Happy fifth birthday to Gmail!

As part of my personal Gmail birthday party I tried to find out how old my account is. I can’t tell for sure, but this post indicates that I’ve been using Gmail since early January 2005, so it was about eight months old by then.

I know there are some naysayers out there, so let me just say this: I love my Gmail account and if I’d known I’d have totally baked a cake or something.

Red walls + green stairs = Staircase Fail

Not translating a perfectly translatable word in a children’s book’s title = Translation Fail

Mine!

I actually planned to do something else here¹, but it was too time-consuming for a Tuesday night, so I’m just keeping it simple with a little reminder coming via BustedTees:

Now go buy a shirt.

¹And no, I’m not going to tell you what it was. It wasn’t that great anyway.

I caught a nasty cold again. It doesn’t feel so long since the last one. For me it usually starts with a sore throat. Then it’s two nights of restless sleep, because swallowing hurts so much it makes me want to punch the wall or something equally distracting. Then you’ll have me sniffling, coughing and fishing for some compassion for a couple of days and then it’s gone. It’s always, always the same and I hate it. I hate it even more, because I know exactly what’s coming and I know that there’s nothing I can do that makes it go remarkably better other than… well,… suck it up basically.

In other news, today at lunch someone asked whether anybody else had seen the sneezing panda video already and OMG, I had. I guess I have seen it twice in a row, because I really needed to see it again to understand what was happening. The thing that really caught me off guard there was that I couldn’t get the idea in my head that it’s a 15 second video of a baby panda. Sneezing. Again. 15 seconds of. A baby panda. Sneezing. And people around the world have seen it and they’re talking about it at lunch. About a sneezing baby panda. This is an insane world, guys, but then again, these things make so very happy. Nothing beats the laughing baby, though. (And I can proudly admit that it was indeed my parents who introduced me to that one. Plus, we think that my cousin had a very similar laugh when he was a toddler, the same one who could do an amazing imitation of a guinea pig before his voice broke.)

PS: I’m still working my way through GREG RUTTER’S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU’RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING and some of these things are hilarious and some of them scare me a bit.

I recently put together a playlist in iTunes which is intended to wake me up on my way to work each morning. It seemed the obvious thing to do since I tend to listen to the same stuff in the morning to get me in the right mood.

I use the shuffle option on my playlists, because I want to be surprised and not know which song comes next, so this is just the songs in random order. Feel free to be inspired.

James: Waterfall
Rilo Kiley: Portions For Foxes
The Ting Tings: That’s Not My Name
Superchick: Not Done Yet
Wheatus: Teenage Dirtbag
Weezer: Beverly Hills
Zeroleen: All Good
Ben Folds: Rockin‘ The Suburbs
Barenaked Ladies: One Week
The Slip: Children of December
Catatonia: Road Rage
Lily Allen: Knock ‚Em Out
Rooney: When Did Your Heart Go Missing?
Anaïs: Mon cœur, mon amour
Shivaree: Thundercats
Jimmy Eat World: The Middle
Sia: Cares At the Door
Sonny J: Can’t Stop Moving
Self: Stay Home
Phantom Planet: Do The Panic
Eels: Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)
Arcade Fire: Wake Up
The Elected: Not Going Home

After watching the first four episodes of Dollhouse, I’m not yet as overwhelmed by the show as I want to be, but I have hope that I will be soon. I’m just really glad that Joss Whedon is back and he brought Tim Minear along, too. I really like Dollhouse and it looks promising enough, so let’s see where it goes and until then, enjoy the theme song, which I just learned is performed by the wonderful Jonatha Brooke. (Unfortunately it’s not available on iTunes Germany. Can somebody please do something about that?)

Based on the amount of similar avatars I have seen on the internet, this probably is ancient news to some of you, but I have indeed been asked about that a couple of times at work, so I’ll just mention it here again and hopefully be done with it. That image of myself in the header was done with Face Your Manga.

So, it was this fun website that did it (and will do it for you, too) and not me sitting down and actually arranging pixels.

I’m currently trying to bring some order into my online life. The first step was probably to switch from Bloglines to Google Reader, a decision I haven’t regretted one single bit so far.

I had been using Bloglines for a couple of years and I was never really unhappy with it, so I didn’t even try to look for alternatives. Then I was looking for a feed reader for my iPod and settled for an app called Feeds which synchronizes with a Google Reader account. Moving my feeds from Bloglines to Google Reader was easy as a breeze, but then I kept on using both my Bloglines account on computers and Feeds with the connected Google Reader account on my iPod. The stupidity of basically using two disconnected feed readers didn’t occur to me until a few weeks later when I was once again updating my Google Reader feeds to match my Bloglines feeds, which… hello? Did I just add one RSS feed to TWO feed readers? Again? Plus, I constantly had to go through „new“ items that I had already read on the other feed reader (whatever the other was).

So, I checked out Google Reader and there was just so much I immediately loved about it that it was pretty much a matter of minutes before I said buh-bye to Google Reader. I love the fact that it displays all items and dynamically loads older articles when I scroll further down. I love the fact that I can share items with or without a comment (and you can see them here). I love the fact that I can read shared items (hi Caitlin). As always, I love the simple, sleek Google design. I love how easy it is to add new feeds. Not sure if I’m doing Bloglines wrong here a bit, because I never really bothered to find out everything I could do with it. But then again, maybe I’m not, and it’s really about making all of this easy to find, access and play around with. Basically, maybe sometimes it’s actually about giving the user easy access to the application’s features and making them curious about what else you can do.

However, while I was at it and playing around with my Google profile, I thought it was time to consolidate my email, which also included merging my mail accounts and with merging I mostly mean changing the email address I use for this blog. Doing that kind of meant that it would be obvious that the pseudonym I have used here (and a couple of years before that when I was performing as a singer-songwriter) actually is a pseudonym and that meant updating the blog and use my real name and while I was at it, I decided to update the layout as well.

Updating the layout of course meant that I had to update WordPress to the latest version (which frankly, I should have done anyway). Then of course I started playing with the features, making sure that I had widgets enabled, checking out plugins (we’ll come back to that later), starting to add tags to posts and finally moving some content from being a post to being a page – such a very simple thing, but so overdue.

As for the plugins, I currently have only a few installed and I want to check them out carefully. I’ve been using Akismet for a really long time now, and it has never let me down. Not sure how many false positives (would that be the right term?) I’ve had without noticing, but every time I scan the comments caught by Akismet there’s only spam in there, so I’m hopeful it has been doing a good job. (That’s also saying that if ever your comment didn’t make it to the blog, it was probably eaten and digested by Akismet. Sorry.)

This time I also used a plugin to enable StatCounter for this blog and it worked perfectly.

Then only a few days back, I installed Sociable, which is responsible for all the pretty little icons at the bottom of each post that enable you to forward whatever you deem worth sharing from this blog. Digg it, Twitter it, whatever… I have only enabled a few services, because I didn’t want each post to be cluttered with icons nobody uses anyway. If you think something useful is missing, please tell me. Of those services I have enabled I personally only use Twitter anyway, but alas, you might use something that I have never heard of.

And then only some minutes ago I installed a plugin which enables a iPhone/iPod touch optimized mobile version of this blog. At first I wasn’t sure if I would like it. It totally ignores the pretty new layout, after all. But I checked it on my iPod and, what can I say… I like it. Very neat and clean and easy to use.

There’s still some work to do on the blog’s layout and I’m not done playing around with the settings, new plugins and adding new tags to old content. I also just updated my blog roll. This is not the complete list from my feed reader, by the way. I have quite a list of technology and food blogs in my feed reader which you probably couldn’t care less about.

And then of course there’s some more consolidating to do. But more about that the next time (or the time after that or… you know… somewhen soon).

No, of course I’m not done with Neil Gaiman. I’m so far from done with him I don’t even have words for it.

However, as of this month I finally read Stardust and now I think I can say that I am more or less done with what I would regard as the essential selection of Neil Gaiman’s bibliography. I know that he’s quite the writer and so I don’t even pretend to think about reading everything he has written. I also don’t really think that I need to. The „main“ books, yes, of course, the short story collections, sure and I must admit that I haven’t even peaked inside the Sandman comic books and still need to watch Mirrormask. But, come on… here’s what I read (and then you can judged whether I can publicly announce to have read the essential Neil Gaiman or not):

• Coraline
• Neverwhere
• American Gods
• Anansi Boys
• The Graveyard Book
• Stardust
• Good Omens
• Fragile Things
• Smoke and Mirrors

Now what do you think? Did I miss something important? I think aside from one story, M is for Magic only contains stuff that has been published in one of the other books I have read, so I can probably skip that book.

The question now would naturally be: What did I like best? So here’s my personal opinion on these books:
My top three books would be Coraline, Neverwhere and Stardust. I love, love, love Coraline with a passion and although it also was the first Gaiman book I read, I don’t think that this is the reason why it is my number one Neil Gaiman. I just love the nightmarish atmosphere of the book, the intensity and the fact that although it is a children’s book it scared the hell out of me. It’s simply great stuff. I loved the lightness of Neverwhere and would say that it is probably the funniest Neil Gaiman book in a Douglas Adamsy kind of way. Plus, it was written very tightly, so to speak, which made reading it a breeze. You just kind of sailed through it and before you even realized it, there was the end. Then Stardust was again one of the shorter, lighter Gaiman books and reminded me of The Princess Bride, which in my world is a really good thing. It really was a modern fairytale and I could hardly stop reading it (I had to though, because I was reading it when we were in Krakow with my parents in law and it would have been rude to just stay inside and keep on reading).

American Gods, as far as I know, is a favorite for many other people, but it was a bit too long for my taste and while this is not generally a problem, I think it just became too obvious in some of the parts of the book. Anansi Boys and Good Omens had the same problem for me. They just weren’t as capturing and tightly written as the books mentioned above.

Then, The Graveyard Book (which has been ridiculously translated to Das Graveyard-Buch in German, which… what the hell were these guys thinking?) I hoped I would love it, but then I just liked it a lot. Good enough for me, so I don’t have any complaints, it just wasn’t as good as Coraline, so there you go.

Both short story collections I adored. Not every story in there is great per se, but the diversity of stories and styles and Neil Gaiman’s extensive explanations regarding where the stories and poems came from are just amazing. This is a really good creative stuff, and I love the fact that he goes out there and publishes stuff that might not be perfect or even particularly good, but on the other hand it shows the whole range of his writing and the imagination of Gaiman is just mind-bogglingly.

So, there you go. My take on Gaiman. Once again, if you think there’s something I missed, something that I should definitely read because it does indeed belong to the essential Gaiman list, please tell me. It’s not that I don’t want to read other Gaiman books, but I might have trouble finding the right thing to continue with.