general

Man, I'm frustrated... while getting a client's project ready for deployment I noticed that performance on the production server was dismal and went about debugging when I realized that the CPU-hog wasn't the new project but... the Zope instance serving tomster.org...!

Okay, this geek and his family is off for a week with good friends, lots of snow, mountains, fresh air, alcohol, fire etc. pp. but without internet access. I'll see y'all next year! Thanks for stopping by here, it's been the most fun year blogging and being a nerd - hope to continue that!

Everybody: have a happy new year!

Every once and a while I get excited about something eventhough it has no practical relevance to me whatsoever - simply for the fact that somebody got it utterly right. Usually it's something relatively simple on a conceptual level but brilliantly executed with attention to detail. Check out iPlayMusic's demo video and perhaps you'll know what I mean. Or maybe I'm just kinda weird - who knows...

via TUAW

Unbeknownst to the majority of the readers of this blog (a.k.a. "the other five guys") I'm actually in Florence, Italy since Wednesday evening and officially on holiday with the family. Hooray! Well, except that I've managed to catch a nasty cold on Tuesday and that the weather here is rather dismal... so I spent a lot of the time here sitting in the 14th century apartment of our wonderful hosts and enjoy cups of columbian lime tea and 3Mbs/s wireless internet...

Yesterday evening, after the kids were finally asleep (the percentage of stuff that they are not allowed to play with in this apartment is way higher than at home, poor guys...) Mascha and I took a nice (dry!) walk through the centre of Florence (our hosts live a convenient 800 metres from the Ponte Vecchio) and I really can't help but admit that I was rather impressed how beautiful everything is... It's quite a difference to see a few isolated beautiful buildings but every single one in an entire city? Mindboggling... It's not so much that every house is something special in itself but rather that all of them - out of tradtition, I presume - have been built following the same set of classical design principles that are simply pleasing to the eye - unlike, say, in Berlin where every other house is designed according to some school of design or other (if you're lucky) and a lot of them have been downrightly abused by Eastern German "modernizations" or post-reunification investors.

Well, if the weather gets better we'll undertake some trips around Toscany - if not I'll tinker some more with my instaPlone script and watch reruns of the Daily Show's Indecision 2004 and the recent episodes of the Colbert Report (man, is that guy nuts, or what?)

• people are more polite
• trains run smoother and more quietly (and are cheaper)
  
• Sunday seems to be taken way more seriously here
• people seem to take more care about the way they look (or perhaps that's a byproduct of Sunday being taken seriously)
• as mentioned elsewhere, Vienna is noticably more expensive
• free wifi seems to present no problem ;-)

Aside from these Vienna specific observations there's the more personal one that I've simply become too damn old to perform well with only two hours of sleep under my belt. It's now 4:45 pm and if I were a car, I'd be running on fumes... at 7 p.m. we'll head over to the opening session at a nearby restaurant. Then I'll either get revitalized by some Goesser or hopefully be able to crash early at our hosts place...