Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:40 PM | rahel luethy | 2 comment(s)
crossing dreirosenbruecke is the part i like most about my bike ride to work. while i wouldn't really want to live in that area, i somehow like the mixture of urban traffic, harbor cranes, container ships, and the excellent view of the city, with gempen in the background. the ride feels different every day, and to share some of that variety, i've started to take snapshots:
luckily, i don't have to work every day, so i'm not even tempted to promise daily shots. i'll still try to bring my camera along whenever possible.
(flickr doesn't seem to support feeds on individual sets. thus, i've quickly set up a boilerplate blog with the default atom feed so you don't have to check back actively.)
Thursday, January 18, 2007 9:27 PM | rahel luethy | 1 comment(s)
in computing, a quine is a program that outputs it's own source code. in maths, a smart guy called tupper constructed an amazing self-referential formula which depicts itself when plotted.
Friday, January 12, 2007 5:45 PM | rahel luethy | 0 comment(s)
this post has been sitting around as a draft for quite a while. now that ben has listed xkcd as part of his daily addictions, i thought i'd just hit the "publish" button. so, without further comments, the three favorite sketches of an otherwise comic ignoramus:
and a forth one for the geeks:
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Thursday, January 04, 2007 11:25 PM | rahel luethy | 0 comment(s)
2006 was a wonderful year. it was great in all respects, except that i find it really difficult to put together a reasonable "best tracks of 2006" list. simply because i didn't have enough time and opportunities to listen to good music. nevertheless, these are my favorites (and if you also feel a need to catch up, this might be a good starting point):
nelly furtado: maneater (loose) — when i first heard this track, i thought it was performed by gwen stefani, whom i quite like but imho is always a bit on the hyper/wound-up side. i've already liked nelly furtado's earlier work, but this single is very catchy and repeatedly made me turn up the radio. the chorus somehow reminds me of michael jackson's "dangerous".
damien rice: rootless tree (9) — i came across the irish singer/songwriter because he performed a duet with tori amos on her latest album the beekeeper. his new work is very similar to the old songs and is perfect winter music: melancholic, beautiful, perfect with a cup of tea or a glass of red wine.
snow patrol: chasing cars (eyes open) — excellent song & wonderful lyrics. my 2006 girly-pick.
panic! at the disco: i write sins not tragedies (a fever you can't sweat out) — 2006 will also be known as the year of bands with very stupid names: someone still loves you boris yeltsin, and you will know us by the trail of dead, and panic! at the disco. how inventive, an exclamation mark! anyone heard of p!nk before? luckly, i've heard the song before i knew about the name. the violin intro sound's like it's been there before but this doesn't do any harm to the killer track. the rest of the album didn't convince me enough to spend the dollar on allofmp3.
muse: supermassive black hole (black holes and revelations) — i'm always rather cautious when it comes to emphasizing how much i like muse. i guess they are among the most talented musicians around. whenever i hear a live snippet, i find it almost impossible to believe what wall of pure rock sound they can produce as a trio. matt bellamy's energetic enthusiasm and dedication catches me in a similar way as tori amos does. if only muse didn't do any of this pompous prog rock stuff! (but probably this is as if i were asking tori amos to skip the piano). anyway, this track features no progressive elements whatsoever and is my favorite song on the new album.
the strokes: ? (first impressions from earth) — this is probably what "real" music reviewers could never afford: i can't decide for a particular track on the new strokes album. have i ever mentioned my averseness to the "shuffle" functionality of music players before? if not, i think that it is an unrespectful act to shuffle songs. no one would ever want to shuffle book chapters, wouldn't they? back to the strokes: another great album which must be listened to from the first to the last track. (this is my personal strokes association: the most snowfall possible, my nitro shogun snowboard and a day of hip-deep powder riding, a final beer at the cable-car station, driving home in the volvo, with cozy under-seat-heating turned up to max).
