Finished reading The World According To Garp and The Attack Of The Unsinkable Rubber Duck this August.

Garp:
Got this book borrowed by Julia. Good book but it's to dark imho. Also some stuff is made a big deal about, but was missing in the earlier chapters. Like the under toad bit.

Rubber Duck:
If you got problems with *%§$°-language, this book is not for you. I liked it very much. Guess I'll pick some of his other works as well. Get yourself a copy.

http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/

Been testing the demo version of Anno 1404, since I'm below the minimum requirements. Worked fine apart from some sound glitches. Maybe larger Cities will crumble my frame rate but oh well. I will get a fast laptop sometime in the near future anyway. And it reminded me a lot of the first Anno I played.

Since I accidentally got a DRM infested version of Oblivion, for $$$, I do check before buying a game now. To Bethesda defence they did not use freaking activations.

To bad for Ubisoft, they are using TAGES which does not sound like something I would like to use. Google for it and see some of their problems from the last holiday season (servers down 2+ days) and ubisoft is allegedly having bad customer service concerning older DRM titles as claimed by users on the steam forums or cd drive problems in X3TC (yeah I read anno does not use cd validation).

I do not oppose DRM completely as long as they are sane.

As you might have read, on twitter, I bought The Secret Of Monkey Island Special Edition on Steam. I wont be able to pass my copy to a friend or family member after I finished the title, as I did when I was a minor and played Monkey Island the first time. Plus I do not have a nice coaster sitting in my bookshelf after finishing the game.

But steam proved itself of being trustworthy and non intrusive, imho (and Monkey Island is only 10 Euros). Same scheme as iTunes after-all.

On iTunes I bought TV episodes that also bound to my account but are cheaper then the DVD and also available in English. Yet I would not buy non iTunes-Plus music since I can't copy it to my linux or if ever I buy a non apple portable music player.

Egosoft with X3 uses stupid DRM too, but they are trustworthy to provide lots of patches that also contain free updates and after awhile they remove the DRM from the game. One might just wait for the DRM free 2.0 version, if you hate DRM that much. All hail to egosoft. Seriously I like you guys.

That said I'm none of this automatic no-sayers, still I do not like to be fucked with for spending good money on a poor product (non sane DRM, whatsoever). You could at least have a non TAGES steam version. I might have considered buying that.

Well maybe they patch it out or I make up my mind. Until then I got plenty of other games, SimCity4, CivIV,... and maybe pick it for $ instead of $$$ price tag without three online activations later next year.

Peta has a campaign for the amzon.com which sends it to the CEO directly or something, you might consider putting your question in their form:

http://getactive.peta.org/campaign/amazon_fur

Only recently was I made aware of that amazon sells fur. How should I noticed, I hate it when rich women think that is an adequate replacement for the dick-enlargement Ferrari or Porsche. So I emailed amazon to give me an insight why they do this.

Most annoyingly amazon.de didn't addressed any of my questions and simply claim that they read my email (they did not address any claim) and even claim to agree on many points.

Yet they have to make the biggest selection, whatsoever, for their other costumers as well. Therefor not banning it from the marketplace. Basically this is the same response others have got. Canned email. Really sad.

I will not buy any products from amazon while they continue to do.

Spread the word and if you do have an amazon account ask them yourself why they do this and how you feel about it (like buying elsewhere). Close down your wish list (by simply setting it to private). Hope that they understand loss in sales more then reading email and taking a stand against cruelty.

the canned response (in German) follows:

Guten Tag,

vielen Dank für Ihr Schreiben an Amazon.de.

Ihr Feedback wurde weitergeleitet.

Wir danken Ihnen natürlich für Ihre E-Mail zu unseren Produktangeboten, die Tierfelle enthalten. Dabei können wir nachvollziehen, dass Ihnen diese Angelegenheit sehr wichtig ist und stimmen auch in vielen Punkten mit Ihnen überein.

Unser Ziel als Händler ist es, unseren Kunden die größtmögliche Auswahl zu bieten, damit Sie die von ihnen gewünschten Artikel bei uns finden und kaufen können. Daher enthält unser Angebot in seiner Breite auch einige Artikel, die von anderen Besuchern beanstandet werden.

Ihr Feedback dazu ist uns sehr wichtig. Vielen Dank, dass Sie uns Ihre Meinung mitgeteilt zu diesem Thema mitgeteilt haben. Auch wenn wir auf dieses Thema nicht weiter eingehen können, hoffen wir, dass Sie unser Angebot weiterhin nutzen.

Wir bitten um Ihr Verständnis.

Freundliche Grüße

M##### B#####
Unser Ziel: das kundenfreundlichste Unternehmen der Welt zu sein
http://www.amazon.de

sorry for the lack of updates... again.. i am so lazy blogging.

here are two pic of someone just turned 29 ^^

this one is somewhat blurred... :-/

oh and we got this cam since december, my big sister did won it somewhere, nice device. samsung nv15 10.1mp.

on other news "The Day the Earth Stood Still" wasn't that great... rating: c (nice cgi though)

looking forward for that vampire movie though (rise of the lycans)

also planing on seeing slumdog millionaire, starting around march 19 at the pictures, maybe also one near you, with angela.