Goodies

Below you’ll find a number of…well, what are they? For lack of a proper categorization I decided to call them goodies. So, it’s stuff from various categories that could be helpful or interesting for you.

Toad the Wet Sprocket

Toad the Wet Sprocket is – in my humble opinion – one of the best bands ever seen on earth!
I became a TTWS fan through ‘Something’s Always Wrong’ off their 1994 album ‘Dulcinea’. However, I seemed to be the only Swiss who knew TTWS back then… I have to say that actually I only knew their music but nothing about the band itself.
In September 1997 I left for a one-year stay in Santa Barbara, California (see About). Of course, I brought ‘Dulcinea’ along. One night I was listing to TTWS in my host family’s living room. My host dad walked in, listened for a few seconds, and asked who this band was. I replied: “Oh, it’s one of my favorite bands but no one seems to know them. They call themselves ‘Toad the Wet Sprocket’”. Can you imagine how excited I was when he told me that TTWS actually were from Santa Barbara? Sadly, I’ve not yet managed to see TTWS live in concert. I may never – on July 24th, 1998 Toad the Wet Sprocket ceased to exist officially. The world lost a wonderful band.
Since then TTWS has worked together off and on over the years. A few shows here, a few shows there but no real reunion. You may want to follow their off/on cycle through wikipedia.org.
Their original domains http://www.toadthewetsprocket.com/ and http://www.houseoftoad.com now point to myspace.com and a record company respectively. To honor this band I’ve dug out everything I could find through Google cache and broken links and reassembled the original website! It even includes the old original TTWS web site! It can be found through Links -> Semper Absurdum.

Related links:
http://monica.hubbe.net/toad/
http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/default.asp?oid=397
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=5029&cf=397
http://www.rockonthenet.com/artists-t/toadthewetsprocket_main.htm

Deception Point by Dan Brown

I “consumed” Dan Brown’s novel in record time. One day and two nights or something. The story is enormously thrilling all the way through the first half of the book. By then most readers will have figured out the plot and simply want to know whether they were right. However, the second half of the story is stuffed with chains of coincidents that I found totally superfluous.
Despite that, I had to put together a web page covering all those crazy new technologies described (or mentioned rather) in the book. Enjoy digging!

Log book Finnish North Pole Expedition

A bunch Finnish skied to the Geographic North Pole during the spring of 2006. The seven-member team set out from Ward Hunt in Northern Canada at the beginning of March 2006. The route was approximately 850 kilometers long (about 530 miles). The Expedition was unsupported, i.e. no materials or supplies will be delivered to the skiers; everything needed during the 2-month trek was be with the skiers from the beginning. They uploaded a file for Google Earth.
I assembled their English log book entries into a nice ToC/content site. No, this wasn’t available before as RSS…

Bejeweled 2

Here’s the direct link to this amazing online game.

Japanese

I’ve created HTML character set charts for Hiragana and Katakana in various layouts (font size differs). Please help yourself:

Frame relay tutorial

The best and funniest tutorial on frame relay on the WWW! It was created by the folks from Scan-Technologies. Their company, however, disappeared from one day to the other. So, their domain is gone and so was their tutorial. By coincidence I had downloaded the entire tutorial a few months before…
The tutorial is not only well structured it is also easy to understand, since it’s written as a dialog between an expert (N.Erd) and a computer rookie (Norm Al Dude).

They did the same thing for ATM, ISDN, and Transparent Bridges, which I was able to save and restore, too.

Base64 encoding/decoding for ASP

An ASP script I found somewhere on the Internet (where was it?). It provides two functions to encode and decode a string using the Base64 algorithm.

Tips for good web design

I admit I haven’t followed all the rules I proclaim myself on this old list of guidelines. But I am probabely closer than the majority of sites out there. Feel free comment on the guide or my site itself!