Turukhtan

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

My Personality

It is possible that I subconsciously manipulated the "Multiple intelligences" part, because my boundless arrogance would not permit me to be "less intelligent" than Ainur. :op

Posted at 11:35 pm by turukhtan
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Friday, July 04, 2008

Wordpress and spam comments

I regularly downtalk WordPress, because it has no word verification for comments, which apparently leads to a serious spam comment problem that everyone I know who uses WordPress and has commenting enabled suffers from. I used a (secret) WordPress blog at one point, and did not enable comments for that very reason (besides the blog being secret).

Meanwhile, WordPress themselves are proud of using Akismet, which catches spam comments from being posted and helps them shut down spam blogs. But the user still has to go delete the spam comments. (Don't they take up a lot of space on the servers?)

Blogger and even Blogdrive here have enabled word verification, and I've never gotten any spam comments since it was enabled. I often asked myself: why would a sophisticated service like WordPress not do the same?

The great WordPress lover Ilan pointed out that "WordPress is not a company... it's a movement and the PEOPLE run it." (I guess he knows I have a weak spot for rhetorics like that, with the word "the people" in all caps and shit. :o)
And luckily, among all those people, there are a couple who have taken it on themselves to write WordPress hacks with word verification for your comments, and are sharing it with everyone.

Gudlyf has made AuthImage, and among Peter's Useful Crap is Peter's Custom Antispam Image Plugin for Wordpress.

Posted at 4:30 pm by turukhtan
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Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Doggie walk

We took out a neighbour's hunting doggies for an evening stroll. Otherwise they only get to go out when/if they go hunting with him.

Some more photos here!

Posted at 11:27 pm by turukhtan
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Saturday, June 28, 2008

The Tunguska event has its 100 years anniversary today.

To celebrate, I spent all day running around in the woods. Wheee!

Posted at 10:38 pm by turukhtan
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Sunday, June 22, 2008

Last day with Henry

Henry is moving to Bonn soon, so this was the last day I babysat him. He will get to live in a nice house with a garden. As a cool Berlin boy, maybe he will impress the Bonn doggies?

Henry running down the stairs:

If you look closely you can see that Henry's right hind leg is less blurry. That's because he has a special technique where he only uses his left hind leg when running down the stairs ...

Henry in blossoming Mauerpark. He was very bored and wanted to continue our walk instead of just sitting around, so I got extremely lucky with this shot. In the background are toilets and other things in anticipation of Fête de la Musique.

Posted at 4:50 pm by turukhtan
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Friday, June 20, 2008

Tunguska #1 reloaded

Accomplished, June 18th-20th:

- Finished the Sergei video and uploaded it. (Here are all the videos with Mitsu and Sergei!)
- Made an appointment to pick up mum's books from a store.
- Babysat Henry evening and overnight.
- Got an order for among other things Tunguska 1, which pushed me to finish the new edition of it. Rescanned and retouched 69 comic pages and illustrations, layouted everything and printed a first edition of ten.
- Mailed the order for fanzines.
- Worked on the page numbers for Musée Téléguidée. The page numbers are quite an endeavour in that book.

While taking the printing sheets for the first, crappy edition of Tunguska 1 out of service, I noticed that one sheet was missing. It's untypical of me but still possible that I've misplaced it somewhere.
Or maybe someone has stolen it. It was the one with page 3 and the hawt photo of German revolutionary Ernst Toller. I know that my mum was here at one point when I was away. Mum, you didn't have to steal the original. You have his picture in the magazine already.
Or maybe it was my flatmate. I should give her my comic books so she can practise her Swedish with them. Though somehow I have a feeling that they might make her nervous about living with me.

Posted at 7:19 pm by turukhtan
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Accomplished

Inspired by Rah, who among other creative work draws Metanoia, one of my favourite webcomics, I shall try posting lists of what I have accomplished. Not only will this help me realise that I do get work done, but it might also motivate me to get even more work done. XD

Accomplished, June 17th (yesterday):
- Cut a Sergei music video to the tunes of Bruce Springsteen's Gypsy Biker. (The lyrics are kind of unrelated, but I'm sure Sergei would have enjoyed this song from the album Magic, released after Sergei's death ...) Some tweaking still required before the video is finished.
- Rendered typesetting for Dipneuste 22-37 (phew, finished with that at last - that's part of this book I'm making for/with Quentin).
- Screwed the new internet/phone box to the wall (most fun I've had in ages). Connection will not come until the end of the month, though. ;_;
- Babysat Henry over the day.
- Frantically went to check e-mail all day in case there was something wrong with the PDFs I uploaded last night, but my Gmail was happily uneventful.

Today I finished the Sergei video. Here it is:

Bruce Springsteen was Sergei's favourite musician.

Posted at 2:58 pm by turukhtan
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Sunday, June 08, 2008

Ostkreuz

Last time Ilan was here we happened to change trains once at Ostkreuz station, and the weather was nice and we had our cameras, so we took some photos.

More photos here.

Here are Ilan's photos from the same occasion.

Photos of Ostkreuz by other people!

Posted at 9:42 pm by turukhtan
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Thursday, May 01, 2008

Geneva photos

First off, some tourist snapshots ...

The river Rhône flows from lake Geneva down through the town. The water is very green and clear. The jet of water that you can see in the background originally had a function in the water power plant to the right in the foreground. The power plant is no longer in use, but apparently the people of Geneva wanted to keep the jet, so it was moved out to the lake.

In the old town. Some mountains (in France) on the horizon.

The old town from afar.

And now ... doggies!

"I do not soil the pavements!"

Insane doggies prohibited in this park.

Puppy toilet paper!!!!!!!!!!!1

Paparazzi shot of a doggie by the river.

In the more touristy areas, I spotted some small, energetic doggies. But in all other parts of Geneva, the doggies were big, slow and sleepy. At the opening of the Mapping Festival, there was a girl who brought her doggie with her, and the poor little doggie kept falling asleep all over the place ...

Finally, some birdies in Lake Geneva.

(A lot of my time was spent at the Mapping Festival, but I didn't take any photos of all those happenings with my own camera, because there were lots of people documenting it already with better gear ... When/if the photos and films I did shoot with other people's cameras become available online, I might post a link. Meanwhile, here are Mapping photos by Ork. Yes, there is at least one with me in it.)

Posted at 10:23 pm by turukhtan
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Birthday breakfast

Me in Ilan's silly sunglasses in a café on the top floor of a department store (Tokyo Style?) overlooking the town. Nice weather.

I'll add some more Geneva photos here eventually.

Posted at 12:46 am by turukhtan
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