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I thought this might be mildly funny for all Cocoa programmers: presenting Fazer Cocoa Nibs, “finest dark chocolate with crunchy cocoa nibs, 70% cacao”.

Fazer Cocoa Nibs

Actual product, actual packaging (80 grams). Dark chocolate, in moderation, is supposed to be good for you.

How stupid are you, if you send spam to people but can’t even do it right? This is an e-mail message I received just recently:

Subject: %SI_subj

What if you could %SI2_rnd10 your desire and %SI2_rnd11 by just %SI2_rnd12 %SI2_rnd13 step?
What if this step was %SI2_rnd14, %SI2_rnd15 and side-effect-free?

%SI2_rnd24 of men did it – You can do it too!

If I understand this correctly, the various %SI2_ entries are placeholders for the name and features of whatever crap someone is trying to sell me. Well, it goes without saying that I most likely wouldn’t have bought it even if they had been able to configure their spam machine correctly.

If you like spam, this is an epic FAIL. If you don’t, it’s actually a good thing because now you won’t be able to buy their crap even if you are also equally stupid.

I love these moments of iPod serendipity, one of which happened just now: I had decided to open a small can of pineapple chunks for a light evening snack, my iPod was playing in shuffle mode for the third consecutive hour, and as I scooped those chunks, I heard nice, mellow tinkles from the speakers. I didn’t recognize it immediately, but when I heard the vocoded vocal phrase “Ananas Symphonie”, you can imagine my smile… Yes, it was the closing track from Kraftwerk’s third album “Ralf und Florian”. I mean, what are the odds of that happening with 13,000 tracks on the iPod? Lovely!

Of course, you may argue about my definition of serendipity, and there’s no Florian in Kraftwerk anymore, but who can resist the call of the pineapple?

In the last 10 years most of my travel has been work-related. Most times I’ve taken a camera with me, and I’ve often managed to take some snapshots of the city I’ve visited.

Some of these photographs are now available on Flickr. For the time being I only have a free account, so I’m limited to three sets or 200 photos. Those three sets are Düsseldorf, Budapest and Århus. I bumped into this limitation as I was preparing a fourth set (Berlin). It looks like I have to get that paid account, since I want to upload more sets, and it’s pretty cheap anyway.

The photos in the existing sets were shot with point-and-shoot cameras. The Århus and Budapest sets were shot with my first digital camera, Minolta DiMAGE S414, which was bulky, ate through batteries in record time, and is now very much retired (much like Minolta from the camera business). I have yet to upload anything shot with my current Canon PowerShot S5 IS.

If you want to comment on these photographs, please do it on Flickr. I’ve never done it before, so I can’t help you there (I don’t know if you have to have an account for that), but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

One of my photographs is included in the Schmap Düsseldorf guide. All the photos are published under the Creative Commons “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic” license.

Comments on my blog entries are disabled. And they stay disabled, for now.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want you to comment on my blog postings. Should you even want to, is another matter. Let me explain.

I read my share of blogs, and the single most irritating thing about them is the comments that people make. I mean, it’s all about the participation in principle, but many, if not most, of the comments are utter nonsense, fluff, and superfluous. Of course it depends on the topic of the blog, on its admin, frequency of moderation, and many other things, but that seems to be the norm. It’s not just personal blogs; there is a disturbing trend with news sites to let people comment on actual news releases, and it’s a really rare occasion when people, given the chance, have something constructive and useful to say.

I admit I’m old skool in that I still tend to view most media as unidirectional. Television sure is, although I don’t care much for TV. But traditional books and magazines are that, too — I can’t comment on the latest paperback I read and adorn it with some facetious remark. (BTW, Amazon’s user reviews are mostly crap, too. Sorry.) It would take a major change in human nature to make me allow comments on my blog entries. I’m also saving myself a lot of aggravation and moderation, because I’ve seen many neglected blog entries full of actual spam. I wouldn’t want to clean up the debris that some spambot left behind, let alone decide if a comment was worth keeping or not.

People misuse the comments on blogs horribly, not just by writing inane and clueless things, but also by asking questions from the author, or other commenters, even though a dedicated discussion forum for that might exist just nearby. Of course, questions like “how did you achieve what you wrote about?” are semi-smart, but questions like “I installed this software on my mother-in-law’s PC, and now it doesn’t work anymore, can you help me?” are just out of context and dumb.

So, the bottom line is I simply don’t trust you enough to make rational comments. That is why comments are disabled. Tough luck. Myself, I do comment on some blogs, but I try to keep it constructive. And I wouldn’t mind if comments were disabled, because I’ve rarely been able to educate the poster anyway. So it’s basically a waste of time. Yours, too.

(BTW, if you feel the urge to drop me a line, I’m sure you can figure out my e-mail address. Use it if you must.)

It’s been sitting there on this site for almost a year now. You may not have noticed it. It’s an essay (or whatever you want to call it) called “The Good Bit”, and it’s mainly about Tunnel of Love by Dire Straits. It contains a personal story of a fledgling guitarist (me) in the shadow of a professional (Mark Knopfler), and draws an amazing parallel to the late Douglas Adams and his novel So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish. I think you should read it. I mean, you should read both. Start with my piece, please.

For many, many years I had a website. Then many people started having blogs. I didn’t jump on the bandwagon. Nowadays many people have just a blog, and no website. (Yes, a blog is technically a website, but not conceptually.) Now I have both a website and a blog. How do you like that?

Watch out for more stuff.