Keys Corner

Take a look at Butt Johnson’s ball point drawings here. The detail is impressive. I particularly like Mario.

(via Giornale Nuovo by mr.h)

Well, well. The Apple Store is offering refurbished Mac minis, and in Germany Gravis is out of stock of both mini models. Those two events together often signal a model update is coming shortly. One can live in hope – it would be about time…

This 29 second family video clip of an 18 month old boy which has a barely recognizable rendering of a Prince song playing in the background resulted in Universal filing a court complaint against YouTube to get the video taken down.

I think the music industry has completely forgotten who funds their profits and is living on another planet in another universe. What pity they don’t just stay there all the time.

BigString has implemented a useful service. If you regret hitting “send” after you’ve sent an e-mail, you can recall it, so long as it was sent with their e-mail service. That is something I have wished I could do a number of times over the years. At work, I can – so long as the mail is internal – as we use Microsoft Exchange. But this is first time I’ve seen a service like this for public mails. You can also set up your mail to self-destruct after it has been read.

We finished the renovation today, apart filling a couple of gaps around door-frames. I must say that I now think that an offer we saw before we started, to lay parquet for 17 Euro a square meter is very good value – and my knees and fingers (which got bashed hard by the hammer on several occasions), would agree if they could speak!

We’ve not posted any pictures as it is pouring with rain and the light is awful at the moment. We’ll put some up when the weather improves.

Update (2007-07-25): We’ve added several pictures of the finished rooms.

... or non-existent here now until we have finished decorating and laying parquet flooring in the office, which is where our computers are! Back in 1-2 weeks, depending on how we get on (have removed everything from the room now except the Macs and tables that they are on

An interesting article in today’s Handelsblatt caught my eye today. It appears that the CIA might have been funding illegal operations by bringing forged $100 bills into circulation. To date, bills worth $50 million have been confiscated.

A little searching on the internet turned up a short article in the English Wikipedia reporting the same story and dating the first report (by a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) to this effect in January 2007. Interestingly, the White House has been claiming that North Korea is the guilty party.

Europeans consistently regard the US as the biggest threat to world stability, a new poll revealed in the Financial Times today:

...Inhabitants of Spain are most concerned about the US, with 46 per cent of respondents naming America as the biggest threat.

European poll respondents – who also come from France, Germany, Italy and the UK – are increasingly concerned about China, which 19 per cent perceive as the biggest threat, up from 12 per cent last July.

Meanwhile, 17 per cent identify Iran as the biggest threat, 11 per cent Iraq and 9 per cent North Korea. Only 5 per cent single out Russia, despite increased tensions between Moscow and the west…