Over at Teekay’s

When I came home from Zürich on Friday, Tiger was waiting for me after Mrs. M-V had taken the cat in from the doorstep, where the DHL dude had left it (him?). (It’s that kind of town, where the mailman leaves stuff on your doorstep…)

Installation was a breeze, as always. I’ve always been among the early adopters and have never, ever gotten hit with the sort of thing that seems to routinely affect other folks. Maybe because I keep my HD in order and run the maintenance routines every once in a while and generally try not to have too much stuff — especially little shareware apps — lying around? Be that as it may, after an archive and install, Tiger was up and running — sloooowly, because Spotlight first needed to index all the files on my HD.

A number of people have commented that Spotlight will revolutionize the way we do business by eliminating, or almost eliminating, the need for hierarchical folders and similar Finder organization. It’s kind of like Gmail: with such powerful search abilities, why bother filing stuff in folders?

The hype is true.

I had experimented with such setups before, using DEVONthink as a repository (dump) for files, PDF files in particular, and relying on its ability to look into the full text of these files, putting them at my fingertip. I bought a license right away and am still happy with its ability to create semantic links between files, but I’m not happy about having to use a separate app for the purpose of file management (though of course the Finder is a separate app too, but it doesn’t feel that way).

I haven’t warmed to Dashboard yet — nice eye candy but not horribly useful.

Cool: the dictionary. It’s basically the New Oxford American, which contains gems like “This use of queer is now well established and widely used among gay people…” — but never mind. (And in case you were wondering, this is for a story I’m editing.)

This is one of the titles that were briefly under consideration for my wife’s as-yet non-existent blog; since this one, as well as “Just off the bus” and numerous others, were quickly rejected, she hasn’t set up her blog yet. Talk about delaying tactics…

Sometimes I’d love to be one of the folks who sit in front of a desk all day, rate stocks, and make millions. Check this out, from the Mac Observer:

Analyst Robert Semple [of CSFB] raised the price target for AAPL [Apple] from US$40 per share to $45. In his research note, a copy of which was obtained by The Mac Observer, Mr. Semple wrote: “We believe the next leg of Apple’s share price ascension will be driven by success in the PC market, where the Mac has just completed its second consecutive quarter of share gain.”

So far so good: a PC maker is upgraded because of gains in the PC market. But then read this:

He continued: “We expect iPod to continue to deliver strong growth, but its position as the HDD and flash MP3 market leader will eventually limit its growth to that of the market. In the PC market, however, Apple’s 2% share has significant upside opportunity regardless of market growth.”

I’m probably just too dense for this, but is he really saying that having a small market share is cool because it leaves you room to grow?

Today’s column by David Brooks in the Times reports on a recent, comprehensive study that overweight people live longer. “Since I read about this report a few days ago,” Brooks tells us, “I haven’t been able to stop grinning.” But the money quote is without a doubt the following:

I’ve been happy because as a member of the community of low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible behavior has been unjustly rewarded. … I’ve been happy because now there will inevitably be a shift in the fashion winds, favoring members of the Zaftig Corps. … More people will realize we should all be patterning our lifestyle decisions on those made by Christopher Hitchens.

Does Brooks mean we should all churn out 4,000 words a day while sitting at our desks?

But anyway, what amuses me most about a certain kind of health nut is that they’re all about spirituality and renunciation of earthly goods and all that — but all they actually do is about their bodies.

Courtesy of East Ethnia, here’s a hilarious book review by Matt Taibbi from my favorite New York freebie paper, the Press, of Thomas L. Friedman’s latest bestselling explain-it-all. I enjoy Friedman’s columns in the Times but find them exasperating at the same time, though he sure does a good job at driving his points home.

His latest opus is somehow about globalization and the flattening of the world and how everything is interconnected and all that — and it seems to be one of those books you can safely ignore if you’ve read just one review, provided it’s this one.

Update, 4/24: of course, I should also point out that many of the same complaints as in Taibbi’s reviews were already made in a piece published in the Economist (cover date 4/2), which was almost as sharp as the book seems to deserve.

Yesterday’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung ran an interesting article about the latest product from Swiss publisher Ringier, a company that virtually invented the tabloid in Switzerland with Blick many years ago and is now emulating its success (which has grown a bit stale in Switzerland itself) in places farther east. It’s called Blic Evropa and aims at, you guessed it, the Serbian — and Serb — diaspora in Europe, whose number the publisher puts at roughly one million. Blic has eight pages every day that specifically provide information on Germany, Switzerland, and Austria — host to (I believe) the largest Serb diaspora communities in Europe — and things like visa, cheap flights to Serbia, and so forth.

There is, of course, already a similar title at many newsstands in these countries: Vesti is made specifically for the Serb diaspora and is also distributed in the US and Australia. It will be tough for Blic Evropa to break its monopoly, but putting its cover price at around half that of Vesti will certainly help.

Ringier might be able to pull this off in part because it can put the weight, and low production costs, of a large media conglomerate behind the product. It has also found a good printer with experience in this sort of enterprise — in fact, the printer is quite possibly the inventor of the European diaspora daily: Hürriyet S.A. in Frankfurt.

Technorati Tags: Balkania

Teekay goes to the online Apple store Germany to order Tiger for his wife, who doesn’t have a credit card but is a student and therefore entitled to an education discount. Teekay’s credit card billing address is in a neighboring country which shall remain unnamed, but his wife’s shipping address, of course, is in Germany. This *extremely complex situation* <sarcasm> is evidently too much for this technology-aware internet merchant to handle: the billing address doesn’t even *have* a field where one could list a country other than Germany.

This is no way to do business.

I now had to switch to a *bank transfer* — can you imagine? I can’t remember the last time I bought something via bank transfer…

Apple, please, fix this. This is ridiculous.

Speaking of fixing, I’m using *asterisks* for emphasis because ecto somehow decided it didn’t want to deal with my italics any more. Anyone has any clue how to fix this?

From today’s Times (free registration required):

Turkey Says 523,000 Were Killed by Armenians Between 1910 and 1922
By SEBNUM ARSU

Published: April 17, 2005

IZMIR, Turkey, April 17 - The Turkish State Archive issued today a list of more than 523,000 Turks whom it said were killed by Armenians in Turkey between 1910 and 1922.

The move appeared intended to counter longstanding Armenian contentions that Turkish Ottoman officials committed genocide during a period of mass deportations of Armenians that began in 1915.

Does that mean Ankara has finally hired those PR specialists from Banja Luka? (”Your genocide is our challenge!”)

Remember when I complained about the weather a few weeks ago? Well, here’s the weather forecast for this lovely town for the next few days:

Tiger will be launched/loosened/set free/unleashed on the 29th. For the poor souls out there who have to deal with Windoze, Tiger’s the latest incarnation of Apple’s operating system X which has been running smoothly on my PowerBook G4 (15“ Titanium through 2003, when I passed it on to my wife when her Windoze machine bit the dust, from then on a 17” Aluminum) ever since it came out years ago. (The last drastic upgrade was Panther, which reached stores on 24 October 2003, our first wedding anniversary. We spent it queuing outside the Prince Street Apple Store, to celebrate. Dude passes by and asks, “what are you guys waiting for?” Teekay replies, voice trembling in excitement, “the new Mac operating system!” I had to admit that sounded, uh, really bad.)

In any case, I pre-ordered my copy (or rather, my wife pre-ordered hers, to take advantage of the educational discount — boy, my wife is doing *homework* right now!!!) couple days ago and can’t wait for the thing to arrive. I’m especially thrilled about Spotlight, which should make the file jungle on my hard drive slightly less impenetrable than it sometimes appears to me now.

Stay tuned for ongoing coverage. (Unfortunately, I have a lunch appointment in Zurich with a federal MP and the ex-boss of a big Swiss bank. Being busy with selling out I won’t be able to do what really counts and upgrade my little PowerBook.)

One shouldn’t make fun of stuff one is getting for free, but AOL is just a ridiculous experience, at least the German version for Mac I’m using on my PowerBook. I had to resort to this measure since it takes Deutsche Telekom (sorry, “T-Com”) a full 14 days to establish a DSL connection even when the phone line is already there. They send you the splitter and router by mail! In any case, I’m starting to understand what some people mean when they talk about the internet being a boring place.

It’s all horribly corporate — some cubicle-dweller’s idea of “fun” — and ugly and cuts the connection every twenty minutes or so, though I’m not sure that’s necessarily AOL’s fault.

Be that as it may, I thought it would have been a nice gesture of T-Com to offer free dial-up while one is waiting for DSL to come, but hey…

When you register your residency in this lovely small town, they check the number of people in your household against the number of trash bins in the building. You are then handed a sheet (“Behälteranmeldung grauer Restabfallbehälter”) you need to fill in and send to the “Abfallwirtschaft und Stadtreinigung.” Just to make sure everything’s in order.

Registering was easy, but the trash killed me.

I think the same would apply to Germans as well, but the Swiss are a bit stranger, a bit more idiosyncratic, a bit less self-conscious — just plain weird, in fact — in everything they do.

At the Italian-Swiss border, before 5 am on Easter Monday. Swiss border guard enters bus to collect all passports and run them through a check. Unsmiling, not saying a word, not so much unfriendly as totally focused on his work.

Guy wears two earrings.

Two!!

Comment from my wife: they’re extremely correct, extremely focused on doing the right thing, conscientious about the job — but hey, they’re also real rebels.

Struck me as *exactly* right.

For the last two weeks we’ve been little refugees, living out of our suitcase. (Alright, it was more than one.) We looked at around twelve apartments and really only liked two of them. Thursday evening the landlord of the first of those two — in fact, the first apartment we really looked at — called to say we should meet Friday. We signed the lease and moved in, and here we are. Nice!

In a few days we should have internet access at home. In the meantime, we’ll just make the few steps to Rathausplatz couple times a day to u/l and d/l our e-mail through the local public WLAN.

They do have internet — in fact, I’m sitting in a sidewalk cafe (admittedly inside, because the weather’s been rotten) while posting this via a free wireless access point. Expect slightly more over the next few days than over the last weeks.