Archives

How (not) to treat your customers

The US lobby group for the music industry, the RIAA, has excelled itself this time in its heavy-handed dealing with a customer. They are suing a customer who bought 2000 tracks on CDs and copied them to his computer for his own use. He didn’t upload them to the internet, just listened to them . . . → Read More: How (not) to treat your customers

The Bush Countdown Calendar

This calendar is currently at position 539 in the Amazon books best seller list. We got given a block calendar with 365 quotes from GWB last year and enjoyed his muddled quotes so much that we have ordered the countdown calendar for 2008.

Wishing you a great . . . → Read More: The Bush Countdown Calendar

Cold here

It’s been cold here for the last week or so. Around -6°C to 0°C. And dry and sunny. A nice change, after having had torrential rain for 2 weeks before that.

The picture is of a local stream that we went past yesterday, when we went for a walk around the . . . → Read More: Cold here

The fog clears in Europe

Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic all join the Schengen Zone tonight.

That is the part of the EU where the member countries trust each other enough to abolish the visa- and border controls (But beware! At airports, the new members won’t benefit from the abolition of . . . → Read More: The fog clears in Europe

The tree circus

Picture from Arborsmith Studios website (click picture to visit)Axel Erlandson an American arborsculptor opened an exhibition in 1947 featuring trees which he had shaped by pruning, bending and grafting. The original exhibition, called The Tree Circus had a chequered history, only bringing in a little over $300 in a good year (1955). Eventually 12 . . . → Read More: The tree circus

Combine your hobby with work

If you are a software developer who likes knitting, you need to take a look at documenting your knitting patterns in XML.

(via Boing Boing)

Word of the year 2007: w00t!

Merriam-Webster has named the word of the year for 2007: w00t!

If you need an explanation of the meaning, they are kind enough to provide one here.

The latest global house price trends

The Economist has its regular table showing how property prices world wide have developed: Graph from this week’s Economist As you’d expect, given the US sub-prime crisis, the US prices have dropped by around 5% in the last 12 months. More surprisingly, the UK prices, despite the concern in the British press about their . . . → Read More: The latest global house price trends

Reconstructing extinct viruses

Researchers today are capable of building their own viruses: Thanks to steady advances in computing power and DNA technology, a talented undergraduate with a decent laptop and access to any university biology lab can assemble a virus with ease. Five years ago, as if to prove that point, researchers from the State University of . . . → Read More: Reconstructing extinct viruses