Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
— Charles Simmons
So it would be a good idea to check the translation of your CV, if you are going to publish it on your company’s website (click on Lebenslauf at the bottom of the page).
Especially, if that company is a major bank.
The New Scientist has published an article on e-money (subscription needed to read the full article) – using chip cards to make “micro-payments” to pay for tickets, meals and so on.
This isn’t the first English language article to report on e-money, but for some reason the authors have always managed to overlook Germany. New Scientist quotes the London Transport Oyster Card, with 3.2 million users as an example of a potentially successful implementation (there have been several failures to implement an e-money card in the UK), but in Germany there are 63 million Geldkarten issued and some 200 000 acceptance points which handled nearly 40 million payments in 2003, making it the world’s largest e-money system.
While not every Geldkarte is being actively used (they are issued by default on your ec-card by some banks) this is nonetheless a sizeable user-base and you can use them to pay for carpark tickets, tram and subway tickets, postage stamps and even Big Macs in over 400 German towns.
I wanted to select podcasts along with music in the same iTunes smart playlist. It isn’t obvious how you can do this, but a couple of minutes searching Google, turned up a couple of useful tips:
Found recently on del.icio.us – logogle.com allows you to search google with your own logo at the top of the page. Of no real use, but a nice touch all the same.
What does a chainsaw manufacturer do, to demonstrate the power of his product?
He builds a bike powered by 24 of them.
We bought it on 6th August 1992 for 898 DM – an external single speed CD drive (a CD reader only, there weren’t CD writers on the consumer market at that time). Since we stopped using it attached to PCs (many years ago), it has been going strong as a normal CD player in the cellar, where Ruth used it to listen to CDs while sewing and doing the ironing. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, but we decided it would be useful to have a CD player which can also play MP3s, so after almost 13 years we finally took it to the local dump and put it in the electronics scrap container. I suspect very little of our other computer hardware will make it to such a venerable age in continous service.
Neither should 11 year old girls being tormented by boys throwing water bombs:
...the girl, who speaks little English, has admitted throwing a rock at a group of boys she says were pestering her with water balloons as she walked down the street.Maribel Cuevas, who lives in Fresno (California), has since spent 5 days in detention, having been allowed to see her parents once for 30 minutes in that time, and a month under house-arrest.
An ambulance was called, but arrived flanked by three police patrol vehicles. A helicopter meanwhile hovered overhead.
The 11-year-old was then read her rights twice in English before being detained…
Update (2005-07-20): See Mike Birch’s comment below and if you think the police behaviour is beyond belief, like I do, sign up on his petition (you can also make a pledge to pay into a fund to help her fight this case)
A common practice in the UK is to use credit cards to pay off credit card debt. The idea is to use the interest-free grace-period of new debts to pay off older debts before interest becomes due on them. The British are, according the Guardian, the most credit-intensive country in the world, with 8 million more credit cards issued than there are people living there. Checks on your creditworthiness before cards are issued are minimal, and the issuers use high-pressure marketing to persuade customers to sign up without reading the small print.
Richard Cullen’s wife needed an operation and he started using credit cards in 1998 to finance the £4 000 they needed to have it performed privately. By 2005 the debt had become £130 000 and Richard Cullan committed suicide because he couldn’t see a way out of the problems created by rolling over the debit between the 22 credit cards he had taken out.
The Guardian explains how the credit card industry works and the marketing tools it uses, and how the Royal Bank of Scotland came to offer a gold credit card to a dog in 2003.
The free BBC downloads of the 9 Beethoven Symphonies has – as might be expected – caused some aggro with the music industry which has accused the Beeb of “devaluing the perceived value of music”. (Which is a bit much, coming from the managing director of the Naxos label, which itself shook up the music industry some 18 years ago by marketing cut-price classical music CDs)
The BBC is expected to announce the millionth download of the symphonies this week.
Good news if you prefer the Palm OS to Microsoft’s Windows CE on your PDA. LG Electronics have licensed PalmSource’s OS to use in smart phones. PalmSource has been struggling recently – it announced a 16% staff cut last month, and the cash injection will help keep them afloat.
