The Empire Weblog

Both of the following expression say, that something happens soon. However, which of them is closer or sooner?

• soonish
• very soon

If you know, then leave a comment! :-)

Via Scott-O-Rama I came to this:

Evil to him who evil thinks!

Or for those of you who like to take a tiny German lesson: Ein Schelm, wer böses dabei denkt.

Winston has put together a bunch of reasons about "Why I don't leave a comment". His main critics mostly aims at American bloggers who only put either politics, religious or just puny stuff on their blog.

Since I am using BlogExplosion, I also came across those types of blogs. And I have to confirm Winston's opinion.

If I want to have the latest world news, I am going to the BBC News or Spiegel where I can be more or less certain that I will get well investigated stories. If I want to know something about Jesus, then I will go to my pastor and have a chat with him or just read a good book. And yes, I also haven't seen so many bloggers from another country who are posting so much stuff and sometimes even shallow crap about their inner politics. Yes we (non Americans and/or not in America living) all know, that their are disputes between the fans of the Republicans and the Democrats. And yes, we all don't understand, why Mr Bush was re-elected after he made so many stupid mistakes and was found guilty in several well-planned feints of the American peoples.

So girls and guys, go and blog really interesting or funny stuff. Let's see, what you experience at work, at home or on holiday. Let's have part in it. And also use this kind of medium to show the good sides of a Republican America and don't ruminate what we all can see and read in our daily news! That's getting really boring!

P.S. I also found interesting and funny American blogs via BlogExplosion. However, they are in the minority.

Via Jim, I came to this:

What Famous Leader Are You?

Any comment necessary? So far, I agree with the statements given, although they are verbalized very generously. People who know me personally will agree with the statements more or less. I think, the last statement "Perfection is important to you" fits me best. :-) Even if I sometimes have the feeling that it might be too important for me. ;-)

Easter is ante portas. So it is also time to colour some eggs on our own. And to do so, it is a good idea to have white eggs instead of brown ones. Whereas brown eggs are preferred to be used for cooking and so on, white eggs are essential for colouring.

However, getting white eggs may become a bit difficult here. I have seen not shop yet, which sells white eggs. Well ok, Tesco sells some white ones in a blue paper box. And that's the problem: the eggs are not really white they are pale blue, which is also not so good for colouring eggs with other colours.

Well, let's see if some of these small corner shops have some white eggs. Still a few days time to deal with that problem that shouldn't be one.

Everybody is talking about Google's GMail service at the moment. Since the beginning, it is limited to users which are taking part in the beta test phase. However, these users have had and still have the possibility to send invitations to friends, which enables them to create an own GMail account. For a few weeks now, Google increased the amount of these invitations up to 50 per user. This has started a real run: People are going to offer their invitations also to others who are just interested in it. You can find these offers on many blogs including the actual number of invitations left.

Why are people so crazy for such an email account? I still didn't get the point yet. What are those special features other web-based email provides, such as GMX or Yahoo, do not have? Ok, one mighty feature is Google's brilliant indexing and thus search facilities. However, mail clients like Opera's M2 and the upcoming Mail 2.0 from Apple (to be released in Mac OS 10.4 - alias Tiger) offer this so called "Search, don't sort" feature as well. The 1000 MB mail storage cannot really be that argument to have a GMail account. GMX and I think also Yahoo offer this for free, too. Apart from that, my Powerbook's hard disk is even larger. ;-)

Another thing, at least for me, is that I already have my own domain with my own mail address. And I am sure, many of you have this too. So why would I still need an GMail account? To be honest, 1000 MB is far too less if I would like to store all my mails with such an account. And I am not a big fan of having my mails distributed over several locations as long as these locations cannot be accessed as one logical one. Using the POP3 facilities of GMail and storing my mails locally on my computer, however, makes the only useful feature of GMail, the powerful searching, pointless.

So guys and girls, if you think I still miss one point, then let me know and convince me why it would be advantageous having a GMail account.

Of course, I know there are many of you who are going to switch or have already switched from other web mail providers. And I also can understand this very well. However, I am still looking for that eye-catcher, which would be the trigger for me and blokes being in the same situation as me to using GMail!

As I already said in one of my previous posts, I finally have made the 20 recent comments availably via a RSS feed. You can subscribe to it here. Once subscribed, you won't miss any comment, which is posted to my posts. So go on and subscribe! :-)

For about one week now, parts of Leicester Square Station here in London are fully accoutered with Apple's iPod Shuffle advertising. This is the first Tube station, which sees that kind of promotion for a product. However, it is not new to Apple. It did this kind of billing already in the Metro in Paris or in some other underground/subways in the US and Canada.

I wonder if it is random ;-) that they have chosen Leicester Square Station for that kind of advertising. Why? Well, at Leicester Square station the Northern Line (Charing X branch) and the Piccadilly Line are stopping. And both, but especially the Northern Line, rank among the most unreliable Tube lines in the entire network.

And with the right sense of humor you could see Apple's slogan "Life is random" even with other eyes. :-) Got the point?

Yeahh, the spring is here. Today we had a wonderful first Spring day: very pleasant temperature at about 18 degrees Celsius, sunny and blue sky.

Ok, off we went to town or better to Covent Garden for window shopping tour and just to enjoy the nice weather. Since we started quite early in the morning, there have not been many tourists and and you actually could see how the city become awake. During our tour through Covent Garden we also passed Neal's Yard. A very nice and quite place to relax and having a wonderful breakfast. The atmosphere is fantastic. It reminds me a bit of the Kunsthofpassage in Dresden, which is also a fantastic and unique place.

The atmosphere in Neal's Yard today was like being beamed to Spain. The facades of the houses, especially the strong and bright orange one, let you feel like being there. Terrific!

Today - episode four of the "Spotting the Spy" series:

The little spy had to check all those dangerous and suspicious letters from Germany I received today. They have been kindly forwarded to me by my former flat mate. Once I started opening the letters and Mr Ruby got the smell of fresh paper into his highly sensitive spy nose, he appeared at once to check all that paperwork. I hope, he didn't find anything which might be a potential thread to the Empire. ;-)

For those of you, who have missed the former episodes, here are the links: episode one, episode two and episode three.

That's why I like the English language. They don't just say 'Traffic Jam'. No, they say 'Delays possible'. However, actually they mean: Don't expect to pass this road within the next hour! - All right, have a nice journey!

Today in the morning, a man in his thirties killed another man in his sixties using an axe. More news can be found with BBC or the Evening Standards.

Is this the new Jack the Ripper: Jack the Axer?

And don't tell again, the wealthier boroughs of London are more secure then the less wealthy ones like the East End of London.

May I introduce to you: Lumpur (left, the butch boy) and Raika (right, the girl). Both are Siberian Tigers living in the London Zoo.

Lumpur's favorite smells are ginger and Calvin Klein's Obsession. Quite strange for a tiger, isn't it? Raika, however, enjoys stalking keepers as they walk past the enclosure. She also likes to be a model. She often comes to the wall with the big windows, steps onto the landing and postures to the visitors like a model.

London Zoo offers to adopt certain species in order to help them funding several protection programs. I am really thinking of joining the adaption program. Of course, my species of choice would be the tigers, because cats are my favorites. And since these big cats are highly threaten by extinction, adopting would give me a chance to help protecting them. They are wonderful creatures, smart and elegant. And it would be shame to see them only in Zoos one day.

Sorry guys and girls, this site is not best viewed with Internet Explorer (IE).

This site is written in XHTML 1.0 and designed using CSS. Microsoft Internet Explorer may not render theses standards correctly. Alternative web browsers provide a better web experience! Go and get one of these other browers: Safari, Firefox or Opera.

You may be able to see most of this site, however, it will probably not be the best experience. And I am neither in the mood nor do I have the time to deal with deficient programs.

On a walk through the Borough of Islington today, I captured these two pictures with those nice spring forerunners.

Spring used to start here a bit earlier, but this year it's still quite cold for London conditions. Last year the same time, you could already see many trees with fresh green and even nice colored flowers. Also primroses have been all over the parks and in little hanging baskets at the outside of many pubs. However, this year, it's all a bit later. Anyway, I think it will start getting green quite soon and that also means the start of one of the nicest times in London, especially when the days becoming longer as well. A must for that time is a visit at Primrose Hill in Camden. It is very close to Regents Park and the London Zoo. From the top of the hill, you will have a wonderful view over central London. To get a very first impression, look at this animated panorama view provided by the BBC. So, if you should be in London during the spring time, go to Primrose Hill on a lukewarm evening and enjoy the view over London's skyline. After that, you'll find many bars and pubs in Camden Town to let the day die away.

For today's breakfast we had half English breakfast. Why only half?! Well it's obviously not a full English breakfast what you can see on the image. If you know, what's missing, leave a comment. :-)

However, I didn't really enjoy it, the egg, tomato and also the bacon were o.k., but these sausages. Brrrrr, absolutely nothing for my taste. That's why I will head for the German Delicatessen shop near Old Street this afternoon in full hope that they have some delicious German sausage. Their website looks promising, especially that they offer 'Thüringer Rostbratwurst' - my favorites and also very very tasty and I assert: the best Rostbratwurst you can get! So, I will check out if the ones sold in the shop are as same tasty as the ones I know from my former home Thuringia.

The Evening Standard revealed today that major tube repairs are many years behind schedule. Well, so far nothing new. Everybody can life this experience form day to day. However, this time that terrifying fact is manifested by documents which leaked today. They will be presented to the London Assembly's transport committee this week.

The entire Tube network is owned by three private companies the responsibility of which is to maintain and heavily improve the infrastructure including tracks, signaling and stations. That all is part of a so called public-private partnership deal.

The main critics are as follows:

• "In the first seven years of the 30-year PPP contracts a third of the ancient tracks are meant to be replaces. Instead, two years into the deal, only four per cent of track has been replaced."
• "Station refurbishments are running behind schedule, with only 10 of the 31 stations planned to be completed by the end of this month expected to be finished on time!"
• "... Metronet and Tube Lines are not fulfilling the terms of their contract despite earning nearly £100 million pre-tax profit for the year ending last March.", says London Underground.

These facts show and prove my opinion: No private companies dealing with public transport systems. This is already a contradiction by the words and the reality daily proves that this does not work.

The private companies' main concern is not really improving the network nor the stations. Their major concern is to make profit first. Of course, profits have to be higher year by year. And only the remaining money is invested into improvements. Well, it is not really improvment, it is rather action, a.k.a. patchwork, to keep the Tube running. However, it can be shown that even here they try to spend as less money as possible which results in hiring unprofessional maintenance companies. The consequences can be seen every week, especially on Mondays such as "The Central Line has several delays in both directions. This is due to late finishing engineering works at Bank station". Other reasons or excuses are "... due to faulty trains ..." or "... due to faulty track ..." or one of the top three "... due to signaling problems ...".

The badly working privatization of the British railway should have been a big alert signal to the British Government. National Rail Services still suck today, years after privatization has taken place. The tracks are rotting away, the stations are going to seed and the trains have been become running scrap metal and dumps. However, the British Government (Labour at this time) forced this PPP on London and London Underground has to make it work now. And that is more or less a hopeless job!

In September last year, Jim and also Savas asked for your "Start Menu" under Windows. As Jim already mentioned in his post it can be sometimes quite funny and interesting when somebody is going to prepare his laptop for a presentation and you can get a glimpse of his/her start menu.

Everybody has his/her own ideas and quirks what programs should be in the start menu and hence quickly to be accessed. This also shows where somebody sets his/her preferences and what he/she fancies.

On Mac OS X, however, there is no start menu like under Windows. There it is called "Dock" which is a nice menu usually at the bottom of your desktop. It's a kind of integrated start menu with a task bar. And with Mac OS X you also get some nice visual effects such as magnification.

With this post I would like to ask all apple users reading this post to tell us a bit about your dock! What programs are important for you?

I've put a screenshot of my one below. I don't think it is necessary to talk a lot about since the great icons are self-explanatory, aren't they? And yes, there is already Keynote and Pages (called iWork if you buy them bundled), which I just bought this afternoon. I haven't worked a lot with it yet, but I am already impressed by the very fine selection of templates both offer you. Also the import of Microsoft Work and PowerPoint files works fine including many transitions and animations set up in my PP slides. I don't know if Keynote supports all kind of PowerPoint's eccentric animations but I think that is not so important. What counts is that you can import your PP slides and the layout, fonts, graphics and also the (at least) basic transitions and animations remain as you know them from PowerPoint.

Ok guys and girls, its your turn now! Let us see your Dock!

I changed the link to the RSS 2.0 feed of my weblog. I moved away from static files to dynamic generation using PHP.

The new Link is http://www.daniel-schaller.net/weblog-posts-rss2.php.

Please switch to that new link since I am going to stop the old one in a few days time. Until then it will still work and also be up-to-date!

I also will introduce a feed just for comments so that everybody of you who is posting a comment to my blog gets informed when new replies have been submitted.

Mr Ruby is again on a secret mission where he tries everything to prevent being spied. The last time he did this was at Christmas last year. This time, he found a new place to hide for his secret mission. Let's see how long he can stay his hiding-place till he will be spied.

Today I was lucky to make a new very special experience with the British personal banking business.

Since I am working in the UK for more than one month now, I also get paid in GBP onto my account with Halifax. However, all my insurance payments and also still my German mobile phone is being paid from my German account I have with Deutsche Bank (the bank with the best banking service - in my opinion after over 12 years being with them). So, it is necessary to transfer money from the UK to Germany from time to time. Today, it was time to do so.

I went to an Halifax branch and asked how much it is to transfer money to Germany. The answer was shocking. The lady replayed just with "14 Pounds". Imagine: f o u r t e e n Pounds, thats about 20 EUR for the simplest service a bank can/has/should/must offer! "Sorry, I beg your pardon" - that was my first reaction. I still cannot believe it! It is simple impertinent to demand that large amount of money to transfer a few pounds from the UK to Germany, even worse if you think of that both countries are in the EU! Anyway, I had no choice and asked the lady to do so. Then the next surprise: It took her about 15 minutes to type in all necessary information and print three forms to sign. 15 (!!) minutes! Compared to Deutsche Bank, it is banking like 20 years ago. With Deutsche Bank's online banking it takes me 2 minutes at no charge to transfer money from Germany to the UK. By the way, you cannot transfer money to an account outside the UK using Halifax's online banking.

Wait! The British banking shocking show is not over yet. Being really on my broom after that "excellent service offer" experience I went to other famous high street banks, such as Barclays and NatWest. Unbelievable what they would charge you: Barclays will charge 20 Pounds (?28 EUR) and NatWest, the absolute front runner, 18 Pounds (?24 EUR) if the transfer may take up to four days or 25 Pounds (?35 EUR) if it may take up to two days only! What a bargain!

Back at work, I was looking for the EU regulation 2560/2001 which states that money transfers up to 12.500 EUR within the EU must not cost more than a transfer from one bank to another within the same country. Unfortunately, this only applies to money transfers made in Euros. However, the UK is still stuck to its great Pound.

So what shall I do? Opening an Euro account with Halifax if possible. Will they follow the regulation then? Or should I switch to Barclays at one day and get two debit cards from which I would give one to my mother in Germany. So she could get cash at any Deutsche Bank cash machine without any charge since Deutsche Bank and Barclays have a "No charge at ATMs" agreement (btw: the same agreement exists with Bank of America and Deutsche Bank). Then she could pay in the money (in Euros of course) on my German account.

Is this really the way how to bank in the 21st century in one of the top leading financial countries? I don't think so.

Stop ripping off your customers!
Go and offer reasonable (online) banking service!
Get a life!

UPDATE

I changed the headline from 'British Private Banking...' to 'British Personal Banking...' since this seems to be more precisely. Thanks to Gindy who triggered me to check this.

After four exciting days in one of the most exciting cities and the craziest I have visited so far, we are on our way back to London, back to our good old Empire.

Yesterday, we have been on the Empire State Building. As I already mentioned, a must for the Empire Weblogger. Yes, I know. Everybody goes there, but there is a reason why they do it. :-)

In the afternoon, I had to go to the office of the company I am working for. I had to sort out some things with the guys there. This also gave me the opportunity to introduce myself to them and also to see where and how the office in downtown Manhattan is. And I have to say: Very nice. Since it is located in a office building right at the end of the Manhattan island, you have a wonderful view to New Jersey across the Hudson River. You can also see The Statue of Liberty which is in the south of the island greeting all new immigrants.

Ok, I am writing this post now from John F. Kennedy Airport. However, it is not possible to post the entry straight to my weblog since this airport has no wireless network generally available. This is quite bad for the main airport serving a city like New York. When I have been on Hawaii last summer, I even had the choice of several wireless networks. But here (terminal four) at the airport of New York, one of the most important financial centres, it seems not so important to offer such an essential service for (business) travelers. Anyway, never mind, we're going back to the leading financial centre where you have wireless access at the major airports and also more at many other locations in the city. :-)