Oliver Thylmann

Just finished (almost) my TMA 02 for the course Managing People at the OU. 2200 words written. Wonderful. /me happy. Now I just need to try out designer tomorrow to get a graphic done visualising Tuchman and Jensen’s stages of team developement as a swing. Never mind

That’s the number of girls and boys already having been thrown into the fountain on the main square here.
Yes, you might have guessed it. The sound check for Pur (not BAP as I said yesterday) has started and the first fans have arrived. It’s still 7 hours till the concert starts though.
Going out to look around a bit.

Well. Aachen is the center of the music world (in Aachen ) these days. Today the german singer Sasha should have been coming but he has a cough. Blah! Not that anyone in our house here really loves any of the artists comeing with all their heart, it is still fun to have these open air gigs right behind our house.
Sadly we cannot see the stage but only hear it.
Tomorrow we will have BAP, another german band and only if they do not get a cold too We will probably barbeque on the roof to listen.
Thursday will be nice with Vonda Shepard, which is nice even though I already saw her in Cologne a short time ago. But this is one of the groups that will interest me the most.
Friday will be Scorpions. Boy this will be a blast and probably a lot of fun people to look at wondering around
The interesting thing is that Saturday is some weird band that I have no clue about. Hmmm… I will report back to the world and to keep my thoughts here.
The cool thing is that we have a beer tent in front of our window too
Oh, and I tried out skyscraper ads on Counted! today. Actually looks ok but sadly Flycast, emm.. Engage, does not have paying ads for those yet. Bummer. Would be nice. Other than that I will put Tribal Fusion on Counted! too, like I did with BeNews.

Well it seems, Unisys is sorry. Really sorry for inventing the UNIVAC 1 in 1951. The full press release can be found here:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010614/2170.html

Specifically, Unisys apologized for:
*Making it impossible for anyone to do more than five minutes’ worth of work without being interrupted by an emailed joke, Top Ten list, or chain letter.
[...]
*Relegating to obscurity the smell of fresh-cut flowers because the only flowers you ever get to smell nowadays are the ones you see in online pictures when you’re ordering them to appease an irate spouse, who’s feeling neglected because you’re spending every spare minute online.
[...]
*Ending that great morning tradition of newspaper and coffee, because by the time your coffee is hot, the “news’ in your newspaper is already two generations behind the online edition.
[...]
*Getting you so used to receiving responses in nanoseconds that you can no longer wait the ten seconds it takes for your microwave oven to warm up your bagel.
*Making it impossible for you to justify that trip to a training workshop in Cancun because all the training you’ll need is now available on your desktop.
*Making it possible for you to vacation in Cancun without ever losing touch with your boss back at the office.
*Forcing you to go through a five-minute startup routine every time your computer crashes while you’re creating a three-minute memo.
[ WE NEED A NEW VERSION OF BEOS DAMN IT! ]
*Giving SPAM a bad name.
[...]
*Making it easier for the IRS to spot discrepancies between your tax return and objective reality.
*Reducing your life and everything in it to a series of counterintuitive acronyms.
*Giving you a false sense of security regarding the spelling and grammatical accuracy of your next memo.
*Increasing your volume of in-mail to the point where you have to devote significant time outside of regular working hours to get through it all.
*Eliminating the concept of regular working hours.
*Providing you with the means to lose money in the stock market at an unprecedented pace.
*The half-dozen keystrokes you need to press for the privilege of being put on hold.
*All those Monday morning deadlines you didn’t know about because they were emailed to your laptop at 10:00 p.m. on Sunday.
*All those theater tickets you can no longer buy at the door because every seat has already been sold online.
*The dot.com bubble.
*The bursting of the dot.com bubble.
*The concept of multitasking.
*The avalanche of press releases that any company with a media directory and access to email can now generate at a moment’s notice.

That’s the number of Friends Episodes I have watched up till now starting this morning at 12.
I NEED HELP
Talk to you later, 33 just starting, don’t you just love DVDs?

Thanks to the Oxford Dictionary, “DUH!” (from Homer of the Simpsons) is now an official english word. Catch the story on CNN.
Update: Hmmm… thanks to sean I now know that I really made a fool of myself It’s DOH! not DUH!
I TOLD YOU ALL. TOOOO MUCHHHH FRIENDSSSSS

My brother got Episodes 4,5 and 6 of Friends as DVD. My brother is gone for the weekend. I have his DVD Player. I have the Friends DVDs. over 12 hours of Friends each.
This will be a fun weekend.

Once again I was woken up by:
“Test. 1.2.3. Test. Test…” today.
I went to club from 1am to 5:30 am yesterday and around the nice time of 10am the 3 student bands that are playing on the market today (in front of my window) started testing the sound system. at 12am the first band started and sleeping was no longer an option. What I really hate is the introduction from the singer (translated from german):
“Good morning Aachen. If it is too loud for you, then go somewhere else.”
Asshole!

We had a relatively short DoS attack on our servers yesterday. Something like 30 minutes to one hour. Actually it was an entire class C subnet that was hit and our servers just happen to be in there. We have no idea if our servers were attack explicitely. Grrrr… These things really suck. I mean you are sitting there and there is close to nothing you can do. An entire Cisco Switch/Router broke down it seems.
Ah well. It’s over now and there is no realy damage. Our servers were not hit too hard and seems like the counters still worked more or less reliably even, partly to my amazement.

See… I am already starting. If you are really into sound, then this article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58447-2001Jun12.html

will be a nice read.
Actually even if you are not it will make you wonder. But I promise you, they are right. I would currently not spend $150.000 for a hi-fi system, but I remember something from when I bought my first one.
I have Sony CD player and Cassette player (bad boy, bad boy! ) and B&W speakers. The main driver is a hand made Aura Evolution amp from england which just rocks. Power button, volume control, switch for CD, Cassette, Phono,… It really rocks. I loved it when I bought it and it was just the right price for me several years back.
But I went into the backroom of the place where I bought it and put my Living Colour CD into the main system they had there.
IT IS LIKE THEY SAY IN THE ARTICLE!!! You suddenly feel like the band is in the room. I heard a lot (and I mean a lot) of new sounds, effects, notes, whatever inside the song I just listened to on my system in the other room. It is totally amazing. Then again, that system cost about $30.000, so it was way out of my league, but read the article and you will understand.
These things are wild. Now I listen to MP3s mostly as it is easier to just mix a lot of different thigns but if I really want to listen to something deeply, I still need a CD even if it is not the same thing as an old vinyl LP.