No, I’m not talking about ‘the’ OMD. I was born in the 70s, survived the 80s and must have heard my share of their songs.
The OMD I’m talking about is an online marketing fair that’s being held in Düsseldorf once a year. It’s one of the largest exhibitions in online marketing in Europe, and meeting point for the trade. It’s two days only, so everyone’s pretty busy checking out what’s new. Long hours, anybody…?
Even more legendary than the fair as such may be the partys afterwards…. This year’s ‘must’ event was the LayerAds OMclub – and let me just tell you: It rocked! Congrats to Randolf and his team.
I was returning from my re-indoctrination in Bielefeld (You should all come to Bielefeld…. just don’t wear any Foil hats – THEY don’t like that.) this evening and trying to enjoy a comfy seat in a clean and punctual train of the Deutsche Bahn (Ok, I’m kidding, but the train was at least on time!), when all of a sudden I realized the wagon was filled up with soccer fans.
It might not surprise many of you that I’m not too fond of soccer as such, but while it can be fun to fool around with the ball a bit and have a good time with your friends, watching soccer is kinda like the most boring thing you can waste your time on – ok, baseball excluded. And drying paint.
But even though having to watch soccer is likely to be one of the punishments in one of the outer rings of hell, being in a wagon filled with drunken soccer fans can either be fun, or one of the tortures in one of the inner rings of hell. Depends massively on legislation, weapons in your current possession and other influences of the same nature.
Unfortunately, being unarmed and pretty sure that current laws don’t allow anything fun, as well as being a total minority of one against many, you can just lean back, shut up and think of it as a safari into the unknown depths of human? behavior.
‘Welcome to the jungle’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses would have been a nice soundtrack…
I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say it was a fascinating experience. I’ve never heard songs like that, seen tool development evolve and territorial markings done. Well, except on any nature or animal show in television I’ve ever seen.
Hey Darwin – if you still need further proof for that thesis of yours – give me a call.
And for the crazy bunch of bible huggers creationists out there: If God created man to his likeness – ooops…. I spot some flaws.
Found a Google gap? You feel that this gap shouldn’t be just filled, but it should become a landmark on the web? Easiest solution: Offer a free iPhone for the owner of the website that ranks #1 for the phrase in Google search after a fixed period of time.
When Randolf had the idea to rock the OMD by having a non-boring party on the first day, he created a buzz amongst to usual suspects, but when MacNotes decided that they would have a SEO contest for the word “Befreiphone”, the blogosphere went wild…and it wasn’t alone.
As I myself have no chance to win, I decided on two things:
1) Have a good time at the LayerAds OMclub
2) Link to the guy who offered to raffle money amongst his trackbackers if he wins the iPhone
Disc what? Golf. That’s like Golf, but with a Frisbee. It’s way more fun than actual golfing.
Arno, one of our CI/Graphic design guys at metapeople organized a company outing to the small, incredibly too-much-nature-around-me city of Meinerzhagen, were we played disc golf, or frisbee golf. It was a fun day for all participants – and Swiss 1, the team from our new swiss office scored best with 31 on the Par 27 course. They won the ‘Highscore’ award with that, and also our second nine holes of the day. Since not everybody wanted to do the second nine, only the first round was counted for the overall results, and again one of the swiss guys (together with Nadine) came in first with 32. I scored the (parted) second place with my teammate Robin with 33, the same result that DAS LOTH and his teammate Jennifer had. Since we got divided into groups with three two player teams each, there was also a group competition, which our group won easily with a total score of 102. Robin’s and my second round was a 32, and as the best ‘german’ team of the day we decided to name us ‘Deutschland 1′, but other than the bobsled team with the same name, we stood no chance against the Swiss…
Lots of beers and grilled food ensured that noone lacked the energy for partying, and the Ping Pong games are sure to become a metapeople legend…
Thanks a lot for the fun day guys – hope we’ll be doing this again!
Just downloaded and installed Chrome, the new browser from Google. Unfortunately, you can only download the browser if your current browser is configured to identify your computer as a Windows system. Chrome is available for XP and Vista only at the moment, if you try accessing the Chrome page (www.google.com/chrome) with a OS X system (I only tried Safari, but I guess it’s the same for Firefox), you only get an option to sign up for updates on the development for *NIX and OS X systems.
Installation was easy enough, as a minor setback, you had to download an installer first that downloads the actual setup files afterwards. It was amazingly quick though, especially as I assume there’s lots of traffic hitting the download page currently. Setup itself worked perfect on my virtual machine (XP SP3) and was rather quickly done.
First impressions of the browser: Not much to configure, very nice, very clean GUI. Chrome asks whether you want to keep Google as your default search engine at the first start, which I allowed. If it encounters a site that requires a plugin (Flash in this case), it askes whether you want to download the plugin or not, and after allowing that, downloading and installing the plugin was fast and without any problems at all. While testing, I found that popups were blocked without problems, however layer ads still show up – annoyingly as ever.
I’ll add screenshots later on, and will write some more about Chrome as soon as I convinced the IT to install it on my PC at work….
Turns out there wasn’t any links for “Sinusscrollerplugin” on Google…
I still believe that a Sinusscroller would be perfect for any oldschool related topics – whether for comments or blogposts, I couldn’t care less. It would be perfect if it would provide some chiptunes as well…
I honestly don’t know. I guess around 200, not counting all those from my childhood days. It happened more than once to me that I was searching around, found a book from one of my favorite authors and bought it, just to find out I already had it. I started adding books to several websites that are offering free digital librarys where you can add your books to a virtual shelf and have a look what you already possess while browsing Amazon or Abebooks or other online sources.
Unfortunately, my previous favorite, www.lovelybooks.de stopped an easy way to add books – by searching the Amazon index and adding foreign books easily by entering the ISBN number. Since most of the books I own aren’t in the lovelybooks database, and adding them manually wasn’t as easy (I’m not sure whether it was or is currently possible at all), I stopped using the site.
Leuk pointed me to another site that offers the same service, for free, and even their layout is nicer than the one from lovelybooks.de. Yes, Amazon index search works, and adding books is as easy as it used to be… This new page is available in german and english (german by default), and it can be found at www.quillp.com. Check it out, it’s worth a try – I for one have found a new digital home for my library. If they would also offer a mobile page so I could check on my smartphone whether or not I have this book already whilst in a bookstore, I’d be in heaven
And for all those among you who need not only a digital home for their books, but also for DVDs or CDs – check out www.reliwa.de. Great site, I heard, but for some reasons I never really started using it, even though I have an account.
Is the title of a short story by William Gibson. I guess that was not the main reason to name the coming Google Browser ‘Google Chrome’ instead of ‘GBrowser’ or something similar uninteresting, but I could imagine it might have contributed…
Google does it like nobody else – their announcement was a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud… It has been released under a CC licence and can be found here.
The main URL for Chrome, www.google.com/chrome is not yet working, but I would expect that to change soon.
Sidenote on ‘Chrome’: Since the browser isn’t just for websites any longer, but also foundation for ‘thick web client server apps’, as Appleinsider put it, I betting on a Google Adwords Editor release based on Chrome shortly after the official launch of ‘Google Chrome’.
Speaking of William Gibson, I just thought about reading his works *again*. I’ll skip the ‘Neuromancer’ triology though, as I just read it recently, and start with the ‘Brigde’ triology instead. If you call yourself Geek, Nerd or ‘I’m interested in computers and the internet’ and haven’t yet read any of Gibson’s works, do it. NOW!
Since I have no plans at all for an ego page, no “about me” or whatever, quotes days might offer a glimpse at me. At what I like, or at least find interesting enough to post. Don’t expect too much…
“Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.” [Oscar Wilde]
