I’m happy to announce that the first product of the company I’m working for has been released in DACH:
Martin Morgen is an animation series for children, airing on TV in Europe.
In “Martin Morgen – Das Spiel” the player controls the adventures of Martin and his friends.
Interestingly enough, it’s the first project based on licensed IP that I’m involved in.
Recently I bought myself a cool Roland V-Drum set.
Now I stumbled across freedrumlessons.com, a site with dozens of (you guessed it) free drum lessons on video.
In order to avoid downloading all video files manually, I wrote a little Groovy script. It greps the overview page for all links to sub-pages, and then scrapes all the sub-pages for MP4-files (so I can put them on my iPod later).
I can’t imagine what it would have been like using plain Java…
Hausfreund.at , der Webshop des Zustelldienstes für Lebensmittel und sonstige Haushaltssachen, ist nicht mehr.
Also, nicht mehr von mir – bis vor kurzem war dieser Shop der letzte verbliebene aus meiner Internetz-Web-Development-Superchecker Zeit um 2000…
Die Technologie, das Konzept, das Design (von Markus Mayer – mit einem kleinen Relaunch um 2003 herum) hat ganze 8 Jahre lang gehalten, alle online Kundenbestellungen darüber abzuwickeln. Hach, wer oder was kann das in der heutigen Zeit noch von sich behaupten? 
Stephen King (yes, the Stephen King) writes on Entertainment Weekly on a bill pending in the Massachusetts state legislature:
[The bill] would restrict or outright ban the sale of violent videogames to anyone under the age of 18. Which means, by the way, that a 17-year-old who can get in to see Hostel: Part II would be forbidden by law from buying (or renting, one supposes) the violent but less graphic Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
According to the proposed bill, violent videogames are pornographic and have no redeeming social merit. The vid-critics claim they exist for one reason and one reason only, so kids can experience the vicarious thrill of killing. Now, what does and doesn’t have social merit is always an interesting question, one I can discuss for hours. But what makes me crazy is when politicians take it upon themselves to play surrogate parents. The results of that are usually disastrous. Not to mention undemocratic.
[...]
What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture — not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter — as a whipping boy. It’s easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud. Also, it allows legislators to ignore the elephants in the living room. Elephant One is the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in this country, a situation guys like Fiddy and Snoop have been indirectly rapping about for years. Elephant Two is America’s almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. Cho used it in a rampage that resulted in the murder of 32 people. If he’d been stuck with nothing but a plastic videogame gun, he wouldn’t even have been able to kill himself.
Case closed.
Now, I know from personal experience that it makes little sense to discuss this “pathological love of guns” with Americans – been there, done that, got no t-shirt. It’s disturbing at least, to see liberal minded folks suddenly taking that “I have the right and the need to defend myself and my family”-road in a discussion.
On the other hand, Charlton “”From my cold, dead hands!” Heston died recently, so there’s always hope.
Ah, now I know what I have been missing since the upgrade to Mac OSX Leopard – no SMS and calling feature from address book 