Keys Corner

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has some advice for office parties.

Tips include:

Resist the temptation to photocopy parts of your anatomy – if the copier breaks, you’ll have Christmas with glass in painful places.

and

Office furniture isn’t designed to be as sturdy as the furniture in your local pub, so dancing on desks could do them and you a lot of damage. Likewise, the boardroom table is meant for weighty documents, not overweight executives.

(via The Word Company)

Be cautious about opening e-mail attachments which appear to be an electronic Christmas card. F-Secure reports that the zafi.d virus is spreading on Windows PCs at the moment. The virus displays a Christmas greeting in the language of the recipient and spreads by mailing itself to other persons in their mail address book.

It opens a back door on infected PCs, making it possible for hackers to use them to send unsolicited bulk e-mail or spam, and to launch malicious attacks on web sites. Better to stick to sending real cards, if you haven’t missed the last-post-by-date already.

Reports that travellers and even vehicles have been suddenly swallowed up in the desert, to vanish without trace, have been dismissed as fantasy in the past. But fluid physics research at the University of Twente in Holland with fine, aerated sand suggests this is quite possible.

(Seen at boingboing)

The Economist has updated its statistics on the development of house prices world wide. There’s not a huge change in the overall picture. The Australian and British markets are cooling a little, although looking at the year-on-year increases, even Britian and Australia still show a gain over 2003.

Given that the Economist reckons that property values world-wide have risen twice as much in the last 3 years as share prices did in the three years before the global share price bubble burst in 2000, and that more people in the countries concerned have money tied up in property than in shares, the continuing trend does not bode well for the world economy.

(You can only appreciate this, if you speak some German as well as English – thanks to Karl for sending it to me!)

When the last Kalender-sheet
flattern through the Winter-streets
and Decemberwind is blowing,
then is everybody knowing
she does come, the Weihnachtszeit.
All the Menschen, Leute, people
flippen out of ihrem Stuebel
run to Kaufhof, Aldi, Mess
make Konsum and business.

Kaufen this and jenes Dings
and the churchturmglocke rings!
Manche holen sich a Taennchen.
When this brennt, they cry: 'Attention!'
Rufen for the Feuerwehr:
'Please come quick and rescue here!'
Goes the Taennchen up in Rauch
they are standing on the Schlauch.
Read the rest of this entry »

The International Herald Tribune points out that the new G5 iMacs sold in the US and Japan can only handle 110 volt power – all other Apple computers (except eMacs, which are sold to schools) can handle 110V and 220-240V.

It is being speculated that this is an attempt by Apple to lock in the higher prices charged in Europe (the G5 iMac is over 400 Euro cheaper in the US than in France, for example) by stopping customers importing the US models, since plugging a US G5 iMac into the power here will fry the motherboard.

A BBC poll released on Thursday, shows that 60% of those under 35 have never heard of Auschwitz.

This is really surprising, given that the image of the Germans and Germany in the UK is still, 60-odd years later, frozen in the past, thanks, apparently, to the history curriculum at school and the diet of war-films that are shown on TV.

If you are using WordPress 1.2x or 1.3x to run your blog, you really need to delete a line in the login script, otherwise it is possible to unintentionally bring your site down.

See weblog.burningbird.net for more details.

Quzzle is, according to this article in the Economist, the most difficult sliding block puzzle that there is. Click on the the image above to try it out.

All week, we have been amused by this car, parked right in front of one our major competitors, the asset management subsidiary of a well-known bank here, directly across the road from my office at work. Today, at the lunch time, I took a couple of pictures with my camera phone.

The car is covered in text, both in German and English – along the lines of I feel I am a real estate victim of the Deutsche-Bank and Never again for me! Deutsche-Bank or their partners. Exactly what injustice they have done him isn’t clear, but his protest is quite effective, right in front of the main entrance to their building, which often has large black executive cars parked outside. As the car hasn’t been towed away yet, it is presumably legal too.