - after the Goethe poem Der Erlkönig - "Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?" (Who rides so late through night and wind?): pre-production prototype models that the auto makers use to test everything from handling through to fuel consumption. And here in Munich, home to BMW, advance first sighting of new models is pretty commonplace - in the past year I've spotted the new 1 Series cabrio, the X6, and now, the new 7-Series.

We spied the new 7er yesterday near Miesbach - without any disguise, but with the badges taped-over. The new design is less chunky than the controversial current model - and it's goodbye to the much-debated "Bangle Butt" that is featured on both the 6-Series and 7-Series right now.

"It's a Mitsubishi!" proclaimed Andrea. "Oh not it's not," said the boys. "OK, it could be a Mercedes," she countered. "Oh no it couldn't," we responded - "the exhaust pipes would be oval.". And so the discussion continued...

At least we agreed on one thing. The car was black.

Labels: petrolhead

I think Skype's blown it with the new version, 4.0, which is currently in beta. I managed about a week with the beta version 4 before heading back to skype.com to download the old, familiar version, which is currently 3.8.

As I did so, up pops a questionnaire window asking why I was downgrading ... listing pretty much all my reasons ... which suggests that I'm not the only one who has been perplexed and irritated by the all-new "shiny" interface.

First of all, I have never wanted a full-screen Skype application. I use it more than anything else for IM - which doesn't need all my monitor's real estate. Even Skype isn't ready for full-screen: user images are tiny and pixelated. And moving between contacts in 4.0 was not intuitive.

Back to the drawing board, folks. The Skype Garage page for 4.0 says "it?s easier to start conversations and keep track of them" - which I dispute. And by the looks of it, 4.0 is not ready for prime time yet.

Labels: skype, tech, VoIP

One of my favorite business networking sites is LinkedIn, which has grown from a contacts database with bells on into a valuable resource that I'm consulting to find out background information on potential clients.

Building contacts is one thing that all diligent networkers are focused on - as is evident from the daily network updates I get via RSS about who's added whom as a connection on LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn's homepage I also get shown names of people I might know and therefore wish to add as connections - this leads to a quick quiz asking for some salient details of where/when you have come across the contact in question.

One of the radio buttons is labeled: "I don't know this person" which I've always found amusing, but never clicked - until now. I couldn't resist.

The next step was the equivalent of a Jack-in-the-box exploding out of my laptop screen ... the whole browser window (Firefox 3, naturally) went grey and I got a severe telling off, as shown in this screenshot. "Your invitation was not sent. Invitations should only be sent to people you know personally."

Sorry LinkedIn. I won't do that again. Promise.

Labels: social networking

Major upheaval at home as work starts on our conservatory / sunroom / wintergarten (what you call it depends on where you come from). This will add an extra room to the house - and add more light. We're also looking forward to the solar gains in the spring and fall.

The diggers arrived yesterday to start excavating the foundations. This has of course ruined the lawn, but we've got plenty of spare topsoil to fill in the ruts once the heavy machinery work is finished.

Labels: wintergarten

A picture would say 1000 words here but since I've got one of the only mobile phones on the market that doesn't have a camera, read on and picture the scene: The window of a downtown Munich department store - showing a pretty model dressed up to the nines ready for a ball. The caption: "You look like a million." That was it - no qualifier.

A million what? A million others? I know what they were trying to say - You look like a million dollars ... (at today's exchange rates, around EUR 135.60) but missing out the dollars takes away the sense.

Labels: Gerlish

What's really in my mailbox, and who's sending it? How many mails do I get per day and how good am I at managing email? Since I have had the feeling for a year or more that email has taken over my life, I downloaded Xobni, a nifty plug-in for Outlook, to find out more.

It's now more than a month since I installed Xobni, which offers "email organization, search and navigation", and that's been long enough for the Xobni Analytics to produce some interesting statistics.

To share some of the more interesting ones:

• I'm getting more than 120 mails a day, weekdays
• Overnight I've usually received 40 to 60 mails
• From 9am through to around 10pm I get a steady flow of between 8-10 mails an hour
• The peak day for receiving mails is Wednesday
• I'm most likely to respond fastest to an email received between midday and 1pm
• Send me a mail at 4am and it could take me up to five days to respond
• I'm sending about a third the number of mails I receive
  

You might ask: How has Xobni helped manage email so far? In short, it is starting to help: I've identified the people who email me the most (you know who you are!) and although this might sound like stating the bleeding obvious, this is a useful first step. One person in my top 10 has already taken action - he took a week off work, and of course his position in the table has dropped.

Although the analytics are useful to a point, they're far from perfect - Xobni doesn't seem to index mails that I delete immediately after receiving. I'd like to see greater accuracy in the analytics, but for now, for a free tool that's still Beta, it's a good start.

Labels: search, tech

It's a typical scene for a day working at home - my desk contains a laptop, mobile phone, paper notebook, empty coffee cup, and a flyswatter.

On this warm late spring day, the flies are out in their thousands, which I suppose is one of the disadvantages of living on the edge of a farming village.

A few years back, the crop of the pesky little blighters proved even to be too rich for our Venus flytrap, or Dionaea muscipula, which withered and died.

It could be worse: compared to a city, the air is pollution-free, and I can hear the birds singing. It's a peaceful backdrop and I've shifted loads of work, in anticipation of a quick swim later in what we call "the lake", which is five minutes away. And people ask why I live in Germany ...

Labels: domestic

To Twitter, or not to Twitter: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by Twittering end them?

With apologies to Francis Bacon.

Labels: social networking

Spring has truly sprung in sub-Alpine Bavaria - and everything's already covered in a layer of yellow film - hay fever season, here we come!

Here's a picture I took earlier - showing the green, green grass of home!

Labels: spring

Another weekend of trying to install Linux, this time Ubuntu, and I've finally given up on trying to set up and maintain a dual-boot system. It just ain't happening.

Something random going on with Ubuntu version 8.04, which is only recently released. I even bought a self-help book to make sure I wasn't missing something in the set up, or the partitioning. Swop file set? Check. Format spare partition on primary SCSI hard drive with EXT3 fs? Check.

I took the easy route - booted the Ubuntu live CD and ran the install from there - and I took the harder route and installed from the CD. Why did I do it twice? In fact I did it four times. Each time, after the system was up around three to five minutes, the screen would blank and the system would freeze me out. Not a CTRL-ALT-DEL freeze-out but what the techies in the late 80s used to call a problem that needed the BRS solution - toggling the the Big Red Switch on the front of IBM PS2s to get them out of a lock-up type of freeze-out.

Much as I hate cycling the power on a running system, I did it - and eventually after the fourth try, I gave up and installed VMware on Vista. The VM version of Ubuntu works perfectly - and I really have not got the time, inclination or deep technical skills to try and work out what went wrong.

So, I'm stuck with using Windows as the underlying OS. At least everything works, including my webcam (a few years old, and flaky with Linux) and the toaster - the Netgear SG101 NAS device - where I actually made a bit of progress. Yep, discovered that it is possible to run my Linux VMs from the NAS drive, even though the disks are rather slow and offer a maximum R/W speed of around 5MB per second. This discovery helped sweeten the bitter pill and widens my choice of Linux flavors. The rather excellent ThoughtPolice website even provided me with super-fast downloads (via BitTorrent, faster than HTTP) for some ready-baked VMware images such as Fedora.

Labels: Linux, Ubuntu, virtualization, Vista