The Truth Slips Out, Again

The last couple of days has given us old news on Iran and lack of news about CIA interrogations, which in itself is news. AFP sums it all up pretty well in an article published here.

So, what has in fact happened? Regarding Iran it seems the nuclear weapons program is indeed on hold. That’s good news since we’ve been hearing increasingly aggressive rhetoric from the US over the program.

Regarding the interrogations performed by the CIA the tapes that could have shown the interrogation methods in use have been destroyed. Not very surprising, but critics say this proves that the harsh methods should in fact be classified as torture. If the methods were to become public, that is, but now they’re not and who knows what they contained but we can assume it’s no Sunday School picknick.

Refugees Still Sweden Bound

The war in Iraq has generated a wave of refugees to neighboring countries and countries as far away as Sweden. Actually, the Swedish town of Sodertalje has admitted more refugees than America (the whole country), which is odd considering what country is most involved in Iraq. The facts in this article are still valid, Sweden has accepted many Iraqis.

One good question is what will happen over the next few years. The Iraqis in Sweden are concentrated to a few areas where they are living in overcrowded apartments. Few jobs are available. The refugees may have escaped their homes and saved their lives, but the current situation in Sweden does not make it easy for them to start building new lives for themselves.

This is something that needs to be addressed soon or matters will only worsen.

Dollar Plunges Deeper

For anyone interested in exchange rates, the current status of the dollar is an interesting case to study. What’s happening? A colleague asked me the other day if the dollar could pehaps have reached its lowest point against the euro and would soon make a sharp turn up. The dollar has gone from a higher value than the euro to today’s rate where about US$1.50 is paid for each euro.

There is in fact no end in sight.

There are many reasons for this. One is the interest rate situation where lower returns are expected in the US market. Another is the conflict in Iraq (and Afghanistan) which is eating away federal funds at a never ending pace. There is also a credit and housing situation in the US which is not under control.

So my advice to my colleague, and anyone who thinks the dollar has dropped as far as it can is this: as long as the dollar is worth more than the paper it’s printed on there’s always a chance you’ll see further drops in value.

Read more here.

Sony, Always Annoying

I recently bought a movie on DVD from Sony Pictures. I can’t complain about the movie itself, its entertainment value was close to expected. However, I had to watch legal notices for over a minute before the movie actually got started in my DVD player. Not only does this notice pop up the first time I watch the movie, it shows up every single time I insert that disk into my player. Why? It’s extremely annoying.

What if Microsoft bothered their customers with over a minute of legal notices every single time they clicked to start an Office program? There would be a horde of outraged customers outside their headquarters complaining.

I can’t imagine that the people who actually intend to make illegal copies of movies ever bother about the legal notice anyway, so the text is there for ordinary people like me. It’s somehow intended to scare me into not making illegal copies of the movie. What it’s in fact doing is annoying me to the extent that I’d rather purchase an illegal copy if the seller can promise me that the legal notices have been replaced with something at least mildly entertaining.

Place the legal notices where they belong, after the movie!

Hello Kitty!

I just noticed that all things Kawaii (Japanese for cute) are popular again. At least around here. It may be an old phenomenon in Japan, but I haven’t seen it so much here in Northern Europe before. That old cat, Hello Kitty, is once again à la mode and I cannot quite figure out why. Teen girls suddenly show off Hello Kitty printed on jackets and T-shirts or even hand bags.The cat is over 22 years old by now, so this is no young kitten. More of a fat old cat, really, but of course the image is exactly the same as when the figure was launched in 1974. And Sanrio makes about 1 billion dollars on Hello Kitty related business. Per year. So that’s a pile of cute dollars.

Cute things in general seem to be huge in Japan, even when designing fighter monsters the Japanese believe a cute surface is the best. Because that’s what they are, the Pokémon: Pocket Monsters. Born and bred for one big task in life: fighting. Yet they’re cute looking, for some odd reason. Pikachu, the best known Pokémon, is adorable… and dangerous.

In the west we’ve traditionally designed even the good guys to look evil. Has anyone ever found Spider-man to be cute?

Sex Scandals and Other Truths

We’ve not quite attracted the attention lately that this blog deserves. In our opinion, that is. The reason seems obvious – we haven’t spent our time on searching for the truth, uncovering it no matter how ugly it may be.

Sex scandals are ugly simply because they contain the “sex” element in a scandalous context. The best known scandals of all time include Woody Allen who had an affair with his wife’s daughter, Michael Jackson who was repeatedly accused of sexual activities with minors, or the classical Rasputin (1869-1916) who was accused of all sorts of things including sexual promiscuity, manipulating the royal family and taking bribes. Bribes are extremely ugly when politicians and tax money are involved.

The biggest scandals at this moment in time may be high school teachers that have been involved sexually with their students. This doesn’t seem to be uncommon; searching the internet you’ll find lots of stories. The students may have been willing to participate, however this does not mean that it’s alright, teachers are in a position of authority which makes it a crime.

Let me just add that you are welcome to link to this blog, even using our cover picture with the bird that can’t speak but lets the truth out all the same (always visible in the header). Quality links are reciprocated.

Stain Remover Finally Working

I’ll admit to carelessness. I wore my new shirt, which by the way is very nice quality and looked like it would park itself at the number one spot as my favorite shirt, when I managed to get it full of stains somehow. I’m not sure how, but obviously some of the food I lifted off my plate never ended up in my mouth.

Very annoying, really. But the most annoying thing was that the stains didn’t come out after a regular washing in the washing machine. I rewashed the shirt at a higher temperature. Still nothing happening to those stains!

So, I bought myself a stain remover and applied it generously, according to the enclosed instructions. After a third wash the shirt was… still stained!

I applied detergent, soap, liquid soap and a few household chemicals that looked mild enough. Still nothing. Very disappointing.

At that point I gave up and hung the shirt far back in my closet, refusing to understand that it could absolutely never be worn again and should in fact be thrown away.

Then something happened – my three-year-old son talked me into buying another stain remover. He liked the package and wanted to take it home to play with, so I thought I just might try the contents on my stubborn stains on that nice shirt. I bought the stain remover Wizz Oxi Ultra Plus which promised to remove just about anything. I didn’t believe it, but the package looked nice to play with.

To my amazement the stains came out completely!

The moral of this story is not necessarily to buy this product. But I think the moral is that some stain removers are very good at some types of stains, and others are good for other stains. It’s not a total waste of time to try a few different products if you really like the stained item.

Capturing Carbon Dioxide

The United Nations recently released a report on climate change that blames humans for the ongoing global warming. At least this is what the short version of the text says, and I haven’t read the long version yet. To read it yourself, click to go to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A few quotes from the text:

“Changes in the atmospheric abundance of greenhouse gases and aerosols, in solar radiation and in land surface properties alter the energy balance of the climate system.”

“The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change”

So, there are two factors involved. Fossil fuels and land use change.

Oddly enough factor one gets a lot more publicity: the fossil fuels. Anyone traveling through the modern world will notice that factor two is decidedly present as well; forests are gone, replaced with agricultural landscapes that don’t store carbon dioxide the same way large trees do.

There are other ways to store carbon dioxide underground that could prove to be the best and quickest way of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. It’s called “carbon capture” and environmental organizations aren’t fond of it. They would prefer cutting down on energy consumption overall, but is that scenario really realistic? Carbon Capture, or Sequestration, is the technology of separating carbon dioxide and storing it underground.

Buy Top Domain Names, Here’s How

Most interesting domain names have already been acquired by someone else… that’s a sad fact. If you’re a big fan of some very specific subject you’re still not likely to find the domain name available, at least not under the dot com top level domain. For example, if you’re extremely interested in ancient Egypt and specifically mummies you might be looking for egyptianmummy.com as your new blog domain. Forget it – the domain was acquired long ago!

This is where the new IDN domains come in handy. IDN domains are Internationalized Domain Names. As you must already know there are a number of non-latin alphabets in the world. There are also a number of variations within the Latin alphabet, for example the word café which contains a non-standard Ascii character at the end (which is why it has been written cafe in internet domain names until now). This is the interesting part: in most languages that use the Latin alphabet it is perfectly natural to use these special characters – and it is more likely that, for example, a majority of French people will actually write “café” instead of “cafe”. The same goes for most non-English language Europeans.

So if you’re devastated that your hot domain name cozycafe.com was already taken, consider buying the cozycafé.com version which is most likely still available (it is at the time of writing this post) and that domain name may even be the spelling of choice for very many Europeans.

(As a side note, do remember that these IDN domains are new and all software does not yet support them.)

Industry Calendar Girls

I have traveled to many different sales companies within the company group where I have worked for the last 5 years and seen surprisingly different ways of doing business. From time to time I’ve seen calendars on walls featuring calendar girls more or less undressed.

I doubt this is a good way of doing business. Having naked breasts in your customers’ faces when they visit your company can’t be considered professional. It certainly doesn’t make women customers feel comfortable, and most men probably feel uncomfortable about this as well. Especially modern men who consider equal rights for everyone to be important.

I recently visited the sales company in Södertälje, Sweden. Not only were their walls plastered with Topless Calendars, they were company calendars, with the company logo! This means that they have printed and want to associate their own company with undressed girls and unequal treatment of women – not only in their own premises but everywhere where the calendar is put on display.

This is not a good business idea. Calendars should display the goods on sale, not nudity.