Author: arved

Today I skipped through PlanetSUN and discovered an interesting article about the relationship between industry and university.

Continue reading “The Future of Research”

My university has WLAN in the lecture halls like most universities nowadays although most of them have not defined a usecase.
Oliver Wrede wrote an article about Notebook conferences, where he tries to verbalize how Network access can be used *during* conference and teaching talks. He presents the SubEthaEdit Notes from the blogtalk conference as an example. What are they smoking at blogtalk? These notes are nearly unreadable, and as summaries really bad.
Philipp writes his summaries after the talks while he is traveling home by train, they are much better to read, although (or because) they are written by only one person.
Volker Weber’s observations are much more realistic.
I only take my notebook into boring classes and talks, because if the topic is something more serious than “social software” you have to concentrate 100% on the speaker to get an idea what they are talking about and to not loose track.

Greece won Euro2004 and Jimmy Jump stroke again and jumped into the Greece goal.
This is the first holiday weekend and the results of last weeks “ARK” university course were released, and to my surprise I managed not to fail.
I read through a lot of Popmusic articles on Wikipedia today, now i know that Lauri from “The Rasmus” owns _three_ BMX bikes and I wrote a small article about one of my favorites from the 90’s: Deee-Lite
I shot today’s picture yesterday at Natural History Museum. Don’t ask me what species the black fishes are.

It is now proven that I am visiting McDonalds too often. When I entered the local McDonalds today, i was not greated with the usual “Gruess Gott, Bitte sehr!” but with “Hamburger Royal TS Menu regular mit Cola ohne Eis zum hieressen?”.
So here are some facts about McDonalds Karlsplatz, where I am eating at least once a week. There are four groups of customers, pupils from the next school, students, tourists (like everywhere in Vienna) and junkies, as Karlsplatz is the meeting point of the Viennese drug scene. This McDonalds is unique, because it is the only restaurant I know, that has _no_ toilet. As McDonalds restaurants are famous for their cheap and clean toilets (compared to public toilets) around the world, half of the people entering look confused around and leave the restaurant without buying something.
I am still trying to find out, why seven out of ten junkies buy a FishMac. The others are either too stoned to order or notice after they ordered that they don’t have enough money.
Another important advise, if you plan to eat on the terrace, don’t buy fries. Because if you enter the terrace with fries, you will immediately learn that the birds, that look so peacefully are descendants of Alfred Hitchcocks’ Birds.
Other things I like about this McDonalds, one of the shop managers hates the usual US-Top40 music played at most McDonalds and prefers to play DrumNBass, HipHop and other “alternative mainstream” music. Additional they usually have Austrian Newspapers laying around, so you are not bored while eating boring food.

Yesterday, Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, visited Vienna. He took part at a discussion round at ORF with the title Digital Communites, because Wikipedia won a “Golden Nica” at the “Ars Electronica Prix”. The other participants were an austrian historian, a representative from Creative Commons, and Andreas Hirsch from Ars Electronica.
They discussed various online knowledge commuties, their past and future and special aspects like copyright, vandalism and the digital divide. Unfortunately i was already occupied with taking pictures with Jimbo’s Digicam, so I didn’t wrote down summary keywords. BTW, the UI of my Nikon is much better than his Olympus, and mine does not play an artificial “click”-sample when taking a picture.
To my surprise the historian didn’t attack the quality of Wikipedia articles compared of the articles by his project, so Horst would have been a much better participant :-). Later it became obvious that the historian was pretty clueless about Wikipedia and encylopedias in general, as he tried to persuade Jimbo that he should rewrite Wikipedia presenting a “European Point of View” (as in European Union).
The ORF also installed a livestream to New York, where representatives of other projects tried to take part in the discussion. Someone needs to tell the camera guy in New York, that it is a bad idea to do nonstop-Zooming, because the Stream was full of compression artefacts all the time.
The most useless participants were the director of the Austrian Culture Institute in New York and Franz Morak the austrian culture secretary. The moderator in New York introduced them to the discussion participants in English, but they failed to recognize that most of them did not understand German, and babbled in german how cool all these digital communities are and nobody except the ORF people understood them…
After the discussion we watched Portugal vs. England on a beamer, or more precisely the ORF people watched Football, and we discussed various Wikipedia aspects with Jimbo, while they tried to explain to Jimbo what this Football thing is about.