More troopers

And here is my favourite trooper! André doesn’t think the similarity to be striking, but I think the hair and the glasses look pretty much like they really do. Compare his trooper to his picture in the entry below!

André also found this gallery of about 3 dozen Blogging StorTroopers (& friends).

I’m a trooper

Okay, so I did it too. Because Everyone else is doing it, too!

Go to storTroopers to create a picture of yourself. By the way, I created two storTroopers, and when I hit the ‘Save’ button, my browser crashed – both times. When I restarted my computer and reloaded the page, the image I had created before the crash appeared properly on the right side of the page. I wonder why that happened… (I used IE 5.0 on MacOS 9.)

Pictures, pictures!

Susan has some wonderful photos of San Francisco at night!

How sane am I?

I just found a link to a sanity test on BookNotes. And it says: “You are 14.5454545454545% insane. – You are what the government would have us believe is normal.”

Oh, and by the way, I think a sanity test that seems to give results in periodic decimal fractions is about 99.9898989898989% insane.

Update: Craig says I shouldn’t feel bad – he thinks I’m at least 43.6363636363636% insane, too. Hmm… is that a compliment?

United States Postal Service

The USPS seems to be very reliable – and even has a sense of humor! The Annals of Improbable Research conducted some postal experiments and successfully mailed items like an unwrapped pair of tennis shoes, a $20 bill in a clear bag, some old cheese, a molar tooth, and a wrapped brick:

“Wrapped in brown paper […]. Extreme weight for size made package seem suspicious. Notice of attempted delivery received, 16 days. Upon pickup at station, our mailing specialist received a plastic bag containing broken and pulverized remnants of brick. Inside was a small piece of paper with a number code on it. Our research indicates that this was some type of US Drug Enforcement Agency release slip. The clerk made our mailing specialist sign a form for receipt.”

Link via MetaFilter.

Lunar eclipse

CNN has a photo gallery with wonderful eclipse photos from Europe and Africa. (Yes, that’s the photo gallery from the article Sheila linked to the other day…)

Link via Sushma Kishore.

Astronomy

New York Times: Found: 2 Planetary Systems. Result: Astronomers Stunned., by John Noble Wilford.

Link via Garret.

Today’s trip to the USA

I’ve been traveling today – I went to see Glen Canyon, Grand Canyon and New Mexico.

Glen Canyon

I read Glen Canyon: Images of a lost world by Tad Nichols. André gave it to me for Christmas.

It is a wonderful, beautiful book. Nichols used to visit Glen Canyon with two friends for several years, right before the dam was built and Glen Canyon was lost. The book contains many black-and-white photos from Glen Canyon and its side Canyons, many of which Nichols and his friends named.

From looking at the pictures and reading the book, I got the impression that Glen Canyon was one of the most beautiful places on earth, and it’s incredibly sad it has been destroyed by the dam.

Gary Ladd writes in the afterword:

“I think it is nearly impossible for those of us who arrived after 1963 to comprehend how much Tad, Frank and Katie’s canyon meant to them. However, I am beginning to understand because today a second wave of loss sweeps Glen Canyon and slickrock country everywhere as a flood of visitors and deluge of regulations inundate the sweeping stone landscapes. It’s no longer possible to enjoy the freedoms of Glen Canyon or any formerly obscure and winsome canyon. It is history. […]

There is, though, one deeply consoling fact: Glen Canyon will return. We know it will because we know that dams far more massive and far greater than Glen Canyon Dam have swamped Glen Canyon before. It has happened at least twice in the last million years when volcanoes erupted in western Grand Canyon, backing water up as far as Moab, Utah. Lake Powell, like all lakes, natural or man-made, is ephemeral. In due course, Glen Canyon will breathe again. It cannot be otherwise.”

Grand Canyon

I visited Grand Canyon and New Mexico on the internet, at photo.net.

Phil Greenspun, creator of the photos, went rafting through the Grand Canyon in 1999 and took a bunch of photos, some of which reminded me of the photos of Glen Canyon. Scroll down the page to Out of the Canyon and into a Slot Canyon.

New Mexico

Greenspun toured the land of enchantment in 1994, and some of the photos are quite spectacular, e.g. those of Chaco Culture National Historic Park or the Great Sand Dunes National Monument (yes, that’s in Colorado, but it’s on the New Mexico page anyway.), or Santa Fe. (Did you know that by law, structures in the center of Santa Fe must be built from adobe?)

Wow, Garret, you really live in a beautiful place!

Update: Garret informs us that “there are actually two or three building ‘styles’ allowed in santa fe city. pueblo, territorial, and (i believe) northern new mexico. each has a distinct look, yet all must be made to look like the historical adobe forebears of the style. and, as i’ve said before, everyone must adapt. mcdonald’s, burger king, walmart … they’re all adobe. […] municipalities don’t have to accept neon nightmares.”

Souds a bit like Celle, André’s home town. It’s famous for its Fachwerk buildings (‘half-timbered houses’, says the dictionary), and even McDonald’s has one with a brass plate instead of their usual neon sign (here’s a photo of McDonald’s in Celle).

Lunar eclipse

Yes, Sheila, yesterday’s photos are of the lunar eclipse. I meant to write a short note in English, but forgot. Sorry!

The first, top left photo was taken just as the moon started to enter the earth’s shadow. The bottom right photo shows the last bit of the moon before it was completely covered, and from the poor quality you can see that the sky was almost completely overcast by then. We couldn’t see the eclipse itself at all.

Sheila links to Lunar eclipse offers spectacular show. Well, maybe it did, but certainly not here in Bonn, because it got cloudy before the moon was completely covered by the earth’s shadow.

By the way, the clouds went away after midnight – two or three hours too late!

Okay, off to work now…

Weblogs

Thanks to Craig, I have discovered Cabinet, another cool weblog. So far, I’ve only checked this year’s entries, but it looks pretty interesting so far. Their tag line is “It isn’t whether or not it’s real, it’s just that it’s true.”

I also discovered WebsMostLinked on Cabinet, a site that monitors close to a million of websites and ranks them by the number of links they receive. So if you’re already at the top of the HotList, check your site at WebsMostLinked!

Finster ist der Mond… und der Himmel

Seit einer knappen Stunde verfolge ich nebenbei die Verfinsterung des Mondes. Leider sind die Bedingungen nicht die besten: Weil es so kalt ist, gucke ich nur aus dem Wohnzimmerfenster. Und hier, mitten in der Stadt, gibt es natürlich auch eine Menge Hintergrundbeleuchtung. Außerdem ist es irgendwie diesig oder nebelig, so daß man nicht viel vom Mond sieht.

Bei der ersten Aufnahme um 19:47 Uhr (oben links) war es noch einigermaßen klar, von ein paar Wolken abgesehen. Die beiden nächsten Fotos entstanden um 20:01 Uhr (oben rechts) und 20:19 Uhr (unten links), da wurde es schon schlechter.

Und kurz bevor der Mond ganz verfinstert war (um 21:41 Uhr, unten rechts), war auch der Himmel fast ganz verfinstert…

Jetzt sieht man überhaupt nichts mehr. Mal sehen, ob es innerhalb der nächsten Stunde noch aufklart, so daß wir wenigstens noch einen Blick auf den verfinsterten Mond werfen können.

Update: Sieht nicht gut aus. Jetzt ist es ganz bewölkt. Kein Wunder, denn für morgen vormittag ist hier Schnee(regen) angekündigt.

Bilder von der Mondfinsternis gibt’s aber z.B. hier auf Astronomie.de.

Mondfinsternis

Heute abend ist Mondfinsternis. Jörg hatte gestern den passenden Link: Lunares Schattenspiel zur ‘echten’ Jahrtausendwende (bei Telepolis).

Also, heute abend zwischen 20:50 Uhr und 21:52 Uhr (Kernschattenphase) auf klaren Himmel hoffen und in selbigen schauen!

Manila Newbies

This is a useful page: Admin: Page Adresses.

Link via Manila Newbies Mailinglist.

And another article about weblogs

U.S. News: Blogging burgeons as a form of Web expression, by Holly J. Morris.

“Say this three times fast: A ‘blog’ is a blob of blurbs. It’s short for ‘weblog,’ and like many newly coined technology terms, blog serves as both verb and noun. Though some bloggers will disagree, a blog is a frequently updated Web page consisting of brief, dated entries, with new ones pushing the old to the bottom of the page. Most catalog the author’s chronological musings and are often a mix of personal journal entries and links to whatever caught the blogger’s fancy.”

Link via the Curmudgeon.

Cinema

Have you read “Bridget Jones’s Diary”? I have, and I think it was really fun, so I’m looking forward to the movie, which starrs Renée Zellweger (Bridget) and Hugh Grant (Daniel Cleaver).

Here’s an inofficial website, Singletons of the World Unite… everything you wanted to know about the making of Bridget Jones’s Diary the movie, with a weblog-style news page.

The film is going to be released in April, and I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer before it’s coming to Germany.

Lego

I just found a link to the Lego Brick-o-lizer in a magazine. Sounds like a cool idea: The demo version (online) allows you to load a picture into the Brick-o-lizer, and it converts it to a Lego mosaic. You can then print out the instructions to build the mosaic. The full version also allows you to order exactly those Lego bricks you will need to actually build your mosaic.

The whole thing has two disadvantages. First: You have to accept Cookies in order for the site to work. And second: “The LEGO Brick-o-Lizer is not available for use on Macintosh browsers at this time.” I wonder what kind of fancy technology they use that doesn’t work on a Mac. So I can’t play with it.

But maybe you want to try it out?

Yet another article about weblogs

New York Times: Invasion of the ‘Blog’: A Parallel Web of Personal Journals, by David F. Gallagher.

“The concept is simple enough. Create a Web page. Update it regularly with brief personal reflections or witty commentary, sprinkled with links to other pages. Put new entries at the top of the page, pushing older ones down. Voilà, you’ve got yourself a Web log.

That may not sound like the recipe for a social movement. But in the past two years, thousands of people have started their own Web logs, crating a vast sprawl of sites that, to the uninitiated, might feel like a parallel Web universe.”

Link via Schockwellenreiter, who found it on Arturs Weblog (German).

FAQs ohne Ende

Auf der Suche nach FAQs zu einem bestimmten Thema? Vielleicht kann www.faq-index.de weiterhelfen. Die FAQs sind in Kategorien sortiert. Hier findet man auch z.B. auch FAQs zu Tinnitus, Hörspielen oder Schülerverbindungen.

Link via mein Papi (per Telefon! ).

Und falls die gesuchten FAQs dort nicht zu haben sind, lohnt ein Blick auf www.faq-now.de.

Link via FAQ-Index.

Weblog Awards

A couple of days ago, Garret posted a link to the First Annual Weblog Awards, or the 2001 bloggies for short. This is the latest feature on Nikolai Nolan’s Fairvue central.

While I like the idea in general, I’m not sure whether a contest like this really makes sense. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the so-called a-list bloggers will win most of the awards since they have the most readers, maybe except for the ‘geographical awards’ which are for non-US blogs.

The category I like best is the ‘best-kept-secret weblog’. Kept-secret blogs are all blogs that are not on the Weblogs.com Hotlist at the time of submitting. (Therefore, my weblog is not considered secret.)

I hope many voters think the famous blogs will get enough votes anyway, and vote for less-known blogs instead.

However, I have to admit that I’m curious about the results nonetheless.

Ein denkwürdiger Tag

Der Schockwellenreiter ist auf den Internet Explorer umgestiegen. (Ob jemand seine Beschwerden über lineheights etc. vermissen wird? )

In einem allerdings stimme ich mit Jörg überein: Ich warte auch sehnlichst auf die Mac-Version von Opera. Ich habe den Browser bis vor einem Jahr auf meinem alten PC (486er) benutzt – einfach klasse!

Macros

Scott is playing around with macros in Manila and has gone one step further than just linking to others:

Look at this page. And look at this one.

I wonder why both got his background. Maybe that’s because his background is a graphic, while mine is just a color, and graphics “overrule” colors?!

Sunset

Garret had a beautiful one yesterday.