Sad news

In Paris, a Concorde crashed onto a hotel a few minutes after take-off. 113 people died. CNN has details. Die Tagesschau und n-tv berichten auch.

Sand Sculptures

Duncan has photos of some sand sculptures from Glasgow’s George Square. Impressive!

Anniversary

Um… anniversary does not seem the right word, since it comes from “annum”, which is latin and means year. At least that’s what I believe. (Yes, I did take Latin at school – for six years!) So maybe I should call it “mensiversary” instead.

Six months ago today, I started this weblog!

And it’s been a lot of fun since then. When I started, I wouldn’t have believed that I would keep updating so often. Well, there have been days when I was not in the mood to post anything, or too busy (the latter happened very seldom ;-), but it was fun most of the time.

I think a weblog is a good way to keep all kinds of things: interesting links and thoughts, nice pictures or quotes, discussions with other people about all kinds of things, and even a journal. The big advantage of a weblog, compared to a scrapbook made out of paper, is that it is searchable. How else would I be able to find anything ever again?

Thanks to UserLand for hosting my Manila site.

And to all my “webpals”: Nice to have met you! It’s been great fun!

Wow! I did not think that this was such a special event. Thanks for your congratulations, Garret, Sheila, Susan, Hal, Jörg (whose Schockwellereiter is three months old today!), Craig, Martin, Al, John and Jeff.

Susan likes the word ‘web pal’. I like it too. Craig invented it. Or at least he was the first I have heard/read use it. A Google search yields many pages, and even an organization named Web Pal that matches email pen pals from around the world.

Garret: “andrea’s celebrating six months. i wonder if, when she gets famous, she’ll stop weblogging … i hope not.”

The question is not when I get famous, but if I ever get famous. And I’m not even sure I want to be. Maybe I should think about a new tag line?!

Thanks for the nice compliment, Craig. Makes me blush!

Al, you might be interested to hear that I’m about to release my first CD album. My first book will be available in time for christmas. In case you want a signed copy, send me email!

New Layout

Scott now uses the Aqua Theme:

“I was bored with my layout, so I went aqua. It’s was easy to do using the themes feature of Manila. […] By the way, I’m also bored with my content. I’m still haven’t found the feature to quickly fix that.”

Scott, don’t worry, I’m not bored with your contents! By the way, I never went to the Dom in Hamburg although I used to live only 80 km or so away from Hamburg.

As for the calendar, why don’t you put it in the navigation bar on the left, like Susan did in her Macster Weblog?!

Mouses

The Schockwellenreiter has some links to stories about the computer mouse. His site is in German, but he included a link to the English version: Fire-Control and Human-Computer Interaction: Towards a History of the Computer Mouse (1940-1965). He said he included the link especially for me so I could link to it: “Dieser Hinweis auf die englische Fassung steht hier nur, damit Andrea wieder auf mich verlinken kann.”

Okay, Jörg, was bleibt mir anderes übrig?! Du solltest vielleicht mal Deine Site beim LinkBack Programm submitten – das haben sich bisher offensichtlich nur Leute mit englischsprachigem Weblog getraut.

Da ich ja auch Leser habe, die es vielleicht vorziehen, den Artikel auf Deutsch zu lesen: Hier ist er, erschienen bei Telepolis: Die Geschichte der Computermaus.

Books

Hal talks about books, and how most of ‘us ETPers’ talk about them, or at least about bookshelves. He says he prefers bookshelves worked into the structure of a house so he doesn’t have to ‘waste’ extra space for them. But he “just do[es]n’t want to hear about ‘perhaps you could sell some’. Heretic!“.

I agree!

Quote of the Day

By all means marry.

If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy.

If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

Socrates

Found on today’s A Word A Day

Craig links to the color quiz. He said he found the results disturbingly accurate. I think some of my results were accurate, while I’m not sure about others. Maybe I don’t know myself?!

New Jovian mood identified

New outer satellite of Jupiter discovered.

Link via Hal.

Bookshelves

After the closet, John built a bookshelf. And it has adjustable shelves, too! How neat.

That reminds me that André and I don’t have much space left on our bookshelves…

Faster than the Speed of Light

The last day lasted less than five hours. That is, if you define a day as the time between two page flips.

Inspired by arfco 3000 (one of the NetDyslectics) today’s subject is light that is faster than itself!

There was a young lady named Bright,

Whose speed was far faster than light,

She set out one day,

In a relative way,

And returned home the previous night.

Arthur Buller

Articles about the phenomenon:

• Raymond Chiao and his group did experiments in this field. They point to this article: Superluminal motion.
• This week’s Nature edition: Travelling over c
  (The above Limerick was taken from that article.)
• Markus Pössel’s Faster-than-light speeds in tunneling experiments: an annotated bibliography (auch in deutsch).
• ZDF.MSNBC: Übertragung schneller als das Licht.
• Filmmanuskript der Space Night (Bayerisches Fernsehen) zum Thema Schneller als das Licht?.
• Die Zeit diese Woche: Schneller, als Einstein erlaubt.
• Auf diesen Artikel wies mich arfco 3000 hin: Ob Einstein irrte?
• Meines Wissens war Günter Nimtz der erste, der ein Experiment zur Überlichtgeschwindigkeit durchführte:
  • Was ist das Nimtz-Experiment?
  • Welche der fünf Geschwindigkeitsdefinitionen verwendet Nimtz?

Smart car?!

Slow day. I didn’t do much, except for going jogging this afternoon with a friend. But… I saw this car in our street. I thought it might be interesting at least to my dear readers from outside Europe. It’s a Smart!

Looks pretty cool, huh? But does it look like a real car?

The Smart is fairly new (available since October 2, 1998). The car is designed especially for people who drive in cities a lot. It’s small (two seats in the front only) so it needs very little parking space. I’ve seen Smarts using half a parking space perpendicular to the inteded parking direction. They also use little fuel and are not too expensive. I think a new Smart is about DM 18,000 or around US$ 9,000.

Most Smarts are also very colourful. They come in bright colous like pink, yellow or blue, and each smart has two colours on the outside. (This one is fairly plain, just light and dark grey, but then – it’s a convertible, a Smart Cabrio.) For the interior, you can choose red or orange with blue and other combinations. This one is red inside!

They met on the ‘net

Yes, I have read this story, too. And I liked it! (Link via Al.)

Harry Potter

Heute bin ich zufällig auf eine Leseprobe aus dem dritten Band von Harry Potter gestoßen. Wird Zeit, daß ich ihn mir kaufe!

Für Leute, die Harry Potter noch gar nicht kennen: Es gibt auch je eine Leseprobe aus dem ersten und zweiten Band. Ich finde allerdings, daß die deutsche Übersetzung nicht so gut ist wie das Original auf Englisch (auch wenn ich “nur” die US-Ausgabe kenne).

Sunscreen

Yeah, I know this song is old. I like it anyway, and if I don’t post the URL here, I won’t find it again.

Baz Luhrmann: Everybody’s Free.