William Hayes

After an all day strategy session yesterday, I went to the debut of Capriccio Basel's new CD with recordings of William Hayes, an English baroque composer and devotee of Händel. His music is radiant and imaginative, and yet, he does not have an English language Wikipedia entry! What gives?

Asia pics

Thanks to iPhoto '08, check out my new web gallery with the pictures from my recent trip to Singapore and Seoul! The things you can do with web gallery are neat, but it's a bit of a bandwidth hog ...

Peccabo

Interesting! Swiss / Lufthansa have started a partnership to offset carbon emissions from air travel. To offset the 342 kg of CO2 produced by my forthcoming trip to Ireland will cost CHF 11, for instance. A trip to London is CHF 9. Good stuff - never since the days of indulgences was a clear conscience attainable for less! Too bad that the indulgence cannot be added at the point of sales directly - that is going to be the next step in the sales cooperation, I guess.

Therefore, in the spirit of Sir Charles Napier's immortal pun, let's keep sining!

Welcome, Anna!

I'm still working on clearing the backlog from my recent trip. So, here's a big one - or, a small one, as the case may be: A big welcome to Anna Elenie! My nephew R.'s and his partner A's little girl has entered the stage on 29 August already. More pictures of her are available in my flickr account (check out the sidebar), and hopefully soon on a blog of her own.

NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOM

Abbreviations are fun, are they not, and this mouthful, beyond all doubt, is the mother of all abbreviations! According to this, it stands for (translated) Laboratory for Shuttering, Reinforcement, Concrete and Ferroconcrete Operations for Composite-monolithic and Monolithic Constructions of the Department of Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR. So, despite of being 56 characters long, it still entails a fairly decent abbreviation ratio of 5.54, which is better than NOPAT's 5.2, but worse than USSR with 7.75. Come to think, Russian words tend to be longer than English ones, so the homoglot ratio probably would be even better. (Thanks, RB!)

Rankings galore

If you are competitively minded, you will certainly be interested in the Economist's rankings repository. There you'll find a number of interesting rankings, from MBAs to operational risk. Eminently quotable ...

File Vault trouble?

I'm a bit paranoid about security, that's why I use File Vault on my laptop to protect sensitive (client) information. However, that might have nasty side effects, as I think I've uncovered. Let me quote my posting on Apple's discussion forums:

When travelling abroad, I've repeatedly encountered very serious system instabilities, involving the loss of application preferences, keychains and other vital system information. This was always easily recovered by restoring the backup back home. But naturally, the home backup is not really handy on the move ...
I think I've narrowed the cause of these instabilities now down to a combination of using File Vault and changing the time zone from the account that is protected by File Vault. Is anyone unfortunate enough to be able to confirm this, and might any expert out there have an idea about a plausible explanation and fix for this? Thank you very much!
Incidentally, the workaround (short of not changing the time zone) is changing the time zone in a user account that is not protected by File Vault.

I hope someone can comment on that. Meanwhile, don't try to replicate this on the move, and be sure to have a working backup!

A rising star?

Definitely! Having just touched down at Bangkok after a very pleasant flight from Seoul, I must say that Asiana is going to give the Singapore Airlines etc a run for their (much more) money! The A330-300 is very well laid out, the staff extremely polite & friendly (expect the experience to begin with a coordinated "all hands" reception bow while taxiing) and the food is good. So it's a thumbs up all around, followed by the pleasant surprise of being expected by two ground staff who whisked yours truly to the Thai Orchid Lounge on one of those obnoxious scooters to wait for the connecting flight.

First things first

The first thing to get in Singapore is an umbrella. Remember - it'll be cheaper when the sun shines! The first thing in Seoul is to make sure your mobile phone works with CDMA. You'll need it because apparently, they don't really have addresses in Korea. If you get a little local map together with your appointment message, then that's not just a nice gesture, but a bare essential!