Occasional Observations

This is the Tegernseer Hütte (German site), nestling in the Bavarian Alps some 1650 meters above sea level - but don't let that get in the way of you getting a cold beer.

Our "nice walk in the mountains" turned into a 20km, eight hour marathon - we went up the steep side of the 1697-meter Roßstein (this picture is taken from the summit) ... and towards the top, like a mirage, we got our first glimpse of this wonderful mountain "hut".

We saw the World Cup documentary Deutschland: Ein Sommermärchen on Sunday - it's a pretty intimate insight into the hopes and dreams of a bunch of professional footballers: they're much more "normal" than I thought.

The biggest "WTF???" moment in the movie is when Miroslav Klose is having his hair cut by a Scottish hairdresser in his hotel room bathroom in Munich - she's giving him the usual hairdresser-chat, in English, despite poor old Miro saying "I don't speak English" and squirming in his seat, seemingly concerned about the way the haircut might turn out. She's got her own salon in Munich, so next time I need a ?56 haircut, I'll be there.

Douglas Coupland is right - I really did find my phone number in the first million digits of Pi. And my old one, and my parents' and my mobile number and my date of birth. Give it a try on this super-wacky website URL - search your phone number without the area code, just the six or seven digit number.

According to Douglas' novel JPod (top website, too) you have more chance of winning the lottery than finding your phone number complete with area code in the first 100k digits of Pi.

Clicking my way to a new post and - horror - I just ran into a banner ad for Christmas .... help help and get me outta here. No way am I linking to it either.

Removable collar stiffeners are the work of the Devil. When they were sewn in, at least they were robust enough to last the shirt's lifetime. Today, forget to take them out for just one wash and they are bent or broken beyond reasonable use. We are not amused.

Spent the weekend going back to basics, in an Alpine mountain hut. Except one thing had changed since our last visit - the arrival of electric light, thanks to a solar panel on the roof and a car battery in the attic. No power outlets, just a couple of energy-saving lightbulbs. I'm wondering about how to work out the payback time Vs the old gas lamp.

After sundown, with the lights off, I'd never seen so many stars: to the point where the "regular" constellations were harder to identify because of the presence of so many more stars.

I've seen a new form of spam this morning - an animated GIF which turns into a "hot stock alert". But this isn't just a plain old embedded image, no, they're using content addressing (CID) protocols to mask the gif location.

These fake stock tips have fascinated me for a while, so I took a closer look at today's hot tip, Thermafreeze Products, which has scam written all over it.

Here's 5 reasons why:

1. No website for the company
2. Company started trading only in September
3. Phoney press releases about business deals with the President also the media/IR contact - and using a yahoo mail account
4. Phoney press release about the "unexplained" stock price fall
5. The spam ....

Then I found something else which corroborates my theory. For the record, the stock price right now is 0.115 per share. Just watch it sink!

Back to Firefox, already. There's nothing about IE7 that makes it compelling enough to switch. Also I really hate the way it forced HTML pages to render in ClearType on my flat-panel monitor. Boy, do I hate ClearType. To make things worse, the switch was not only with IE but also with Outlook. Yes, I found and unchecked the box in preferences, but it took a reboot to force Outlook to kick the habit.

Ah. Hadn't thought of that ... it's not going to be possible to pay ba credit card any more for downloads from the "renegade music site" allofmp3. com, according to various news articles.

I sense deju vu (again, if that's not tautology). Last time around it was the original Napster (not to be confused with today's Napster, they're about as alike as the Mini and the MINI). Before that it was Naxos records eating the big companies' lunch on classical CDs.

What next? My money's on darknets.

Microsoft should have jumped a release number and gone to version 8 with its new Internet Explorer: it's that much better than IE6. It's been a long time coming: I abandoned IE6 in favor of Firefox at the end of 2003. In those days it was still called Firebird and had reached version 0.7.

But back to IE7. It's looking good, and I'll be putting the 'fox in the box for a few days to see if IE7 cuts it. I've already discovered some of the more cool features, such as tabbed browsing (hellooo Microsoft, and a very belated welcome) and the anti-phishing alerts. That's the sort of thing that will really help mainstream computer users, who just wanna surf the net and are blissfully aware of the shark-infested waves.

In the mobile space, everything happens faster: No need to go home and log on to your PC to chat with your friends, do it on the WAP or mobile internet.

We're sitting in a press briefing this morning doing a live demo of a mobile ad campaign - and need to show an as-yet-unpublished site. So one of our interviewees calls his office to request a sneak preview:

Q: "How long would it take to get that site up?"
A: "10 minutes max"
Q: "Can you do it faster??"

My jury is still out on the best mobile browser. I've tried Minimo and
now Opera Mobile but have to say that the most reliable of the trio, so
far, is Internet Explorer. It's steadier and more able to render pages,
and is not affected by the totally annoying recurring problem with Opera
and Minimo: non-functional click buttons. This non-functionality really
stymies mobile surfing!

Is Lufthansa's WorldShop using fuzzy logic for its inventory control? My order confirmation says "Product presumably available within 7 working days". Not very reassuring.

Russian Premier Putin is in town and the skies have been buzzing with helicopters all day long. According to media reports, Putin is here on a fund-raising trip (bad timing - he missed the Oktoberfest). He's also held talks with German Premier Angela Merkel about "making Germany a gas hub for Europe" - inspiring the Financial Times Deutschland to come up with the most wonderful headline:

"Putin gibt Gas"

BILD headline writers, eat your hearts out.

Many years back in my tabloid newspaper days, lists of "10 things" were very popular - 10 things you never knew about the serial killer who lived in your town, 10 things you never knew about Christmas, etc etc etc - anything to spice up a dull or widely-reported story.

Time for 10 things to do with a dead iPod. I'll keep it clean, so no suggestions please about where Mr Jobs should try inserting it ... here's the first three. Any ideas?

1. Have it encased in perspex for posterity, as an early 2000s time capsule
2. Sacrifice it on a burning funeral pyre as a gift to the gods of consumer electronics in the hope that my other devices will enjoy long and happy lives
3. Sell it on eBay and pretend it was working when I shipped it - must be the postman's fault
   

Here's another area where the PDA beats the iPod: capability of total
immersion to the point where I missed my train. It was the combi of
music and a software app (in this case, email) that captured more of my
cycles than intended ... Didn't even notice the train until it was
leaving, so ended up standing on the platform waiting for the next one.
Ah well. At least I had something to do!

Yes, the iPod has died again. This time nothing happens when any of the buttons are pressed - and I've tried everything. What a piece of junk... especially as Apple says "sorry but we can't do anything about it because it has an HP logo on it". HP says ... nothing. I have not yet found out how to complain to them about an obsolete third-party product.

Buying the short-lived HP-branded model was a big mistake. At least I got an answer from Apple - HP has yet to respond to my original letter of complaint, from July. But I've seen the headlines, their attention is elsewhere...

Remember when Microsoft first added the option to confirm or deny a "return receipt" on an email? Until then, it was possible to ask for an automatic receipt when the mail was opened, on most software clients I'd ever used (all the way from QED departmental email in 1991). The addition of a dialog box asking if I'd like to send a return receipt changed that.

Now ReadNotify has changed it again. They're able to track messages, and PDF file attachments, as they're delivered, opened, forwarded and deleted. What's more is that it also tracks when the flagged message is opened by people to whom it was forwarded - although it doesn't reveal email addresses.

That's not all - the service also mines information about the user's PC, system language, and even reports the IP address from which they picked up the mail. Email really does leave digital fingerprints everywhere.

Maybe resorting to the fax is a good idea after all.

Today is Reunification Day in Germany, and therefore a public holiday.
I've really earned this one: since the Wall came down, every taxpayer
has been paying an additional "Reunification Tax".