Charon's activity.log

Check out the overview of embassies in current "architecture capital" of Europe - in Berlin. I did not view everything just about seven or eigth and my surprising favourite so far: Oman.

Kill your online alterego easily, quickly and ... forever. Take the tour or check out the testimonials.

Wanted to give it a try and as an expriement kill my Twitter account (you know everything is impermanent), but got the maintenance message:

Sorry our machine is currently shutdown due to server maintenance caused by
the huge amount of requests and reactions we've received in the last hours!

Please consider suicide at a later moment and accept our apologies!

We'll hit back!

Damn ...

Found video PF 2010 from Topolanek and Paroubek yesterday evening and ... I have definitely seen the worst PF ever.

While Topolanek's one is not interesting in any way and does not say anything special or inspirational, it is believable. He looks like an ordinary guy (albeit a bit dumb), he says what the people usually say, he smiles. On the other hand Paroubek's is like a trip to North Korea - awfull place (stage with a candle ... how original!), horrible speech beeing read from the notes, grumpy face. Is it a sort of personality cult or what? The cameraman could tell him he looks like an idoit? OMG, this guy wants to be a PM!

Check your self below.

Top 10 worst predictions, heated rivalries, accidental celebrities, overblown fears, newly minted tycoons and more important stories/people of the last decade in 20/10 decade review.

Zombie attack would cause civilization collapse, if zombies really existed. So says the research of canadian universities. Unless the action is quickly taken ... And that's what I'm ready and keen to do once these kind of nazi zombies will appear. Unfortunately it looks like no fun for Mac OS X users is planned. On the other hand another zombie mission is.

Once upon a time 40 years ago there was an unique event ... Woodstock pics slide show w/ audio at BBC.

Greed on Wikipedia
The greediest people of all time
Capitalist manifesto - Greed is good (to a point)
Islam and greed

And if you do not have enough - greed at Google and Bing.

BBC has published a 1979 Iranian revolution slideshow ... and some of the pictures are very similar to what we can see from Iran these days. Are the events now aimed in the same direction as then?

Commoditization of hi-tech devices such as digital cameras, video cameras, mobile phones toghether with almost omnipresent internet connection changed the ways the information battle between the authorities and the public. Of course it applies the most to situations such as current protest in Iran with totalitarian government fighting its own citizen, but remember Czechtek 2005 case [czech only, for english check Google translate].

The technologies seem to be a huge advantage for the otherwise weaker side of the public, but is that really true? Image North Korea which is a sort of a time trip to the fifties, where the people do not have any technology at all, so it can't help. And there is much worse situation if the propaganda would start to use them as well. Then it would have no clear winner again and would become the battle of which source to trust. Am I more skeptical than usually today?

Definitely one of the most entertaining movie review ever was Newsweek's review of the latest Star Trek franchise commenting the political reminiscences of Star Wars and Star Trek "doctrines". A brief comparison of Bush and Obama administrations also included! Dark picture, but anyway Dick Cheney starring as Emperor and Barrack Obama as Mr. Spock ... click to enlarge :)

After boring campains of radar base opposers and virtually no actions of its supporters I found one particularly funny piece in this issue in Prague subway train. Is this some sort of secret NATO project :)

Text is in czech only and not well readable, so here is the translation of the first picture of the strip.

Title: "... somewhere deep in the forests of Brdy"
Squirrel: "Wow, what is growing over here?"

More and more news about new regulaions of Interent appear such as Berlusconi and G8 or filtering in Australia. Some of them are more amusing some of them more threatening. Anyway they remind me of J. P. Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It is from 1996, but still applies ...

Yesterday U.S. vice-president candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin clashed in first debate. See the comments in a BBC article. The more interesting outcome of the article than the results of the debate it self (the analysts and polls show Mr. Biden did better by the way) is there are results of service which makes so called "word cloud" from a buch of text. It calculates the count of each word used in text and displays it in size regarding the count.

See for yourself what the candidates talked about :)

... or create your own word cloud at Wordle.net (Java plug-in required).

I was told by the PR guys it is common in the newspapers that the article gets different headline than created by the journalist. And that's because there is a special person just for making the headlines who has the ultimate word on it.

It came to my mind when browsing through two days old The Guardian. And it seems as a good work done as following headlines definitely got my attention and made me laugh.

Click to get the excerpt from the article ...