another free download / print out is ready ->

the free football festoon fan flags - download, cut out, draw, hang -> watch the game..

-> here’s the download page <-

..enjoy!

First I wanted to call this post “Merkel’s Mad Men” – but that won’t suit either: nor the the top 10 lost ministers, that had to leave their political position in the past months, nor the greatest american TV series about this New York advertising agency.

Anyways. So in the past months the german government, or Angela Merkel if you like, has lost even more than ten top position politicians. To pay a bit respect to this ongoing situation I have compiled a top ten list. First I’ll just post the names, later I’ll be adding the individual resignation reasons.

Here we go:

1: Christian Wulff, Ex-President
2: Horst Köhler, Ex-President
3: Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Ex-Minister of Defence
4: Franz Josef Jung, Ex-Minister of Defence
5: Günther Oettinger, Ex-Governor of Baden-Württemberg
6: Roland Koch, Ex-Governor of Hessen
7: Jürgen Rüttgers, Ex-Governor of Nordrhein-Westfalen
8: Ole von Beust, Ex-Governor of Hamburg
9: Peter Müller, Ex-Governor of Saarland
10: Axel Weber, Ex-CEO/President of the German Central Bank (Bundesbank)

…to be continued..=)

There is nonsense and there’s nonsense - but the recent trend across Australia, Europe and the USA to ban the bulb is just plain nonsense. At least from my point of view. Rubbish.

First of all it the bulb ban hurts, when you look at it from a design point of view. An almost perfect object, form and fuction going along hand in hand, few cheap resources needed, cheap and easy in production, an easy player when it comes to recycling: some glas, some metal, something isolating in between - nothing much to fuzz about.The official reason for the ban of the bulb is actually its greatest unexpected advantage: light and warmth where you need it - when you need it - both at the same time - instantly. When the family gathers for dinner, the dinner table lamp is switched on, the bulb instantly emits light and warmth. Just like is ancient times, when the clan gathered around the fire place.And hat are we beeing offered instead? Supposedly more efficient, effective, but cold neon light bulbs, packed with semi-hightec components — an over-prized piece of hazardous waste!

Basically I have nothing against neon light - for every task one should always look for the best solution - and there are many tasks neon is currently probably the best choice: hospital corridors, construction sites, street lights — all situations where you just need flat and cold light and emission of heat is not really helping - and therefore a plain waste of energy.

At this point I should probably mention that I don’t need to have bulbs everywhere either - actually where I live we have mostly neon bulbs - sinces ages. But once we have a lamp embracing the bulb, we would of course want to use a bulb. Because good/intelligent design is more important than bad/stupid laws.

see also: Heatball:
www.heatball.de

Bulp Fiction:
www.bulbfiction-derfilm.com (german)

The Phoebus Cartel:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

The Centennial Bulb:
www.centennialbulb.org

at least: almost in time for the quarter-finals of the European Football Championship 2008 I finally made it to re-pixel all tricot shirts of all 16 teams - which means that here’s now some cute and small and colorful 2x 16 team shirt icons for you to download. For free. Of course…:]

‘European Football Championship - Team-Shirt-Icons - 2008′

I first feared that I wouldn’t make it this year to make an appropriate icon-set, just like back in the days of the football world cup 2006 - but then…

-> here’s the ‘Football-Team-Shirt-Icon-Set - 2008′

..to be continued..

…enjoy! greetz! -t..-

basically I don’t have anything against Black Sheep - the opposite is actually the case: not so long time ago Environmentalists, Globalisation-Sceptics, Human-Rights-, Anti-Nuclear- and other Activists and even members of the Green Party were sometimes treated like ‘Black Sheep’…

Nowadays hopefully nobody really wants to doupt that fossil fuels are limited, nuclear power is not such a good idea - and sooner or later we will have to move on and switch to alternative, renewable, regenerative - green sources of enery such as wind, water and solar power.

Actually these ‘natural/green’ power sources are currently so popular in Germany, that the demand can hardly be satisfied by the ‘natural/green’ power plants in operation today. This is obviously not the wind’s or the sun’s fault - these two colleagues deliver way more energy than we can consume. It’s a man made mistake - we are just not collecting or ‘harvesting’ enough of that energy.

What to do…? Some German newspapers ( Tagesspiegel and Spiegel-Online) recently reported, that one of the big players in German green power business recently found a pretty easy though not-so-green way out, bought some not-so-green kilowatt hours of coal and nuclear generated electric power and re-sold it under their green label. Well well.

And what do we learn from this…? First of all: there is also some Black Sheep among the Greens - but that we already knew at least since that ‘clever’ Swedish man not only collected money to preserve forests in South America, but then also cut down and sold some hundrets of thousands of trees - and finally was sentenced to pay a 177 Millionen Dollar fine (see also -> german newspaper Tagesspiegel)…

…well - I’ll anyways stick with the ‘clean~’ and/or ‘green power’ company called Naturstrom AG - they re-invest some of the money for new ‘clean~’ and/or ‘green’ power plants - so that also in the future we will hopefulle not need to use nuclear power - especially not secretly!

…powerful greetings, -t..-

actually for quite some days now I was planning to work on an icon-set for PC and Mac, featuring all European football championchip team shirts as desktop icons - just like those worldcup icons I managed to work on back in 2006. This is of course again more work than expected - especially since this time the team shirt icons should not only be compatible with Mac OS 9 (Classic) and Windows XP, but also look good on those ‘contemporary’ operating systems Mac OS X and Windows Vista. On the one hand this means that those icons will probably look ‘even nicer’ than those worldcup icons - on the other hand it clearly also means more pixels to work on.

Miniature-Cup
Trophy “EM 2008″
ca. 70mm tall
red wooden foot
buy new:
€ 17,95
at amazon.de

‘Work’ is also the right keyword for my excuse: besides all of this European football championchip and Public Private Viewing and Super Summer I am actually also still working on various projects - whis is good. But that also means that I can’t really afford working on team shirt icons full time - and all you Euro-Championship-Tricot-Pixel-Icon-Fans have to be patient for a little longer. As I already said I am still planning to work on those tricot-icons - but it will take a litle time until I can present them to you…

Until then I can only ‘feed you hopes’ and ‘promise you jam tomorrow’ and invite you to have a look at the freshly opened ‘fan shop’, have a closer look at all those ‘real’ fan items like Football Team Tricots, Fan-Shirts, Baseball Caps, Flags and so on - and maybe you would even want to order the one or the other item - everything presented her is presented in cooperation with amazon.de…

All product names, team details, descriptions and especially all prices are based on the information I found on the website amazon.de - no warranty or guarantee for correctness or thelike…
Read the rest of this entry »

First of all: I usually don’t read Ebooks - on the on hand I hardly find the time to read ‘real’ books, on the other hand Ebooks usually cost at least some money - and until now I didn’t really care about them and thought that the information provided in Ebooks usually would also be easy to find and therefore easily accessible online somehow somewhere…
The second thing I have to say before I get to the point is, that I am usually quite skeptical about -free- things. The recent WIRED-magazine features an interesting story about FREE-things - how they can be free, and what they actually do ‘cost’… but also before I read that article my point of view was that I can’t really afford most of the -free- things…

Anyways - surprise surprise: I just downloaded my first free ebook from chitika.com - or actually two ebooks for the prize of none:

• the first one is named “Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging”. It’s basically a round-up of the 30-days “Blog Bash” that took place at chitika.com throughout april last year. It features 30 one-page articles about ’successful blogging’ written by 30 (of the most successful) bloggers of the world wide web…

Of course this ebook can not and will not make anybody a successful ‘good’ blogger over night - but at least it provides an interesting insight into some bloggers ideas, strategies, minds…

• once you’re there downloading the one ebook you can just download the other one as well: it is titled “Using Chitika With Google” and shows different strategies of mixing Google Adsense ads for example with Chitika MiniMalls. Again: don’t expect too much from this - but maybe some interesting and/or entertaining tips and tricks and how-tos and so on…

both ebooks can be downloaded completely free of charge from chitika’s blog:
-> www.chitika.com/blog

greetings, t..

PS: you do not need to register for an account at chitika.com to download the free ebooks - but if you want to start using the chitika-ads for your weblogs/websites you may of course register using ‘my’ referral-link:
-> chitika.com/mm_overview.php?refid=tille

for obvious reasons I recently designed/made this “Free Tibet!” blinkie-button:

Free-Tibet!

…please feel free to download the button, and/or to include it into your homepage, website or blog, decorate your FaceBook account or some MySpace page of your choice. On the related blinkie-button-page you will also find some ready made code snippet along with some related links, that will make it very easy to add this button to whatever website of your choice..

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Sorry, but I just can’t leave the recent public discussion about Nuclear Energy (or maybe Nuclear Power would suit better) uncommented. So here comes my first comment/lament about what I’d like to call ‘Power Lies (and truths (and rumors))’.

First of all, for those who don’t know: I grew up in a rural area in the North of Germany, known for its almost untouched nature, its friendly farmers - and a number of facilities for handling radioactive waste. The whole project is under construction since the 70ies (ongoing), but the first containers named ‘CASTOR’ are already delivered since the mid-90ies.
As long as I can think (literally) I just know that Nucluear Power is not only dangerous, but also simply the wrong way to go.

That said I’ll now come to the first (and actually my favourite) ‘Power Lie’: the Carbon Dioxide Reduction Lie:
Yes, it is true that nuclear power plants can help to reduce the production of carbon dioxide - locally. Once a nuclear power plant is all built and then fed with fuel rods (those nasty parts that radiate very actively and that get so hot that you can boil water with ‘em - which makes a nuclear power plant what it is) a it will basically only emit hot water - and therefore it does not emit carbon dioxide directly.
But until a nuclear power plant is actually built and fed with fuel rods a lot of carbon dioxide is emitted - mostly in the countries where the fuel rods are produced. To compare the actual numbers a so called ‘Life Cycle Analysis’ helps to figure out, what the actual CO2-footprint of a technology is. The exact numbers seem to vary very much though - depending on what is actually compared - and also depending on who actually paid the research.
So.. - ..maybe next time you hear someone saying something like “Nuclear Energy helps reducing carbon dioxide emissions” you can add a little “locally!“.

please feel free to browse on:
-> pictures I took of the third ‘Castor-Transport’ to Gorleben back in 1997 (www.bilderbook.org)
-> Greenpeace’s campain page ‘End the nuclear age’ (www.greenpeace.org)
-> Elena’s Motorcyle Ride through Chernobyl (www.kiddofspeed.com)