It's always about the money...

I was just talking with a friend about why wouldn't Switzerland enter the EU.And he told me that, basically, Switzerland doesn't need the EU, and if they'd enter, their [ridiculously] high standard of living would actually decrease.

And that's when it hit me: the European Union would have never existed either if it wouldn't have been economically advantageous. And all the "European identity" and "European nation"-talk was slapped on, afterwards. So, if the union weren't profitable, no one would have cared about the "European nation". This reminds me of a joke:

Several upper-class gentlemen were discussing about sex. Some of them argued that it is 90% pleasure and 10% work, while others said it is 50-50. Unable to reach a conclusion, they asked a butler what did he think about this. And the butler answered: "It's 100% pleasure, because if it were even 1% work, you'd have had me do it for you." ;-)

So, I'm starting to think that the European Union is about "the European spirit", just as much as George "Dubya" Bush's "war against terror" is about fighting terrorists.

posted Sunday, March 20th 2005 at 13:48 | permalink

Is this for real?

Well, boys and girls (or, rather, "girls and boys"), brace yourselves, 'cause here it comes! The all new, Debian-based, Barbie OS! Yaaay! [ Note to the male readers: the linked site does contain pink and purple. You have been warned. ]

Here's a gem:

The researchers also concluded that restrictive EULAs, proprietary file formats, and digital rights management technologies were not popular with pre-adolescent females, and almost none were satisfied with the results of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Initiative during the last year.

I'm rolling on the floor, laughing at the thought of hearing a girl (aged 4 to 11) saying the above things. :-))

And another one:

"Most girls up through adult women become frightened and confused, often hysterical when presented with a traditional command prompt," Cesterino explained, "therefore the console program available through the B-Menu in BarbieOS features pink text on a flowered background so as to not intimidate or threaten females, and all windows are circular instead of the usual square, since most females unconsciously associate a circular shape with inclusiveness and the womb."

Ohhh... the horrors... a pink terminal... ;-)

posted Thursday, March 17th 2005 at 11:47 | permalink

Cultural exports

The other day I was walking around in Zurich, and I noticed the poster for a DJ Bobo concert, called "The Pirates of Dance" -- the poster looked like a "Lord of the Dance" / "Pirates of the Carribean" rip-off, but that's irrelevant.

Anyway, on the poster, it said something like DJ Bobo -- Switzerland's main cultural export. When I saw that, I was about to break into laughter (I wouldn't be proud with DJ Bobo), but then I remembered that our main cultural export is O-Zone -- which is orders of magnitude worse -- so I decided to STFU instead. ;-)

posted Sunday, March 13th 2005 at 14:07 | permalink

Slashdot pearls

Well, just as I was talking about blogs, I've just come across these two posts on slashdot. The context of the discussion is Richard Grimes' criticism of .NET; a .NET developer, Dan Fernandez, responded to the criticism in his blog. While the original articles are very entertaining themselves, here's what the slashdotters think about them (and blogging in general):

syntap:

How would you feel if someone criticized stuff YOU made in a public forum? This blogging stuff has gone TOO FAR and doesn't respect peoples' feelings.

Anonymous Coward:

Your post sucks.

I guess this describes blogging quite accurately. ;-)

posted Monday, March 7th 2005 at 16:26 | permalink

The blog people

It seems that not everybody is happy with the blogging phenomenon. Michael Gorman from the American Library Association thinks that bloggers are not "in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts" (I can't argue with that. :-D ). He even refers to us (hey, I am a blogger, after all, whether I like it or not) as "the blog people". That sounds to me just like "the mole people".

While I can't really contradict his views, I don't think that blogging should be discarded that easily. It's true that most bloggers aren't that cultivated, but blogging is an exercise of free speech. And that shouldn't be taken lightly. To paraphrase Richard Stallman, if you don't exercise a certain freedom, you won't mind losing it.

From a different point of view, although many blogs are full of "my dog has a fluffy tail", there are many others who are not just a waste of the reader's time. Take Mako's as an example; so far none of his humorous posts has disappointed me. ;-) Other, more technical blogs, while not as entertaining, are a valuable source of information. From this point of view, I find planet debian more interesting than slashdot, because the stories there are better matched with my own interests.

So, as far as blogging goes, there's enough out there for anyone's taste. And the good news is that, if you don't like blogging, you can just ignore it, 'cause it's not like it's jumping straight at you.

In other news, this site has suffered (or, rather, it has enjoyed ;-) ) a major reconstruction. From now on, it is maintained using the Website Meta Language, which is a combination of 9 different markup generation engines, Perl and M4 being two of them (can you say "kludge"? ;-) ). It's the same engine as the one powering the debian site. As a result, this entire site is static, and there's no CGI at all, anymore. And, thanks to tidy, it's XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant.

posted Sunday, March 6th 2005 at 21:22 | permalink