honestly foolish - without guarantee

Just sorting out my thoughts, logging down hilarious content and amusing my Freundeskreis.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Theory of PADI Open Water Diver started

Today we've started our first lesson for diving on Lombok. Slightly changed course due to Ksenia's sunburn, but we used the time for going thru the manuals and completing the theory-chapter 1 & 2, including a follow-up DVD as a refresher in the night.

Thats 6 hours work for today, looking forward for the first practical lesson - optional in open water or the pool - tomorrow. Our instructor left it up to us, tomorrows weather and if Ksenia and me stay alone in the course.
Actually it's a lot to learn, including fun - but: as diving can cause serious damage, injury or death if you. don't follow the rules, we take it serious. But as it's very straight forward - material and the instructors help - I'm quite sure we'll succeed and have the big amazing expirience like thousand of thousands before of us.

Now dinner is done and we're about to start the night-life. Less busy the people, even the lonely-planet keeps telling about. But still an extraordinary amount offers of fish, food, DVDs, weed, all cheap and descent. Trawangan, we start to enjoy you more and more.

K & D :)

Monday, August 28, 2006

Bali & Lombok 2006 Trip-diary startin'

We are alive and no more kicking!

I'm running quite behind to keep posting here, but it was a very busy time while on our holidays in Indonesia. We kept writing the daily expirience down the old fashioned way with pen & paper, as Internet on Bali, especially in Ubud was kinda slow.

Now I've activated the email blogging mode, sending this blog entry now from my blackberry, laying in a hammock on Gili Trawangan, a small island north-east to lombok. The Bintang beer nearby is cold, the homestay bungalow cheap and the reggae sound from the party-island pubs and restaurants gives the right backround atmosphere to start chilling in our hols.

We've travelled a lot in the past 10 days on bali with a small jeep we rented, seen douzen of huge temple / thousands of smaller ones, ceremonies, did some rafting, snorkeling and manymany other impressive things. As the first 60% of our journey was planned to be cultural orientated, we've arrived to the 'Gillies' (indonesian for Island) today with a direct boat transfer from Padang-Bai.

I won't spoil to much of details right now, as we will start posting chronolically all days day-by-day. This entry is meant to be the starter, we might add some smaller notes via blackberry, but going to put the major content, photos and maps in later.
Ksenia burned her back yesterday due to an awesome snorkling yesterday all day in Amed, eastern Bali. The corals are just 10m in front of our bungalow at vienna-beach, with a huge amount of fish - we just couldn't stop it. So probably we won't start the PADI tomorrow as planned, but one day later. If that stays true, we may go back to Bali on sunday, checking a SPA and another dance in Ubud and going shopping for our return on the 6th.

But I won't start thinking about the return yet, looking forward to the stay on Trawagan, diving, party (lot's of young travellers here, different to Bali) and good food. I may leave the magic mushrooms out they keep offering you at each corner ;)

Until then - stay tuned for more and many greetz from the gorgeous south-eastern asia!

Dan - the Hammock - man

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Geeks Palace


Meanwhile the certain point of departure comes near and nearer, I'll use my time to post some quick stuff. Look at the geek advertisement to the left, isn't that funny? - hoho

However, the markets are ramping up again, firms are hiring, the headhunter- and recruiting companies are on the rush again. Our competitors know the direct-phone #, whereby I am wondering if there is any centralised place with all CVs and phone / mobile # uploaded for just picking it up. In russia, you can buy a DVD for $5 in the Metro, where you got all registred civilians of St. Petersburg listed, including phone- and cell-number, any running depts, education, current job and job of your parents. Good bye Lenin & data security policies!


I lost the point - if you're a geek, able to write not only PHP but some more object-based language, and you computer looks as hairy as your trousers (Revenge of the dust bunnies):
find_great_jobs();

It's out there - I feel it.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Spiegel.de picks up on my Gadget-Article

Haha - ye, dream on Daniel. But by coincidence, the most popular german magazine brought up a story about cool USB-gadgets: "Die Buchse für Spielkinder". After my hols I will start a serious RFP for all this coolio-things out there. I still need a couple of that USB rockets, but as you can see on the gadget page I previously posted, there are douzens of funny items to purchase. However, Spiegel picks up on a couple of USB items - I leave the german original translation to keep the copyrights, but with an italic translation appended.
Availabot: 3D-Visitenkarte für Instant Messenger (this I wanna checkout, sounds very interesting)





Travel Plan Bali & Lombok 2006 ACCOMPLISHED - man


Well, here we go. After the august-weather gave me great support for computer-work at the past weekend, I've taken my chance to complete the draft of our travel-plan. On friday afternoon, we'll pick the 747 FFM -> Bangkok -> Denpasar, where we'll arrive about 2pm local time on saturday.

The rest of the details are settled in the already quite good online planner on
Here you will find our timeschedule, places, sight-seeing places and if we'd make it to one of the numerous internet-cafés, I possibly take care of the journal. As the connection is poor from the indonesian islands, the photos will follow later on.

Until then - enjoy and feel free to comment or advice on our Yahoo! Travel - Bali & Lombok 2006-Planning
http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?pid=785795&action=view

Ksenia & Daniel

Friday, August 11, 2006

More AOL public search-logs


Hey, wanna add some more links. Someone did his job and placed the dump-file (see earlier blog-entry) into a queriable webservice. See the AOL-STALKER - that gives you quite fast an idea how tricky and intimate it is, to open your past 500 search-queries: Get a hard time search-engine treatment here

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Die fabelhafte Welt des Eikon

Mit diesem Post erzwinge ich häufigere Updates bei meinem Freund Marci! Die fabelhafte Welt des Eikon

Shared Calender

Okay, let's envision you have a couple of weirdo friends, and they send weirdo stuff in an irregular email-distri. That's the zockcombo - Ric Hardy Schneider invented it and till that moment tries to bust it with intention and great support of Raffi Rafsen, formely known as Koks-Raf.
These guys try to keep us up-to-date on running events, so I'd be glad to pick it up, just to remind myself about current festivalités and closing the terror-topic from before:

  • Olgas-Rock - Umsonst und draußen Festival im Ruhrgebiet. Check out the the program if you like.
  • I like fireworks - Ruhrorter Hafenfest geht's die Feuerzunge ab: Dank an den Kanadier
    • Go for some more background info -> HIER
  • Some infos on the new ongrowing Innenhafen in Duisburg, weekly updated -> Newsletter content
    • Funny background on the CUBAR: After summer makes a break, the german / duisburg bureaucracy decided to let it open again. It's something similar to the monkey island in Duesseldorf, which is supposed to be closed by bureaucracists as well. Cocktails were check and sometimes tasty - but without sun it just sucks. Nice try...
  • New meeting dates set for the Film- & Music-copyright protection society: All english-speaking guys, please DONT click here

Terror-Attack out of Air - what's up man?

Another chaos at it's peak "Terror-Fahnder verhindern Massenmord über den Wolken" - well, at least prevented before it happened, but the result is organised anarchy again.
I planned to fly over to London next week, god for sake I haven't made it to dublin today as I also planned last week. Cancelled baby, HTR is done for now: no handluggage, every passanger doublechecked manually - this at the most crowded and famous-for-delay Airport in northern europe already before.

It's extremly obvious, but we all flash it back to our memory as soon the newstickers put it up: Terror is everywhere, and it will never stop. It's there since the old 70s, the Libanon, Beirut, Palestina, Munich, IRA and RAF - it just seems to be more close and more likely, that somethings happening. As I wrote in the title of my blog, we're planning to fly in 7 days to Bali & Lombok. Bali is famous not only for the outstanding nature and cultural background, beautiful diving / snorkling places, art & beaches. There are some of the most breathtaking vulcanos, a paradis for trekking-fans. But the past attack of fanatism in 2002 showed a bloddy evidence, that - especially in the tourist-peak of south-bali - certain antipodes in a continues friction causes conflicts.

Bali is primarily hinduism orientated - lays geographically in the biggest muslimien coutry of the world: Indonesia. Right next to it is Java, where the civilians and a handful backpackers are busy enough with Tsunamis & earthquakes - and Lombok, the religious opposite of Bali, with an 80 / 20 share of muslimien & hindus (and obviously other). However, the conflicts of Hindu, Moslemien, Christians, Buddism back in the past of Indonesia was always an extreme obvious case - but haven't ever cause so many dead boddies like several overtakes by the europeans there in the past centuries. The mixture and close living to each other resulted in a healthy, respective and harmonical get-together, even in the spiritual level. The religious tradition of all original mankind on these islands learned and adapted from each other, based out of the same roots and having positive effects. This happened after enough of dead people tried to put their opinion onto others, but time helps getting things done better.

Now, after a couple of tourist booms took over the tiniest pieces of this planed, some different type of more friendly - but still offensive colonie-approach is happening. Having thousands of thousands ignorant, arrogant, filthy rich or even sensitiv-curious tourists stepping on your country, we need to consider that some guys don't like that stuff. And in time of missing maturity, intelligence, comprehension and appreciation - poverty and religious insularity, we need to be prepared for more, not less. Team America might try to fight against, but you can't do that with a shadow. Coming back to the book I am reading now, we're in the middle of the new war - the clash of the cultures. Make love not war, peace and harmony - hrhr, ye. And that is not going to end sooner then in the next hundred centuries. We just need to find a scope how to make the best out of it. Understanding comes first - doing needs to follow, but not sooner.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Adsense and Analytics Installation


Hey let's see how that works. Just recently a client called me and asked about the IAB details of Google Analytics. How the heck shall I know, without getting into several available groups, FAQs, White-Papers and incredible much of content in different blogs in all varies of languages.

That's something everybody can start with: The official Google-Analytics Blog
Close the loop and make money / report on your ROI - and categorize your Site-Users: Inside AdSense (German)

Not to be confused with Site-Tracking companies - even public - like WebSideStory or the search-works (formally known as WSPS / Bid-Buddy).

I'll get deeper into it and keep myself and the audience posted.

Gadgets | USB Missile Launcher

Starting the old tradition of picking out funny gadgets at my favorite shopping place - the internet.  If you have some time until this great office-tool is back in stock: Have fun of shooting plastique rockets at your room-mates. The times of MASK, Lego and Masters of the Universe are over. Kiddies grown up, but still love their X-Box, Mobile-Cellphones with plenty of stuff, MRPGs and playing around with the girls.

If you're bored at work: Check out the USB Missile Launcher - an incredible sophisticating tool against annoying Sales-Reps, useless 'can you please' guys and office-managers.

Introduction - bloggin gettin started

That's it - the blog content is about to leave my long-termed memory, otherwise I am running out of space.
I moved my blog hopefully the last time now - let's get this Firefox plugin started and see how it runs.

I've made several approaches to deal with allowing public to get access to my private memoires, starting with the old-fashioned letter-friend (he still waits for reply) delivered by letter pigeons, baloons, UPS-airmail or the 'Gilb' (Deutsche Post, RIP). Later wandered through BBS, Mailboxes, Fido, Newsgroups and my first homepage '95. Last recent one was Y! 360°, which I find kinda weirdo - and for myspace I'm not hip enough yet.


Nothing above mentioned was able to catch entries in a quick'n dirty way for an editor and therefore not my prefered way of useless diary-collecting.
That's what I am about to express via the Topic-comment in the blog: In the yadayada fast-moving society, we digital-childs are always looking for the best-individualizing, straight-forward, seamless, flexible and customizable filter to search to the bottom our knowledge-sources (primarily the internet right now), so we create News-pages bundling different RSS- and Blog-wires. We communitize ourself in myspace, myvideos, myass and mybeer to compress the search for guys in Reallife with same interest. In the pub I need to talk first to 15 guys & gals to find 2 with hobbies like

  • simpsons
  • internet
  • sunshine
  • hols
  • ski
  • hating stupid-people
in myspace it takes several seconds (depends on their database load).

If thats a good or bad thing I leave up to you, my opinion: Both is true.
That's leaving a lot of good things behind - speaking to 15 different persons even not ideally fitting to my target-group allows me to open my mind to other things. And who the heck likes to be with similar chaps all the time, huh?
Good is the time-advantage and the variety of sharing digital pieces - videos and photo sharing, music and thoughts, prosa and project-plans. How did we do that in the 80s? Not AT ALL (photos are always lost)

We're always running late, no-on-track, behind expectations, fearing dead-lines, missing ol' friends, family forgot our face - and waiting for the cloning-machine (useful for a lot of stuff!). But in the end I have always time - I pretend to be busy, but there are things you NEED to have time for, cause it's all lame excuse. I even got time writing that shit here while beeing at work - hey manager, you see that? We have so much time we would need to - and if you're running out of it, it's mostly b/c you have a lack in time-management or you're to lazy cause of smoking weed. Last is valid for an excuse been 18 - 24Y old or Angela Merkel, but not afterwards.

Closing that first entry with something what was once my very beloved topic: Literature.
Reading currently: Several things started, but seriously:
  1. Samual P. Huntington - Clash of the cultures (Ye Joern - still!)
  2. Max Goldt - Quitten für die Menschen zwischen Emden und Zittau (translation: Whateva!)
I think it's a good approach not to spam to much without ending a link to a funny / breaking news story to proof my network works. So here we go with that:

AOL: Suchanfragen von über 500.000 Nutzern online


AOL entschuldigt sich - Suchlog-Deaktivierung in der Diskussion


That's it folks - running out of time, need to work.

Cheers,
DonBolko