Looking at back issues of Stern, or was it Focus, I came across a huge advertisement of German coal mining company Deutsche Steinkohle AG, check out page 10 in their campaign leaflet.

Two middle-eastern guerillas on a motorcycle, one just fired an RPG. Caption: “Is this where the decision is made about our energy supply? The future is already here - Deutsche Steinkohle”. And then it goes to describe that 70% of the crude oil supply comes from unstable countries.

What a pleasant angst-ridden advertisement! Here’s my proposal: “Is this the place where they decide about our children’s chocolate supply? 37% of world’s cocoa comes from Ivory Coast. Will you let your children starve? Buy our XYZ caramels!” I will spare myself searching for a properly bloody photo showing the recent unrests in Ivory Coast…

Candy manufactures will sure love it! It’s ethical, politically correct and it doesn’t play on low instincts. (sic!)

I just read that the Polish surrealist Zdzislaw Beksinski was stabbed to death 4 days ago, by some teenagers. A sad streak - he died in a flat, where his son, Tomasz, commited a suicide on Christmas Eve 5 years ago.

It’s kind of strange to read such news about an artist whose “Gigeresque” paintings are all about obsession with death. If you haven’t seen his works - have a look here

A candle from me [*]

Things that creep

Lion’s share of the music I enjoy listening to, is, well, not quite mainstream.

From today’s perspective I don’t even understand how I managed to find new music just a couple of years ago. It must have been a bit of everything - late-night radio broadcasts (Artur Boryczko!), some press articles, having a chat with CD store owner and listening to his favourites, you name it…

Since none of my friends share any enthusiasm for most of what I listen to, the numerous ways
to broaden the horizons, were often strange, unusual and unpredictable.

And that was definitely fun!

Nowadays, I have a “must/should haves” list, evergrowing - thanks to recomendations in amazon, generally googling on things, and more recently looking in musicplasma.
But the whole joy of searching is gone. A pastime of buying new findings, got replaced by a regular frustration when I need to prioritize before ordering something.

So, could it still be called searching, that what we are doing regularly on the internet? Wouldn’t sieving be a more proper name for that kind of activities?

PS. Check out musicplasma. Sites like that sweeten somewhat the loss of the real searching pleasure.

Update:
Just had a look at the title and it sounds very backward. The RANT-LOCK on my keyboard must have been stuck again, I guess :-P. I will not change the post title, of course. So I added the subtitle instead, to convey the point: Although I regularly search the internet, and seldom do a search in the “real world”, I never took the time to realize that shift in the meaning.

More things that creep will sooner or later appear on these pages…

“Warsaw University has the best IT professionals in the world” What a lovely headline I read in Gazeta Wyborcza! How upbeat! Feels like someone had a near miss trying to pat ME on the back! (Warsaw University of Technology rather than Warsaw University - that would have sounded sweeter to me). Oh, but wait… Not quite…

The story is that currently Warsaw University is leading the schools’ ranking and its student, Tomek is leading in the algorithms ranking in top coder competition. FULL STOP.

Not getting sour about the missed pat, I must say - such generalizations aren’t particularly fair to the non-scholar competitors and participants of the developer/designer competitions.

I would be much happier to see some proper survey data about the ingenuity of the Polish IT people from eg. Gartner, rather than some serious overstatements of a would-be journalist.

Oh well, seems there’s no shortcuts - I will have to do some work in order to get a pat ;-)

In the pre-style times if one were to create a layout using tables it would be more or less something like:

<table>
   <tr><td colspan="3">header</td></tr>
   <tr>
      <td>column1</td>
      <td>column2</td>
      <td>column3</td>
   </tr>
   <tr><td colspan="3">footer</td></tr>
</table>

Giving a layout like this:

And then the styles came, and suddenly everyone started looking for the holy grail of css layout. And the holy grail looks something like this:

or like this:

the beautiful end-effect whimsically depending on the length of the columns.

Now what’s so great about it? “Artistically” speaking - the uneven columns bring the feeling of life, a certain
dynamic tension inherent in the page. Oh, bs!

Somehow, most of the pages you see nowadays have such foul looks. Sometimes people conveniently mask this by making everything have the same background color, sometimes the main column is so long, that one doesn’t realize the uneven looks. Nevertheless they’re still there.

Is this the super-duper advantage of css layers over html tables? OK, css gives the separation of form and content, solves many accessibility issues, gives support for different media. That’s all fine, but when I hear that css gives more control, then I ask - where? Because definitely not in the area of simple even layouts.

Would you want to live in a house with each of the walls having an arbitrary height? Ehm… that’s not the best example

Disclaimer:
I do not make web pages for living, so I didn’t spend much time investigating, and bluntly added a javascript to even out the columns on this very page (tho it worked correctly in IE5 without any script whatsoever). I assume that since everyone out there has these ugly uneven columns, there is no clean css-only solution to this. (???)

My 9-month old daughter seems to be liking Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. Probably I won’t learn soon, whether I should be happy or sad about it. My father played Mozart all through my childhood and baby-hood, the result - I could tell “Linzer” from “Prager”, without hearing, just by comparing the bile levels. I hope Massive Attack won’t traumatize her like that.

My working theory is, that it’s probably the low bass sounds that she reacts to. When I buy some CD-shelf and unpack the CDs, I will be able to do more extensive testing, subjecting her to some low-frequency explorations, like Axiom Dub or Biosphere Shenzou. And when I finish the unpacking altogether, I’ll possibly dig a little deeper into the topic.

It’s Only Art if it’s Well Hung - was the name of one of Olivia’s albums, if I remember correctly.

I bought this plunger, ehm… “artistic” plunger in a rush at Obi. The kitchen sink got stuck, so I didn’t even look at it closely, the price tag was a bit annoying, but so was the sink problem. I just thought “why do they always make things so contrived? Why can’t they make a straight handle for once?”. It was only when I got the job done, that I realized I got into posession of a designer artifact. Oh, lucky me…

But why is this plunger of unsurpassed feminine beauty called “Oscar”? Sesame Street doesn’t endorse this kind of kinky associations, I believe.

I was shuttling a bit with my car between Nuremburg and Munich recently, due to moving flats. On a weekend instead of gliding in a small jet stream, as was usually the case, I got caught in a slowly oozing traffic, almost the whole way. Alps-bound skiers! If a car didn’t have a ski case on top, I could easily spot a snowboard inside!

Imagine a highway crammed with cars, accordion cases on top, or tubas, or fly-fishing equipment, whatever. A vision, if not downright silly, at best strange or suspicious.

Now, what’s that about skiing that such a flocking is nothing unusual?

I guess it’s nice to stand back from time to time and look at the world from another angle. Or maybe better not, lest the world turns out all silly one beautiful day.

Nah! I’m just opinionated, and simply don’t understand the merry activity of downward movement on a pair of hi-tech planks :-P