If anyone wants to know how GRPS really works …
Monthly Archives: July 2001
Book Review: Circle of Seven
I just read Circle of Seven by Clay Jacobsen. To use the Amazon description:
Challenged to create a sensational story for the sweeps ratings period, Investigative television reporter Mark Taylor embarks on what becomes the most dangerous adventure of his career.
Taking a fresh look behind the scenes of the political process, Mark expects to to find a strong bias in the polling questions and how the results are reported. Instead He uncovers something else?more sinister and evil than he had ever expected.
A clandestine group of media elite is manipulating the country to their own twisted ideals, and only Mark stands in their way.
Suspense blends with romance when Mark meets and falls in love with Tracy Faircloth, granddaughter of the mysterious circle’s leader. He must choose between his career or the truth, and all hangs in the balance as he seeks to bring down the Circle of Seven.
It’s really very good. I read it through the night until 5:30 am, which kind of tells you how good it is 
The only thing I did not like is that it is written with a very Christian group bounding together so well for the sake of good things and helping everybody and I sometimes wondered if the author was writing a story or wanted me to become a Christian. But I have to say that it fits well into the book, so I would say it is ok.
If you are looking for a good book to read then take this for your holidays. It will get your mind of things and you will have some fun reading it. But depending how fast you read you will have to buy another book too
Make the cow fly
I came up to 420 points up till now
This is what I call a good investment :)
It seems that SunTrust (http://www.suntrustwachoviaproposal.com/History.htm) has bought some Coca-Cola shares. To be exact, they bought $110,000 worth of shares in 1919. These are now 48,266,496 shares of common stock. The current share price is $46,11. This is worth roughly 2.2 Billion USD Nice return on investment I would say
Nice and silent
Ahhh… it is nice and silent here today. Yesterday we had band on the market all day and from time to time it can really drive you nuts. At least it is over now.
On another note I finished summing up the 400 pages of Managing People module in the management course to 40 pages. There is a lot of detail still in there which I want to have rather than having less pages and there is still some sidebar space to write stuff down and all in nice big letters. Me is happy. I also learned a great deal in the process as always and now I need to revise a bit more until the test on Tuesday.
On top of that we just finished the redesign of our adult statistics service which we sold to another company and are now running for them. It looks really cool. It’s also growing nicely at the moment and thanks to the deal we will have a lot more exposure soon which means that it will grow even more.
Make them dance
Want to make the german primeminister and others dance? Go here:
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/sz/kultur/bundesdance/start.html
It totally rocks.
So how usable is Gnome
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/report_main.html
They just set a few normal people in front of a machine running gnome and looked at how the reacted and performed. Nice. Reading …
Some MP3 thoughts
Thinking again, as I always do when I have to do other things. This time I saw an ad for the newest Dave Mathews Band album (available on amazon) and I really wanted to have it, or at least listen to it.
Ordering it at Amazon will take a few days, which I will still be doing most likely but … it takes a bit. This is not acceptable though. I want it now. At this moment. I will probably like it in a week too but I would love it now. It’s what you call impulse buys. Buying it now and waiting a week would probably be an impulse buy but for me a real impulse buy would mean that I also have it now, not only that I buy it now.
Now don’t come to me with shops and going out to buy it. I am fairly happy sitting inside and not walking through the rain at the moment and I like to buy stuff at amazon. First of all it’s easy and second it will ad to my amazon bill and they tend to be nicer to people with higher bills
This is where MP3s come in though. The album costs me about 16 EUR here in germany if I buy the CD. If they had offered my to download 128kbit/s mp3s for 10 EUR with a possible reduction of 7 EUR if I buy the CD later I would have jumped at the chance. They would already be on my harddrive, with a coupon for the CD sitting nicely in my amazon account, or whatever other account we are talking about.
If I love the CD then I would like to have the CD at one point or the other, maybe. Even 256kbit/s mp3s might just not cut it. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I will really have to watch out for more infos on this one, e.g. from . But in general I think the coupon on the CD would be a good idea.
First of all you would have people think they only spend 3 EUR for the MP3s if they still want the CD having people who really just want the music download the MP3s even if they are not convined of the MP3 format. I would just load the MP3s on my Archos Jukebox and be happy.
Another option would be to let me download the MP3s when I buy the CD. I mean download now. I buy the CD have the MP3s until the CD arrives. Now that would be service.
Somebody I know recently bought Visual C++. Expensive. Getting shipped. Next thing he did was download a copy of the web somewhere because he wanted it _now_ and not in a week, which was the time it took the package to arrive.
In the following months if not years MP3 will have to fight to get out of the underground and into the mainstream for things like this to happen.
The other thing is that young people might not have the money to spend a lot of money on CDs. Why not give them an inexpensive subscription so they get hocked on having 10 new albums on their desk per month? In MP3 form of course.
Later you will spend more money for something like this or somehow buy the extras that come with it.
All this needs a lot of thinking but the thinking will come, at least I hope it does. It would rock. I would love it.
Pay $30 per month to have access to 10 albums per month as MP3 in 128kbit/s from Amazon including a 20% discount on all CDs that you buy. How does that sound?
What a night
Had a wonderful evening yesterday with my gf. We went out to one party a friends around 1800 which included a BBQ. A lot of nice talks with people I never met before and it was very interesting because those were mostly married couples. We are getting older.
The the entire party decided to go see the Koelner Lichter (http://www.koelner-lichter.de/) and most went by tram (city-train) and we thought we’d take the car because we needed to go somewhere else afterwards. After 30 minutes we figured this was a bad mistake. We wanted to meet the others at the Rhein (the river through cologne) but just didn’t get there. The city was packed. Suddenly they called that they were able to get on the roof of the WDR building so as our last chance we figured we would go there too. Once we arrived they told us that we could not come up anymore. Grrr… We had been driving around the city for 1hour and 20 minutes. We should normally have taken 20 minutes or something including the parking space
But as we had a parking spot we, all 5 of us who went with cars, decided to run toward the Rhein. The cool thing was that we were closer than we thought and actually arrived in time for the fireworks to start. Amazing. There was a big boat, which normally carries coal or something, in the middle of the Rhein and the fire works went of from there. 30 minutes. In sync with loud music coming from speakers all over the place. We were right in front of the boat and around the side of the river and on two bridges there were, as the police told at the end, close to 250.000 people. All watching the river and the firworks.
Fireworks coupled with music are simply amazing. It just too cool to see these things go off in sync with the music when a rocket takes 3 seconds to launch. These people knew what they were doing. The boat was turning into a thick cloud from all the launches that were happening. Sometimes they just seemed to launch a big collection of rockets which is when you saw a cloud about 2 meters in diameter and 4 meters high shoot up on the boat.
The even launched fireworks into the Rhein which then exploded on the surface of the water. WECO Feuerwerk, who seem to be kind of like world champions of fireworks (http://www.weco-feuerwerk.de/ , can’t get to the site at the momnet) did the show at the end and they really pulled it of very well.
Next, around 12:15 we went on to the next party at another friends place which was again very nice but totally different from the first party. I really don’t want to be their neighboors. We were singing and playing guitar at 2 am with open windows and everything.
Very nice all in all.
