I’m happy to report that there’s a new version of Ingoal’s Twitter Updater available. Version 2.10 is tested with WordPress 2.9.2, adds bit.ly support and fixes zz.gd support. Thanks to Jordan “@comm” Trask for the version.

Head on over to twitterupdater.com to get it or use svn.twitterupdater.com to get it via turtoise…enjoy!

Hihi :)

So, it’s my birthday today…no major plans, just a little get together with some friends…got some nice gifts already, ordered on for myself (an SSD for my laptop, ty intel for the value series :))…I’m outta here, have a great day :)

I mean okay, the iPad seems to be way cool and in all honesty, I’ll probably order one once they become available over here in germany (depending on the price which is yet to be determined), but what the hell is going on?

Over here there’s a new crazyness about this “new” auction format where there’s an item, e.g. the ipad, which starts at 0.01 Euro and an amount of time x. Every time someone bids, the time y is added (e.g. 10 seconds) and the price increases by an amount z (e.g. 0.01Euro). The ultimate winner of the auction will pay the end price, but wait, there’s a kicker. Every bid in an auction costs 0.5 Euro (0.675$).

So, there’s one winner and x people bidding, in the end there’s the lucky winner and x people having payed for nothing…and even the winner might really be a loser.

See the following example which I witnessed this afternoon:

So, let’s do a little math:

1. The iPad has a value of 499$
2. There were 4986 bids for 0.675$ (0.5Euro) a pop, which equals 3366,25$ for the site running the auction.
3. The “winner” of the auction is the ultimate loser, 1524 bids + the final price = 811,87 Euro or 1.095,79$

Wtf is going on here? This auction platform is like printing money, I guess there are more and more idiots getting up every morning, you just have to find them and they’ll hand you their money…sad..really sad…

Happy 2010 to all my readers! :-)

So, it was time again to do some upgrading…WordPress 2.8.4 it is from now on. All plugins updated as well…it’s been a while since I did a major upgrade, but as usually everything went dandy, thumbs up WordPress!

So…half a year with no post…I didn’t even realize I didn’t post here in ages…really weird, but hey, ever since I started using twitter, I tend to post little tid-bits there instead of posting a new post on here…maybe I should change that again…and post at least a wrap-up of what’s been going on around here…we’ll see…I wonder if anyone is still reading this anyway ;-)

Well, the new year is already a few weeks (errm months) old and I didn’t have much time to blog around here…busy busy…work work work…all good though, just wanted to give you all a headsup that I made it safely into 2009…may it be a blessed year for you and yours….

The answer:

Merry christmas to you and yours…

Hi there one and all, greetings from munich. Foggy, cold, munich. At least the beer is still one of the best in the world and my hotel room, read: suite, is mighty awesome. Not that I can enjoy it much during the day – training courses start at 9am and last until probablyy 5:30pm….but hey…better little time in an awesome room than a long time in a hawesome room (like it was the case two weeks ago in cologne where I stayed in an extended closet for a whole week ;))…alrighty…I’m outta here….

…because I started a new job, which I really like, but it keeps my private online time to a minimum…so don’t wonder about the not all that regular updates around here. Next week I’m off to cologne for the week…after that I’m in munich…getting around…I guess I’ll take my digicam with me so maybe you’ll see a few snapshots…we’ll see….

Due to a minor injury less doing sports and more watching sports. The olympics, german football league starting…and what not. Along the way I worked off my last freelance jobs…so the coming weeks should be a lot less crowded…at least when it comes to working, unless I get the new job I’m applying for, then the “workless” times could be over quite quickly ;)

Football preparation for the new season has started two weeks ago and so far I didn’t miss a single training session – so far. Today I missed the first one, a friendly match, as my foot is shining in different colours ranging from green to blue. It wasn’t the best idea to train on friday after suffering the injury on thursday, but oh well. Nontheless a lot of sport going on.

First of all, the Beijing Olympics…so far nothing much going for the german athletes when it comes to winnnig medals, but at least some of the national teams seem to be in good shape (e.g. handball, basketball)…it’ll be fun to watch them compete for the next few days/weeks.

Secondly, the german professional football season is about to start next weekend, so in good old tradition the competition for the german football cup ( “DFB Pokal” ) started this week…so far quite a few good matches and no major upsets…

Alrighty…enough about sports, I’m going to do a little sport myself now…called “couch-surfing” ;)

…I get no support at all for an original product, genuine baby, that I bought from this company. What do I get instead? “Support” from a russian call-center basically telling me “click here, click there, oops doesn’t work, good day sir”. Wtf is going on here? Is there no qualified staff anymore where cases like mine could be escalated to? Wtf is going on…I’m so mad right now, you wouldn’t even believe it.

Note to self and anyone else out there pondering a Vista install for one reason or another: If you’ve got the “old version” (without SP1), make sure you use this version in the install process and install SP1 after the install. Why? Because Vista+SP1 is not Vista and then SP1…sorry…can’t activate your install…thank you very much M$…that’s what you get for buying your software instead of stealing it…thank you very much….

Edit #1: It seems that even the gurus at Technet can’t help…so I guess I’m in for a reinstall, yet again…

Edit #2: Still waiting for my new external hard-disc to show up…grrr….I hate delays….

Edit #3: Almost there, system up and running again…with official activation and the whole she-bang…still need to install some updates and then I’m good to go again…wheeeeeeeeee.

Today was one of these days. Sit down at computer, do some small stuff…get the feeling that it’s totally sluggish. Hmmm, it’s windows after all and has been running for two weeks straight now…oh well, let’s reboot. Poof. Bad idea. System doesn’t come up again and throws the black screen of death. This or that driver is missing or damage.

Okay, let’s do a repair. Repair done – same problem.

Okay let’s do a restore to system restore point “yesterday” – not working.

Okay let’s do a restore to system restore point “two days ago” – not working.

…

Okay…all system restore points aren’t working. Groovy. Why did the system do them again? Sigh.

Okay, let’s do a repair install. Errm yeah, (upgrade aka repair) only possible when started from within the “old” install. Errm yeah, genius…I need the repair out of pure desperation…not because my system isn’t coming up you dumb***…sigh.

Oh well…burned up the whole afternoon and evening and now I’ve gotta do a clean install anyway…bad beat right there…

…not that I had an old-one, lol, but as I got myself a new digital camera today, I thought I’d start a photoblog as part of ingoal.info. It can be found here. Let’s see how long I can keep it uptodate with photos…my plan is to post a photo every day, let’s see how that works out. If you would like to follow my photoblog, check in regularly or subscribe using your favourite feedreader…

I just wanted to give a big shoutout to the makers of SuperAntiSpyware as their software did a really great job on cleaning my system. It all started a few days back when some nasty spyware infected my system. No big deal I thought, so I fired up all the usual tools (e.g. Adaware, Spybot S&D, HijackThis)…to no avail…not even a safe-mode reboot and cleaning-procedure could get rid of it.

Bring in SuperAntiSpyware – Free Edition. Installed it, auto-downloaded the newest updates and definition files, ran it once, rebooted once and my system is clean. Awesome.

So once again, this is not a paid review, it’s just a message from me saying: Great software and if you’ve got problems with a spyware-infected system, give it a try!