Our office is at a busy intersection and sometimes this provides interesting views:

Our office is at a busy intersection and sometimes this provides interesting views:

This time I tried something new: the goal was to build a track where the electric locomotive would pass over all pieces when set on the track. That goal is simple to reach by building a simple loop or anything else topologically isomorphic to a circle. Getting the same result with a lot of switches and having the train run back over the same piece is a lot trickier. The only assumption you need to make is that the train will take the straight rail when encountering a switch.
The second picture is right before godzilla got her fingers on the track.
Hannes and Evelyn are back in Vienna. We built this one together:
Kevin Drum does “Friday cat-blogging”, John Cole has also pictures of pets between serious posts, so I thought I do something similar.
So, from now on this blog will feature wooden train tracks.
They are actually toys for the kids. When we first got them, Clemens didn’t quite know what to do with them, but now he finally starts to build his own tracks and trains to push along.
And then there is the menace of land of trains: Godzilla, the destroyer of tracks:
Anyway, as with a good number of stuff kids get from their parents, it’s not all selfless giving. (Andrea is looking forward to buy Clemens a Carrerabahn, as she always wanted to have one as a kid.) Sometimes it’s nice to have an excuse for playing with children’s toys again.
So I’ve taken up building fancy sets of tracks with Clemens’ wooden tracks.
I’ve started to photograph my creations some time ago and will now upload them. I’ll date the blog posts accordingly, so some of the entries will appear in the past. Use this link to see them all.
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 14:05:42 +0000
To: @bofh.priv.at
From: “Last.fm”
Subject: Your free trial to Last.fm Radio is over. Did you enjoy it?Hi XYZ,
Your free trial to Last.fm Radio is about to end. If you’re enjoying it, why not
subscribe for only €3.00/month and continue listening to non-stop personalised
radio.http://www.last.fm/subscribe
Best Regards,
The Last.fm Team
and
Deny This, Last.fm
by Michael Arrington on May 22, 2009A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?†based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.
I was inclined to pay them the 3€, partly because I’ve listened a lot to a stream from them, but after this breach of their privacy agreement?
Sorry, no deal guys.
[Update: yes, I know that LastFM is disputing this story.]
It’s strange: this happened just a year ago, but sometimes it feels like it was ages ago. Maybe it just depends on the perspective: For Elena, this year made quite a difference: from 9 months to 21 months of existance, or from zero to one years of life. For me it was just the step from 38 to 39 years. No big deal.
I almost forgot: one of the reasons I was in Amsterdam was the DNS-OARC Workshop. I gave two presentations there:
An update on the post-Kaminsky patch statistics concerning the Austrian recursors.
Stephane asked me to be on a panel regarding what Registries should do about Conficker (and similar threats). I presented our point of view with these slides.
This one started with the crossing in the center.
The Internet Community thanks the RIPE staff for their dedicated work during the RIPE and OARC meeting:

As a followup to Aaron’s talk at Linuxwochen Wien, Claudia Glechner from ORF visited the CERT.at offices to interview us.
The resulting article is now online at futurezone.orf.at.