Monday, 4 July 2005

/.ed

After more than 2 years slashdot has discovered our Lego Star Destroyer stopmotion video. Fortunately some very nice people offered their bandwidth to host mirrors of the files. My server hasn’t been slashdotted to death yet. However a few of the mirror sites have (almost) died. I am very sorry for that.

I am happy that our little video is getting some recognition. Many people have commented here or sent me personal emails to tell me how much they liked it. That makes me happy. Of course the slashdot thread has many troll posts by people complaining that we didn’t build a custom star destroyer model, people complaining that there are not enough boobs in the video and people complaining that this made the slashdot frontpage. But I guess you can never make everybody happy.

I’m just happy that there are quite a few people out there that seemed to have enjoyed it.

So yeah, slashdot managed to have me post my first post in almost a year :)

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 23:12 CET  |  [Comments Link]  19 comments

Wednesday, 22 September 2004

Fun with ferrofluids

Check out the cool things you can do with a nice strong magnet and a magnetic fluid.

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 17:37 CET  |  [Comments Link]  4 comments

Mechanical Pong

Check out this mechanical Pong game. The video is pretty rad.

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 13:40 CET  |  [Comments Link]  4 comments

Wednesday, 8 September 2004

Helsinki

So I’m in Helsinki now. I really like it so far. Even though I got attacked by a taxi this morning. While I was getting into the car the door swung back and hit me in the head. In fact it penned my head in between itself and the car’s roof. It hurt. Now I have a bit of a headache and chewing hurts a little. Oh well…

But the day got a lot better after the taxi incident. We had lunch at a very nice place down by the harbour. I had a plate full of whole prawns in garlic with a very delicious mayonnaise. It was very, very good if a bit of a hassle to peel all the prawns myself. I am now known as Shrimp Mass Murderer because most of the shrimps were carrying eggs. I can live with that though. Maybe I’ll avoid swimming in parts of the sea that has a large shrimp population for a while to avoid revenge ;)

Oh and it’s quite cold here, 10 - 12 °C. There’s some arctic weather front marching through here at the moment. But the sun is shining so it’s really not that bad…

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 14:12 CET  |  [Comments Link]  1 comments

Tuesday, 7 September 2004

The small joys

My new job (well basically it’s my old job, just that I’m permanently employed now) has already started to bring me to places I’ve never been before. Since yesterday I have been in Brussels. Up until an hour ago I wasn’t very impressed. The tourist attractions are surrounded by an unbelievable amount of tourist traps of the worst sort. All the restaurants had people outside trying to lure you into their establishment. Since my colleague and I were unable to find a “normal” restaurant near our hotel we ended up eating at a McDonald’s. Imagine that: we were staying at the Hilton and eating at McD. Oh boy.

Anyway, for lunch we were taken to a sandwich place in a nice residential area and there I got an extremely tasty sandwich for a really good price (€2,60 for a foot-long sandwich). I’m not entirely sure about all the ingredients since the menu was in French but it was really, really good. Yum.

On that occasion I noticed again how bad my French has gotten. I think I will need to start spending my weekends in Paris at my dad’s place to give it a kick-start.

Tonight we will fly to Helsinki where we will stay for the rest of the week. We’ll see how that goes. At least I hear that all the taxis in Helsinki accept credit cards. So that’s a plus. Although I might go ahead and pay cash anyway to get precious Finnish Euro coins…

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 13:39 CET  |  [Comments Link]  0 comments

Thursday, 5 August 2004

It's Been a While...

No excuses. We’ve been lazy. But that’s over now. I hope….

Since our trip to San Francisco last year I grew fond of They Might Be Giants. Actually I can hardly believe that I managed to get around them for so long. Their obscure and funny lyrics just crack me up… For starters I can recommend the albums No, Mink Car and Flood. These will surely get you hooked.

The SpineNow the reason why I’m writing all this is that you can buy their latest album online. That itself is nothing special since there’s a lot of online music lately. But they are selling the new album on their own. No big record company feeding on the revenues of the online sales, no DRM and no usage restrictions. Just pure and high quality MP3s. I applaud them for their courage and am nodding my head to Prevenge.

[Archive Link]  Posted by Michi at 11:25 CET  |  [Comments Link]  2 comments

Wednesday, 12 May 2004

Esther's Disappearance

I’m sorry but Esther can’t come to the blog right now. The cord on her anti-static wrist band is too short.

antistatic.jpg

[Archive Link]  Posted by Michi at 19:16 CET  |  [Comments Link]  8 comments

Wednesday, 3 March 2004

Note to Self

Never EVER try giving your boyfriend a kiss without properly grounding yourself first when there’s a high chance that you’re charged with enough static electricity to kill a rat!

Maybe I should have wished for an antistatic wristband for my birthday…

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 16:41 CET  |  [Comments Link]  10 comments

Monday, 23 February 2004

Static Conditioning

Static electricity seems to like me. A lot. Here at work I accumulate a static charge from walking on the carpet. Actually just from sitting at my desk and moving in the chair from time to time.

So whenever I touch a metal object or a person the discharge hits me. And we’re not talking a minor sting here. I swear sometimes you can see an arc from my finger to the thing I’m about to touch. It can hurt quite a bit.

It also depends on the shoes I’m wearing. Some pairs are evil and charge me like I’m some kind of living lightning conductor. So now whenever I’m about to touch a door handle I cringe in expectation of the shock. Even when I’m not at work and even if it’s not a metal door handle. My conditioning is perfect.

Pavlov would be proud of me.

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 16:32 CET  |  [Comments Link]  3 comments

Wednesday, 11 February 2004

Sushi Adventure

Last Friday Michi and I tested a Sushi restaurant near where we work. It’s in the yuppiest part of Berlin and there’s many rich, young, “hip” people there. And tourists. Anyway the sushi place was pretty good. It wasn’t the best sushi I’ve ever had but not bad at all and the price was okay, too. The restaurant’s interior design was very nice. They had all these little details that I really liked. The staff are friendly. The music mix was very interesting, we heard everything from JPop to Rock music to Frank Sinatra in the hour or so that we spent there (and I’m not kidding).

Next to us sat a guy and a girl who gave tips to their neighbours (for whom it was their first sushi experience). Then on Monday as we were watching TV we saw that the the guy was an actor in some new series. I guess around there it happens quite often that you see famous people. One of my co-workers who lives there tells me that even though he doesn’t have a TV he recognizes people all the time.

After the successful sushi test we’re now thinking about trying a new restaurant in this area every Friday (there’s lots of very good restaurants around here from what I hear). We’ll see how that goes. It’ll probably get expensive quickly…

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 10:51 CET  |  [Comments Link]  0 comments