Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series will be sold to you as children's books. And little Artemis himfelf as the next Harry Potter or better. He's not. They're not.

Harry Potter is lightweight fantasy for children that became immensly popular a) because for some reason, adults like it, too and b) thanks to great marketing and release strategies.

HP-books (or HP1, I couldn't bring myself to read the others) display an utterly black-and-white Weltbild, suitable, perhaps, for Younger Readers. Though I think children should read their ways out of, not into simplistic views of the world. Why adults should enjoy this stuff, I can only speculate. Also, Harry Potter himself has the dangerous attitude of one who's been trodden on all his life - to discover that he, after all, is better than all the rest - and not by virtue of anything he'd done but thanks to his lineage alone. YUK.

Artemis Fowl, on the other hand, is black and white and shades of grey all over. He's evil. But he's also smart and kind. The killer-bodyguard is a loving brother. The fairies have their lot to carry, they're a tough combat troup, but they're also all too human at times. And fair. Everybody's extremely fair and honorable. Everybody tries to trick everybody else out of something, but the powers are well matched and no-one needs to die. No-one's a goodie in the end. But no-one's the evil-who-needs-to-die-to-restore-balance-to-the-world, either.

Artemis Fowl one is well-paced and full of humour. It's written like an action-movie and I can almost see the movie it'll be turned into, hopefully, pretty soon. Artemis Fowl is also full of the latest technical gadgetry, inlcuding computer based translations of elven books of magic - I just love it.

Takeshi Kitano directs and stars in Zatoichi - The Blind Samurai (Japan, 2003). The blind director, more likely.

Whenever I watch Asian movies, even ones I enjoy, I keep thinking that I must be missing something - must be, without immersion in the cultural context. But with Zatoichi I must have missed all the important parts, all that justifies that raving reviews this film's got.

What I saw: Dull camera, awkward lighting, awful "artsy" sound, atrocious digital effects and fully gratuitous stop-tricks. Boring story. And topped with a kodo-drummers-band's idea of Riverdance. Oh, my.

Reinhard Döhl, pioneer of (German) experimental networked art died last May, shortly before his 70th birthday.

Now, Beat Suter and Johannes Auer have published a memoscript with contributions about Döhl's work:

$wurm = ($apfel>0) ? 1 : 0;
experimentelle literatur und internet.
memoscript für reinhard döhl.
edition cyberfiction: update verlag
zürich und stuttgart 2004
isbn 3-908677-70-X
186 seiten; hard-cover
preis: euro 26.- / fr. 39.-

Contributors are: Johannes Auer, Rene Bauer, Friedrich W. Block, Sabine Breitsameter, Florian Cramer, Reinhard Döhl, Sylvia Egger, Jürg Halter, Christiane Heibach, Heiko Idensen, Martina Kieninger, Klaus F. Schneider, Dirk Schröder, Roberto Simanowski,

Beat Suter and Karin Wenz.

More on Döhl: http://doehl.netzliteratur.net

More on the book: http://www.cyberfiction.ch/memoscript.html

I got to watch half an episode of The L-Word - and I was amazed. With their core-audience in mind, I'd expected a two-room soap - but the sets and wardrobes are on a level with Sex and the City, slightly more wearable, perhaps. I'd really like to see their media-data. And the adverts they show in the US during the episodes.

Also, Sex and the City is known for its sexual explicitness. Words unhearde before a) on TV and b) out of the mouth of a woman. But the actual sex-scenes are rather cartoonish, at times even grotesque. Now, on The L-Word, there were what felt like minutes of love-making to the sound of Portishead's Dummy. Portishead - someone's done their homework! Though I guess the sex-scenes if where they get their "broader" audience.

What else? The L-Word is increadibly slow. The pacing is that of a movie rather than that of a serialized genre. The opening credits alone take ages.

I'm not sure which I find sadder: That we'll never get to see The L-Word in Germany or that we'll get to see it late-night on RTL with increadibly cheap synchronization.

Mark is unhappy about his old Tinderbox code. And so he should be. Not because his coding is awful (I'm not judge). Or because Tinderbox is a bad program (it unquestionably isn't). But, in almost all cases, by the time one has completed a project, one has learnt about 90% of what one'd need to know to make a perfect tool with perfectly elegant code.

Now would be the time to go back and polish up the code. But there'll be a deadline, and other projects coming up. So the time when one really needs to do something about the old code is on expanding or porting the project. This is called refactoring and it's bound to involve a lot of shaking one's head in disbelieve (or worse). It's only looking back that we see how steep our learning curve has been.

Peter Norvig touches in this realization in Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (via Anders' Surf Trail). You learn through experience and you learn through doing it. You'll always be better now than back when you did it. So, unhappiness about old code is really a good sign ...

(btw this is also why I think Paycheck is so unrealistic)

Yesterday, I hard-deleted all my cookies. Today, Amazon still recognizes me. How?

Just read in iX 9/2004 (p. 3) that ONE THIRD of US-Americans interviewed by Yahoo! do indeed reply to spam-mail and that ONE FIFTH would be willing to actually buy products "advertised" via spam mail.

See, there's a market for spam after all ...

I was going to write about David Lodge's Thinks ... tonight, but then I happened to watch the Olympics and saw Reinhold Beckmann interview two Beachvolleyball players (female). B. asked whether it was true that the rules contained a minimum size for the skimpy little bikinis the beachvolleyballers (female) wear. No, said the sportswomen, the rules actually say that the pants may *not* be wider than 4 cm.

EXCUSE ME?

Otherwise, the sportswomen said, we'd wear something larger.

Well, Beckmann said, now that's a rule we like, don't we.

But really, rules that force athletes to perform quasi-naked? (Not to mention the breaks after each set during which a team of cheerleaders with even smaller bikinis run on the field to wave their hips to some pop-tunes.)

I was going to add: no one forces you to play beachvolleyball. But no. Rules that require women to be half naked in order to qualify for a match just suck. (The men, btw, wear knee-long shorts and shirts that cover their stomachs.)

Yesterday, German biker Judith Arndt won silver in women's bicycling. She came in second, right behind Australian Sara Carrigan who gained on her on the last few meters, and that although Arndt'd been held up by a plastic bag that got caught in her front wheel and forced her to stop in the middle of the race. Wow. Compare this to German bike-star and advertising champ Jan Ullrich who came in 19th because he'd somehow miscalculated the tatics of his rivals (or so he told Reinhold Beckmann later that night).

However, all the media talked about all day were the events that led up to Arndt's sad faux pas of holding out her middle finger on crossing the finish line. Arndt was mad at Bund Deutscher Radfahrer (BDR) who'd decided not to nominate German sprint-champion Petra Roßner for the team. We're a well-rehearsed team, Arndt said in interviews all day. With Roßner, we could have played different tatics and we would have come in first.

But it's not the tactics the media got hung up about, it's the fact that Judith Arndt and Petra Roßner are a couple. And this was also how Beckmann conducted the interview last night: all about Arndt being mad about her lover's exclusion. Yeah right. Women and strategy just don't combine, not even for a woman who wins silver in a tactics-heavy sport like cycling. If she speaks up, it *must* be because of the disappointment about not being able to travel with her sweetheart. DUH

N. says it's unprofessional of Arndt to make her complaint public and blow her top while all the cameras are upon her. And I must half agree. (Half, because half of the Olympics are about protesting and threatening to stay away from a contest if someone else turns up...) But I also think Arndt kept herself well during the interview, not allowing Beckmann to provoke her into talking about her love-life or into protesting that this was not about personal preferences. Instead she talked tactics.

And, for sure, coming out 2nd despite the plastic bag made her look a lot better and more professional than Ullrich on 19 with several minutes of airtime worth of weak excuses. GO JUDITH!

The credits of I, Robot claim that the film was "suggested by Isaak Asimov's book". If you ask me, the film was inexpertly hacked off Asimov's book with a generous helping of Philip Kerr's Gridiron thrown in. Spiderman, The Mummy, , Terminator and a lot of The Matrix. Sadly, less in a way of ironic, self-reflexive quoting than in a way of quick recycling.

Esp. if you watch it shortly after AI, I, Robot is quite a let-down. Not just because the plot is predictable and the message less than skin deep. The Special Effects are a huge step back. The AI-team had put a lot of work and skill into the visuals of the movie, with miniatures, make-up, digitalpost-production and animation, usually all combined in a scene to create crystal clear and fine-grained images that the (virtual) camera can linger on. And it does. AI is a pretty slow-paced movie with an eye for details.

I, Robot, in contrast, resorts to the old trick of fast action and camera moves to gloss over sloppy animations. With robots running in one direction and the camera panning in another, you don't have to create the robots in such realistic detail, do you. Saves a lot of production time and money. Most of I, Robot is a hulky Will Smith filling the screen against a dimly futuristic background.

And did I mention the predictable and shallow plot?

I've watched Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 with two media studies graduates and they hated it while I was merely not too thrilled. After the reviews I'd read, those that talked about how Fahrenheit worked as an eyeopener for the US-American audience, I'd somehow expected it to be either more enlightening or more shocking. The media studies people's complaint was mainly that there was no journalism in this documentary. And too much bias.

Indeed, I'd kind of missed.the statement of sources: where did Moore get his footage? Where did he get his information? All the "data" in the film appears rather credible, stuff we'd always expected anyway. But I have no way of judging or even guessing if any of the claims Moore makes about Bush's life and relationships is true or not. Surely, if I followed politics more closely, I'd be better able to put this new info or "info" into context? And would properly disclosed sources help that much?

But I'd hoped for a little more balance. I mean - so the Saudis have business relations with the US. Is this per se a bad thing? Or are trade relations one way of tying countries into a community? So the Saudis are invested in the US big time - wonder which countries the US are invested in. Then, the way the members of the "coalition of the willing" were portrayed. are countries like Puerto Rico or Morocco really that ridiculous? I bet Moore could have made as strong a point while being a bit more differentiated.

One thing that surprised me was about a minute of black screen to the soundtrack of 9/11 - crashes and sreams. This review in German weekly Die Zeit had made me expected to see bodies falling from the WTC. Not that I wanted to see that - they did show the charred bodies of US soldiers I'd already seen in German afternoon TV, this time in close up, how the got beaten to pieces and strung up on a bridge - and I couldn't look. But the blank screen - was this the one instance of subtlety in the movie or did they censure Fahrenheit in Germany? After all, it's rated "12".

Finally, I wonder: who's Moore's audience? The "cheap white trash" he appears to be talking to, the people he addresses in the end sequence? People like Lila from Flint who sent her kids to the army because she can't afford to pay for their eduction and whose whole life gets turned around when her son dies in Iraq. (What a stroke of luck for Moore, btw, to get to interview a staunch conservative who actually loses a relative to the war she's supporting ...) In this case, I don't know, being a bit blunt may be just the right approach. Or are his audience the European left in their teens and twens?

I'd skipped AI when it came out because I expected a lightweight Spielberg atrocity about what it means to be human, nothing Star Trek Voyager wouldn't do as well or better. But when I realized AI is, at its core, a Kubrick-movie and after I've seen K.'s storyboards, I went to borrow the DVD, after all.

Its optical opulence and casual humour aside, AI is basically a story about a little kid who desires nothing more than for his mother to love him - a mother, for whom he is always the "wrong child" (the robot, not the organic child). Little David would to anything to achieve this one quality that he thinks will earn him this love: humanity & at the first ending of the movie, we see him under water, out of reach, trapped in a chopper, and hoping, hoping. Heartbreaking, really.

But there's a second ending, where beings (not human, but not aliens, either, it seems) find David 2,000 years on and love him because he and his computer memory are their only link back to humanity. They love him so much that they recreate his mother for him, for a single day of bliss, at the end of which, at last, she tells him she loves him and has loved him, always.

And isn't this what we all hope for? That the love of strangers that we earn in the course of our lives, who love us because we bring some sort of meaning to the plots of their lives, will win us this far more precious, unearnable, elusive prize, parental love?

Very sleek movie based on motifs from Philip K. Dick and visuals from Minority Report. Also, a perfect little adventure game (minus the interaction, of course): after the establishing cut scene, the playing character finds himself with a set of itmes that have to be used (separately or combined) in different situations in order to find the cause for disorder in the hero's world and restore order.

After a slow start, there's some moderate tension and pretty little irony. And Uma Thurman, of course.

Charming little movie. Highly recommended by Nigel, which is always a good sign, too.

Contrary to first impressions, Wilbur is a film about life with a lot of dry humor, much of which, sadly, is lost in the broad Scottish they're all speaking. Some more of it may have been in the original Danish script which the scriptwriter and the director (both Danish) have adapted to Scottish standards while shooting.

Wilbur is a slow movie and does not try very hard to make a point. Nice.

Strange, however, that the characters are all in their thirties. The growing up Wilbur gets to do appears to be more of a teenage thing, including emancipating himself from his family and turning to a romantic partner. But then, the deaths of the family members is so umprompted by the moral scaffolding of the story that it can only be supposed to work metaphorically within the movie, anyway.

I remember why I wanted to read Mark Höpfner's 2001 novel Pumpgun. I wanted to read it because some reviewer had called it an accurate rendition of the adequate language for the computer game generation. Or something like that. And an engaging statement in the computer games and violence discussion. It is, however, a lame piece of popliterature that utterly fails to handle large topics like guilt and growing up in an even remotely enlightening way. Höpfner is wallowing deep in male ego-formation and I bet that, had Erfurt not happened half a year after the its publication, what little waves this book has stirred would have turned out even smaller.

I'm happy with my 12". It's got all I need, including a server and PHP. But every now and again, use of a PC is inevitable: to make sure a site will display properly on the browsers of the unitiated or to check if a site-bug will still be a bug in Winworld.

So far, I've used a ratty assembly of bulk-components to this end - which blew up over the weekend. Not totally unexpectedly, either. The on/off switch of the el cheapo case broke after a year or so. I didn't actually go hunting for the exact right part and the one I installed didn't work for too long, either. Since then, I've started the machine by holding two wires together. Of course, I always kept the main power switch at the back of the case turned off unless I acutally used the machine.

Well ...

Then the CD ROM drive broke down, causing the PC not to boot anymore. So I took the CD drive out, leaving some wires dangling in the case.

Ah well ...

Then, this weekend, turning on the main power switch caused a bang and a spark and every electric appliance around me went dead (except, fortunately, the Powerbook which is connected to a different circuit). Fuse blew. No harm done. But the PC will have to go.

The lessons this story teaches is not necessarily that PC-systems are bad but that there may be a point in investing in quality components. Which means that the "but they're so expensive"-argument against Apple Computers doesn't really hold - unless you can afford to buy a computer that may fail partly or entirely at any time.

So, now I need a new and reliable PC computer when I'd so much rather invest quality-compuer-cash into more Macs. An Airport Express kit, for example. Or a tiny bit of iPod. *sigh*

I don't usually take long with exhibitions. An hour or so. But sometimes there are shows where you just know beforehand that it'd be better to take an entire rainy afternoon off to have enough time for them. Too few musuems offer return-tickets for large shows that would, e.g. allow you to come as often as you like within a week or ten days.

Von der Urhütte zum Wolkenkratzer (from the primordial hut to the highriser) is the permanent exhibition at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (German Museum of Architecture), DAM, in Frankfurt. And I always tought that hut to highriser would turn out to be just such an exhibition, so I kept postponing it. But now I have the Museumsufer Karte (free museums for a year), I can come back as often as I like, so I went this afternoon.

And was utterly disappointed. A single room with thirty or so models of dwellings from pre-stoneage time until the 1990s. Half a page of text for each. No way of finding out which parts of the models the texts refer to (no markers or anything). *Nothing* about architectural styles or anythingl.

I mean, one would assume that the Deutsche Architektur Museum has an educationary aim or something. The socio-history of architecture - where if not there?

Btw the Museum of Telecommunication re-opened its permanent exhibition recently. I've only taken a quick look, but it seems they've mainly rearranged the old material and added some text. The view from the stairs is cool, but the user-guidance system still doesn't look ideal.

The Importance of Being Earnest delightful little movie. Delightful little play, in fact. Basically, there's almost no line that's not a perfect(ly) Wilde aphorism. In the 2002-version of the movie (dir. Oliver Parker, with a wicked Rupert Everett, a somewhat too abstracted Colin Firth and a rather bland Reese Witherspoon), the visuals are entirely accessory. Perfect viewing for a house-work Saturday afternoon with piles of washing to get done ...

In my culture, there's a popular saying: Cable ties will do the trick.

And indeed, they will. On the visible surfaces, the case of the 12" Powerbook is held together by allen screws that go very well with the overall design of brushed metal slab. They are also a pain to tighten, esp. the two at the bottom of the screen are almost impossible even with an angled allen key (and of course I lost the smallest one from my set, anyway).

So I squeezed the end of a very small cable tie into the tiny key-hole and and twiddled the tie until the screw sat flush with the panel again. Neat.