Silberbauer Says:

Exhibit 1: Kunde&Co’s campaign for the referendum on changing the Danish constitution. Paid for by the Danish government an thus pure royalistic propaganda. And a ripoff at the same time. This is wrong on so many levels:

Exhibit 2: Harry Enfield’s “Women Know Your Limits”:

…looking forward to the lawsuit from the BBC.

Excellent video from The Onion introducing Apples new HCI invention

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Tomorrow at this time we will know if the Large Hadron Collider in CERN will create a black hole as some scientists think it may do.

According to the guys in lab coats, it’s not very likely that this will happen (PDF). But these are the same kind of guys that invented niceties like asbestos, the h-bomb, CFC gasses and the thorium toothpaste.

So, If tomorrow you feel being very rapidly compressed into something just a little larger than a singularity, together with the most of the mass of our solar system, it’s a tell-tale sign that some CERN boffin didn’t do his algebra quite right. In that case: Remain calm and enjoy the feeling of being so attractive that even light and the fabric of space-time itself time can’t resist you. Revel in the feeling that McCain, Palin, and global warming can’t harm you any further.

Have a nice day.

[UPDATE]

Here’s a live webcam feed from CERN

There seem to be no limit to what politicians will do to get a bit of airtime.

Right now Danish TV2 is broadcasting a reality show in which our Defence Minister visits the Danish Hollywood King of Beauty Ole Henriksen. We just saw the minister getting his feet washed and massaged, and now he is in session at a hypnotist. WTF? Denmark is currently at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while our Defence Minister is having a foot massage on television. Am I the only one who finds this just a little bit disturbing?

What on earth was his press advisers thinking when they okayed this? Even Sarkozy wouldn’t be so stupid as to get himself filmed in a spa!

But then again, Minister Søren Gade is the guy who in 2005 chose to pack a 9mm Neuhausen for at formal visit to Afghanistan. Very… Castro.

Spam comments are seldom worth mentioning, but this is kind of fun. It looks like it’s a “muslim” spam attack against Danish blogs. It lists about twenty Danish people known from the media cartoon debate and then reads:

[...]
FUCK U DANES! DIE IN HELL!!!
Danmark er lort-
Denmark is shit.
stop danmark -
SUPPORT al – q AEDA!
thank 2.6.
FOREVER AGAINST DENMARK AND DANES-
FUCK YOU DANISH NAZI PIGS!
LET’S STOP DENMARK!
Stop danish nazi society

Oh well.

I think the whole rating/censorship ordeal has come too far when Billy Joel’s Just The Way You Are is rated Explicit by Apple Music Store.

Parental Advisory! Too damn cute a song for your kids! Buy them a 9mm Glock instead so that they may defend themselves in school… What a twisted country.

Someone please point me to the juicy bits, ’cause I just can’t spot them:

Don’t go changing, to try and please me
You never let me down before
Don’t imagine you’re too familiar
And I don’t see you anymore
I wouldn’t leave you in times of trouble
We never could have come this far
I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times
I’ll take you just the way you are

Don’t go trying some new fashion
Don’t change the color of your hair
You always have my unspoken passion
Although I might not seem to care

I don’t want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard
I just want someone that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are.

I need to know that you will always be
The same old someone that I knew
What will it take till you believe in me
The way that I believe in you.

I said I love you and that’s forever
And this I promise from the heart
I could not love you any better
I love you just the way you are.

My Land Rover-crazy uncle sent me this one. It’s clear to see where the designer engineer behind the Defender 110 found his inspiration.

Land Rover Defender 110. In some countries used by the police as weapon against hooligans. Only the chick go faster-stripes raise its aerodynamic properties to just above those of a…

Typical Danish cobblestone, mid-nineteenth century. Typically used by Copenhagen hooligans as a weapon against the police.

Let’s continue our design comparison quest.

Hummer H1. American inferiority complex. Kills trees – and people too, if you mess up.

Husqvarna Chainsaw. Swedish sturdiness. Kills trees – and people too, if you mess up.

Klaus reported the first remarkable sign on a so far unknown connection between car design and weapons. Now I’m ready to disclose yet another piece of evidence on the vehicle that will silence all critics of this claim.

This is ‘Karma’, a premium hybrid sports sedan from the Danish designer Fisker compared with a single bladed throwing knife in stainless steel.

Outselling American brands for years, Toyota is ready to deliver the final punch to Ford and General Motors on their own turf. The concept is called A-BAT and it is, by any standard, ugly as hell. But kudos to car designer Ian Cartabiano for understanding that the ultimate American car have to look like a hand gun. So simple – why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Cartabiano says that the A-BAT is inspired by miltary trucks – yeah right. It looks more like a big, chromed 9mm to me. If Toyota decides to put this beast into production, I think it’s gonna sell Alan Mulally’s pants off.

Toyota A-BAT concept. Made in Japan for the American market.

The .357 semi-automatic Desert Eagle. Made in Israel for the American market.

(The A-BAT Found on Top Gear website).

Just some slides (in danish) from my presentation at the seminar on “Corporate Branding and Architecture” last week.
foredrags_resume.pdf

This should have been an e-mail to Sterling Airlines but as Sterling is so discount that they don’t accept e-mail – it’s going on the blog instead. Well, you asked for it.

This morning I found a parking ticket in the front window of my car. I spotted it from my apartment (4th floor) and as I knew that my car was legally parked and that my residential parking permit is paid for until January 2008 I got pretty pissed. Danish parking fines are at almost $100, so it’s a real pain to get one, and I’ve been fined before without reason.

I ran down the stairs to my car, just to find that this was no parking ticket. It was a flyer from Danish low-cost, low-end airline Sterling Airlines made to look exactly like a parking ticket. I mean: You really have to read it closely to find out that it isn’t.

Some fuck up at Sterling’s agency somehow had the great idea that to get more people to fly Sterling, we must piss them off. ‘Give them a real rotten morning, then they fly with us, just to extend that rotten feeling’, they thought. It might have seemed real funny during the creative brainstorm but guess what: It isn’t in real life.

I have flown Sterling twice: The service is appalling. If your loose your luggage they couldn’t care less (my parents tried that and Sterling pretty much told them to fuck off). If you want to move to a free seat with better leg room, that’s ok – if you pay for it in cash. Their planes are very often delayed … Sterling just sucks.

Now, Sterling feels it’s ok to fondle my car to place their ridiculous flyer under the wiper and fuck up my morning. The ad even tells me to place it on my neighbour’s car ‘just to tease’. Hell I won’t! I hold no grudge against my neighbor – why should I tease him?

I really don’t need Sterling to make my day more stressful. So fuck you too, Sterling Airways – and keep you goddamn hands off my car the next time.

In today’s alert box Jakob Nielsen gets angry on Adobe for forgetting the OK button on a preference dialog.

And yes, of course Adobe should have added an OK button to the Windows version of the dialog, but for Mac folks, this is how dialogs have been for ages – that is without an OK button when it wasn’t needed.

So – in this case Nielsen is right (it’s always easy to be right about obvious stuff). But with his “33 years of experience using computers” Nielsen could have at least mentioned that to exclude the OK button used to be a very common design standard for Mac applications.

Also, it seems to me that with users getting used to Ajax-style “on the fly saving” of data, the missing OK button is getting more and more normal.

Speaking of benchmarking…

Have a nice weekend.

Behold, behold! The New 7 Wonders of the world have been announced. And behold again: 6 of them are extremely old buildings, and the seventh is the horrible over-sized Jesus thing in Rio de Janeiro. That for sure is no wonder: It’s just a big ass chunk of concrete erected to intimidate people not to regress into their native believes.

The 7 wonders of the ancient world really were wonders at the time. But I think we’ve come a long way since it was wondrous to build a large statue or do a nice temple. We can do that any time we want to. But building a long suspension bridge, inventing a CAT scanner or a tunnel scanning microscope certainly takes a lot more effort and does quite a lot more good. And what about nifty stuff like the GPS system, the Arecibo telescope, the International Space Station, the Saturn V – or the internet? Nah – that’s just modern crap.

So we opt for some ruins, because that’s what they did 3.000 years ago (except that the ruins weren’t ruins then). Very imaginative, people.

Must be hard work to be a pope. Imagine how much work the poor fellow must have put into his 10 Commandments For Motorists. Especially the second one must have taken some serious thinking for someone who’s work it is to bring the world back into the dark ages: The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm. No shit Padre?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not taking driving lessons from an old German guy who insists on crusing in a white cabriolet while standing up.

Like this Christopher Locke’s review of The Cult of The Amateure: How internet is killing our culture.
Quote: cult of the snotnose dumbfuck

I haven’t read, I don’t think I will.

Silberbauer Says: is sorry to announce that the iPhone concept is no more than a simple rip off.

70 years ago the very first iPhone was made (in beautiful sturdy bakelite) by Bell Labs which is now planning to re-market is as the iPhone Retro Classic.

First the mouse – now the iphone. Shame on you Steve, shame on you…

Our sys adm. just decided that our workstations are to download updates automatically every day 12 o’clock. Great news for IT security – bad news for my blood pressure.

Sometimes I have a pretty stressed up day, and now Windows keep nagging me with this every 10 minutes:

No! I don’t wanna save everything, shut down Photoshop, Word, Axure and Dreamweaver and reboot my workstation. I’m busy, you see? I’ve got work to do!

If it was only the Windows Update nag screen, but it’s this one too:

And this one:

And iTunes, and the Adobe CS suite, and Windows Mediaplayer, and several other apps which designers think that they’ve made the one and only single most important piece of software on my workstation. Guess what, guys: I’m an adulterer. I have others apps too.

In fact I’ve got at least 8 different apps that craves my attention every now and then. That means at least 1 update every day – and that’s both on my desktop workstation and my laptop (and then again on my desktop at home). My life is one big update.

Sometimes when I’m doing a presentation for a client, Acrobat pops up “demanding my attention” as it so nicely puts it. If I try to show a piece of video Windows Mediaplayer may start the show by asking for a license update, “uhm sorry guys, I just have to …. click click… there”.

It’s as if the software is more important than the work I do. Remember that Microsoft commercial? “We see Susan dreaming of… blah blah blah”. Well, all I see is a bloody MS nag screen wanting me to reboot, even taking focus. Aaargh – there it goes again! Piss off!

Cool my Zune design made The Register. And thanks for all the comments, guys.

Update: Oh my, it’s spreading

Brasil here we come. Update again: …and here goes iPodHacks and macessentials.de
August 4: Articles in Computerworld and ComOn (both in Danish)

Here it is! Microsoft’s iPod-killer – seamlessly integrated with Windows Mediaplayer and as sleak and easy to use as its software counterpart.