Branko's Weblog

Had I mentioned that Maciej Ceglowski is in Beijing? The other day he accidentally wandered into one of the city’s most secret space travel facilities. He gets busted, and his feeble possessions investigated.

At some point the fat cop walked in again to make another attempt at the cell phone, guards springing back to attention around him. Having suffered the slings and arrows of the phone’s outrageous user interface for three months, it gave me a secret thrill to watch this battle. But as confident as I was of the outcome, I worried that the cop might accidentally squeeze the button on the side of the phone and thereby discover the phone’s built-in camera.

By my estimate the phone had about fifty photographs stored on it – two of my bewildered face squinting at the phone, one of my hand, and forty seven of the inside of my pocket. I had no way of verifying this, though, because the built-in photograph viewer was not navigable by mortal man. Only the pure of heart, to whom the user interface would open like a blushing rose, could activate the picture viewer.

Who knew that bad usability and international espionage go hand in hand?

Nice trailer (WMV) for Paul Verhoeven’s new movie, Zwartboek.

Edit: and I am not just saying that because, as someone put it, “Carice van Houten has the nicest ass in a trailer ever”. Though that helps.

The Louis Couperus Society has a very active Dutch weblog about culture from around 1900 CE.

Reinder introduces me to Numa Numa dancing. I like it. (Yeah, I know I am catching on late. And don’t bring a webcam near me.)

A nice annecdote by Joel Spolsky on how one day the big man came in to review something Joel had written.

Kyle MacDonald, the Montrealais who started trading his way up from a red paperclip to a house a little under a year ago, has managed to reach his goal. He originally traded his red paperclip for a fish shaped pen, and his latest barter was a movie part for a house.

Man is one fifth egoist, one fifth hedonist, two fifths sadist and one fifth naïve fool (Dutch). Just so you know.

Last weekend I went to the Jacqueline Taïeb concert I wrote about earlier, which was presented by my friend Natasha. Yuri has put up a clip with fragments of a couple of songs.

It seems the Seventies will stay with us for a while. Electrofons (see photo) for sale. Even the Keracolor started its come-back this week. More here and here.

The upside is that the Fifties are now dirt-cheap.

Via Kane, via Yuri. Fifties via Natasha.

Maciej Ceglowski visits the southern-most city in the world:

They realized they were not the first to pass that way, for the path that led around the left of the Great Plain was well-worn and dotted with booths. At one they bought a box of fudge, which had been baked in an oven in a cave in the mountain, which was heated by the fire of the letters that formed God’s Final Message to His Creation. At another they bought some postcards. The letters had been blurred with an airbrush, “so as not to spoil the Big Surprise!” it said on the reverse.

OK, so that wasn’t by Maciej Ceglowski, and it wasn’t about the southern-most city in the world. But this Douglas Adams quote shows that entrepeneurs are the same everywhere, whether they work at the end of the world, the end of time, or any of a dozen or so locations that are the end of the world. This is Maciej:

The only substantial city on Tierra del Fuego is Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. You will learn this interesting fact at the (southernmost!) airport and have it repeated it to you a dozen times before you can get to your southernmost hotel. Downtown, next to the Falklands Memorial, you will see an enormous sign reading “Welcome to the End of the World!”

[...]

Most of the visitors in Ushuaia don’t fly in, but arrive on one of the giant cruise ships that dock here during the summer, on the South American circuit. As a result, the city is an empire of steakhouses and porphyry penguin gift shops designed for people with five hours of shore leave. You can pretty much buy the southernmost anything you want, if you can stand the markup.

There’s more… Anyway, this is the third time I mentioned the Idle Words blog, you should be able to find your way there on your own now.