fitts's law: the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

the website of bruce tognazzini is called asktog. he naturally has a very detailed view upon the latest design adaptions (e.g. macos 10) but also provides basic know-how for usability and design issues. still learning.

although i have not been dumped since a long time, i can hardly get enough of this song... "and don't forget to give me back my black t-shirt!"

hedy lamarr and composer george antheil are getting a toast by pc week as the inventors of a secret communication system that today is better(?) known as cdma or spread spectrum, a technique used in digital cellular phone service.

hedy lamarr is the cousin of ubiquitous dave winer's mother. his grandfather is german novelist arno schmidt (hell knows how mr winer is doing that).

dandot.com is a cool site combining progressive technical capabilities and fundamental design skills... i have to watch that.

i did not know what incredible things you can do with the already "old" internet explorer 4. reason: i did not use my windows machine for a longer time. on my mac with navigator 4 that kind of stuff is invisible to me...

even blogger makes heavy use of those ie/win features. suddenly i see a menu bar with buttons to mark text as bold or include a hyperlink (however, it does not work correctly – maybe with ie5?). that is the future of writing for the web!

do i have to mention that i found the link to dandot on scripting news?

i was looking for my own name on the web and i found myself being occupied with the hutchinson effect. strange!

pimi is writing an essay about the history of the graphical user interface. she is "quite shocked" by apple's aqua but already concluded rightfully that unfortunately today's guis have to look like this.

besides the new look (bringing the hardware's translucent design into the operating system) and a few modern functionalities that have to prove themselves in practice, i cannot find a lot of the improvements i would like to see in a future os. i replied to her that i want to have a system that is a browser and a finder that is an html document. finder.html – a weird idea?

btw: sensomatic is up and running again. better luck this time! and flo has written another funny summary of the past time in london news.

it's a shame: in vienna there seems to be no platform and no place for people like dave winer (i ask myself if it's a good place for me then...). although i got a quick reply from the people i wrote to regarding a session with mr winer, none of the "makers" took some action. very sad and it's probably too late now, anyway.

but i do not get through to scripting.com for days so i don't know which city will make it to get mr editthispage. zkm karlsruhe made a hefty invitation, too.

dave winer is coming to europa around 4 february 2000! i am asking the few people i know if they could organize the kind of live session dave winer would like to do in vienna. i am curious what will happen. munich, cologne and london are in the game already...

i have had some entertaining days close to stuttgart which means close to the edge... i went to the "one man poetry show" of bruder grimm who puts everyday stories into classic poetry (e.g. doing the dishes or preparing breakfast). gorgeous and challenging comedy at bastion, the smallest club i now so far.

afterwards we headed for stuttgart drinking at delilah's, dancing at radio bar and talking at café weiss. stuttgart definitely changed a lot, and i am glad it changed to become better than it was in the 80's (not that it was too new-wavy at that time, hell no. too many bhagwan followers and birkenstock students poisened the place).

yesterday i returned to vienna. my personal y2k "bug" awaited me as yellow, wet walls inside my flat. the bloody construction company was not able to fix the holes in the ceiling one and a half years ago, still water is crawling down behind the wallpapers... smells like an ancient cave here!

but i am in an excellent mood, though. and mark lycette called in the morning pretending to be an officer of the austrian army to call me in for military service. first i was confused (it was way too "morning"), but then i recognized his voice again. it was a long time that i heard him talking. reading his words in e-mails is so different.

mark and his brother john retouched their website with their beautiful works. what was formely html is now flash, what was formerly carbon is now the lycette brothers. well, actually, i was told that mark and john were referred to as the lycette brothers most of the time, anyway.

"let's play like we were brothers" – deutsch-amerikanische freundschaft

how can i fill the gap between today and my last posting with a few words?

trip from hamburg to hannover: getting up 5:30 in the morning driving by car to the airport of expo-city hannover. claudia and her wonderful boy-friend tibor were lucky to get a flight towards gomera from there. tickets from hamburg were sold out.

returning to the places where i spent about 4 years as student is strange. i never liked hannover the way i like vienna today. however, i met a crowd of nice people there. some of them became good friends and they are still.

i am visiting sabine and peter who are an incredible couple, just as they are incredible hosts, have incredibly good taste and easy way of living. not to mention their beautiful flat with wallpaintings done by a french gay couple staying at their place for a while. too many superb impressions to condense in some quickly written sentences...

it was new year's eve, and the first thing i did after a very warm welcome was putting on a stick mozarella and tomato pieces together with a leaf of basilicum – helping to prepare the finger food for the big delicious brunch and the lot of their friends.

this time i even got into some nice talks with some of the guests. probably they knew me from former visits, probably i was in a better mood this time. i am not always open for social relations. peter's lovely sister was my favorite chat person, though.

i stayed for three days and we took a lot of walks due to the nice, especially warm weather. we went to kestner museum to see fabrizio plessi's "l'anima della materia": the hanging forest.

the only bad surprise during that divine time was the sacher cake i brought along from vienna: it was way too dry to enjoy (back in vienna i have to check a newly bought one for freshness).

i am back at my parents house and i will have to do some work - but i did not... :(