Author: Daniel

Weg mit dem Internet Explorer!

It can’t be said often enough: Please don’t use the Inter­net Explor­er to surf the inter­net. There are so many so much bet­ter alter­na­tives. The Microsoft Inter­net Explor­er is a very inse­cure brows­er, as report­ed innu­mer­able times. The cur­rent case can be read, for exam­ple, here:

Attack­ers are lever­ag­ing legit­i­mate web­sites to more quick­ly spread mal­ware that exploits a zero-day vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in Inter­net Explor­er (IE), Microsoft said this week­end. […] The vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty […] affects all sup­port­ed ver­sions of IE. […] Users are encour­aged to apply sug­gest­ed workarounds detailed in Microsoft­’s advi­so­ry.

But these workarounds are all less than help­ful for the aver­age user. And I feel less than hap­py if I have to apply them on all my friends com­put­ers. Therefore:

Please, please, please, use anoth­er brows­er. My per­son­al rec­om­men­da­tion is Fire­fox, but Safari, Opera or even Chrome are per­fect­ly use­ful browsers. These brows­er pro­grams are all free to use and are at least as capa­ble as Microsoft Inter­net Explor­er. Here are a links to down­load pages of them:

It is not a bad idea to install sev­er­al of these brows­er and try out which one you like most, and which one dis­plays your favorite web pages best.

Next, please update the brows­er you install and use on a reg­u­lar basis. The auto­mat­ic update func­tion has been built into these brows­er for pre­cise­ly that purpose.

Die Kalorienregeln zu Weihnachten

Since christ­mas is approach­ing quick­ly, it is impor­tant to remem­ber the calo­ry rules (please print out and attach to the door of your refrigerator):

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  1. If you eat some­thing and nobody sees it, it has no calories. 
  2. If you drink a Diet Lemon­ade and with it you eat a choco­late bar, the calo­ries in the choco­late will be elim­i­nat­ed by Diet Lemonade. 
  3. If you eat togeth­er with oth­ers, only those calo­ries that you eat more than the oth­ers count. 
  4. Food that is tak­en for med­ical pur­pos­es (hot choco­late, red wine, cognac) NEVER counts. 
  5. Feed your friends. The slim­mer you look yourself. 
  6. Food which is con­sumed as a part of enter­tain­ment (pop­corn, peanuts, lemon­ade, choco­late, sweets), for exam­ple when watch­ing videos or lis­ten­ing to music, does not con­tain calo­ries because it is not con­sumed as food but as part of the entertainment. 
  7. Cook­ies and cakes do not con­tain calo­ries if they are bro­ken into small pieces and eat­en piece by piece. The fat vapor­izes when the cook­ies are bro­ken up. 
  8. Every­thing that is licked from knives, pots or spoons dur­ing food prepa­ra­tion does not con­tain calo­ries because it is part of the food preparation. 
  9. Food of the same col­or (e.g. toma­toes and straw­ber­ry jam, mush­rooms and white choco­late) has the same con­tent of calories. 
  10. Frozen food does not con­tain calo­ries because calo­ries are a mea­sure of heat. 

Definition:

Calo­ries are small ani­mals liv­ing in the wardrobe and sewing your clothes tighter at night.

(Found on talkaboutusa.com)

Änderungen an der Webpräsenz

Je suis en train de chang­er cette présence sur l’In­ter­net. En par­ti­c­uli­er, ça con­cerne le sys­tème mul­ti-lan­guage. Si vous avez des prob­lèmes à trou­ver cer­tain con­tenu, c’est prob­a­ble­ment pourquoi. Merçi pour votre patience.

Wer braucht noch eine Idee für ein Weihnachtsgeschenk?

[Triga­mi-Review] This is a review I wrote on behalf of Osu­ru, with­out instruc­tions from them, though. I was paid with one of their (less expen­sive) experiences.

Since Osu­ru’s offer­ing is avail­able in ger­man only, I won’t trans­late my ger­man review into eng­lish. Please switch to ger­man to read it in the orig­i­nal language.

Gemeinsam gegen Armut — Die Milleniumskampagne

www.gemeinsamgegenarmut.ch

Well, I usu­al­ly am not very polit­i­cal. But recent­ly, some­one point­ed out the mil­le­ni­um cam­paign (“joint effort against pover­ty”) to me. This is the Swiss web­site, this is the Ger­man ver­sion, and here is anoth­er site about it. I think the eight goals of the cam­paign make sense, even if some of the things are dis­putable. For exam­ple, I can’t get rid of the feel­ing, that devel­op­ment aid is futile, except for fill­ing the pock­ets of cor­rupt gov­ern­ment clerks or sup­port­ing orga­nized crime. Nonethe­less, it should be tried over and over, since injus­tice and oppor­tu­ni­ty unequal­ness is still so bla­tant through­out the world.

www.gemeinsamgegenarmut.ch

At least, there is a lit­tle gleam of hope. The elec­tions in the unit­ed states of amer­i­ca that have just come to pass have made the worst repub­li­can par­ty mem­bers lose their pow­er and gives the demo­c­rat par­ty a chance to prove the world, that bet­ter ways are possible.

I rec­om­mend par­tic­i­pat­ing in the mil­le­ni­um cam­paign and sup­port its goals.

Die Band Ganges

My step son Michel is the drum­mer of the band Ganges. I per­son­al­ly like Ganges’ music very much. This is why I want to draw some atten­tion to them here. I am not exact­ly sure if he would agree with my clas­si­fi­ca­tion, but I call their music 1970ies-retro-style. The musi­cians them­selves call it, I think, Space Rock.

Some time ago, Ganges par­tic­i­pat­ed in the “Bat­tle of the Bands” and had gigs in the Abart and the Volk­shaus in Zurich. This video is from the Volkshaus:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pacm8s6Onr8&hl=en&fs=1]

Ganges has their own home­page here. They can also be found on myspace. I wish them all the best and good luck!

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