Let us start with the bad one …

Ocean’s Twelve – what a disaster this one is. The prequel (Ocean Eleven) was reasonable entertaining, but this one is just plain pointless and boring. You are watching a heist movie and you are expecting an interesting heist, some nice action sequences, and definitely some suspense. This one doesn’t deliver on anything. Sure, you got all the stars from the first movie, but somehow they should have spent some of the money on the story. In the end this movie will make you ask one question: ‘This is it?’

Layer Cake – I watched this one, because the producer (Matthew Vaughn) of the excellent “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” is directing this movie. Layer Cake can not hide the connection to this movie; multiple story lines seemingly disjoint cross during the path of the movie, interesting characters with lots of ‘personality’,… I had a good time watching this movie (all to the end) and I can recommend this one without hesitation (without spoiler - a 'good' ending, watch also the alternate ending!). Well, there is one hesitation, it is rated ‘R’ – and one of the reasons is violence. Not totally over the top, but nothing for the sensitive viewer.

It is another gorgeous weekend out here, and having your favorite iced beverage you can fall victim to the most feared cocktail-drinking malaise - The Brain Freeze. A tasteful bit of drink is followed by agonizing pain and a lot of laughs and chuckles by your friends, guests, collegues ...

Fortunately the web can explain the scientific behind the brain freeze. One reason for brain freeze - as 'analyzed' by an eight-year old in 2002: too hasty consumption of very cold food (like ice cream) results in the feared freeze. The experiment was not performed with cocktails by the school girl, but I'm glad to continue the scientific research into that direction. I guess I will have to do some more experiments today to reach a more stastically meaningful sample size...

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I don't know how often I printed something from inside InternetExplorer, just to curse at the printout since half the text was beyond the right border of the print-out. I don't know the technical reason behind it (some page work just fine), but the this little tool 'Internet Explorer Fitted-Width Printing' did solve my problems, no more unreadable print-outs so far - I love it!

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The following math-gem was sent by a colleague yesterday. Very funny I thought, I thought I share it with you:

Ok – while there is time … The radio just had a report about the Europe premier of ‘War of the Worlds’ in Berlin, with Tom Cruise attending. Didn’t this movie just open a week or two ago in the US? Is it my imagination; are Hollywood movies being market much more quickly in secondary markets outside the US? My recollection is that in the past it took often a couple of month before a movie opened in Europe after the initial viewing in the US, is there some statistics to verify my observation? Can you query IMDB for historic/average information like this? A reason for this could be the internet and the copying of movies … Movies are available on opening weekend (or even before) on the file sharing networks, the quick answer for the industry is to make movies available in as many theaters available as soon as possible …

While I’m writing this I’m already sitting for about 1 hour on the Autobahn, about 2 km away from the exit I have to take to make it to the office. The radio informed that the Autobahn is closed due to an accident and has been transformed to a parking lot with a length of a few kilometers. Police cars and tow trucks already passed a while ago, no other emergency vehicle passed, let’s hope no one got seriously injured.

My Outlook mailbox is synced, but I already took care of all the email before I left home this morning, I already used the time to clean up older email, now I need internet connectivity in my car! There is a lot of work I could do right now if I could connect … perhaps I have to make a bigger effort to get data and documents in an offline store on my machine to be prepared for these occasions.

Couple of day ago I complained about the absence of 'XBox Live Arcade' in Europe. In game related news I read today that 'Tink Tanks' is available for 'XBox Live Arcade' starting today, and now the interesting part - in German language! Why can you download a game in German language if you can't download a German Arcade-version?!

Not true anymore - the German Arcade version is available! Without any big announcement the European version of XBox Live Arcade was made available. Now we need a way to get the CDs without buying a magazine ...

A German web site visualizing the effect of Black Holes and travel with near light speed is http://www.tempolimit-lichtgeschwindigkeit.de/. A englisch version of this site is in process, and can be found here (it doesn't look like the process is moving with light-speed). Very interesting site with nice visuals and background information!

I have to admit, I love simple computer games for a quick fix of distraction and sometimes frustration. There is a real industry for these games on the PC. Companies like RealArcade, MSN Zone, PopCap Games, et.al. make a living out of offering a combination of free and pay-for-play game services. I bought a couple of these games myself, stuff like Zuma, Bejeweled, Dynomite, or Bookworm. These games can be a big distraction and a killer for productivity - I created a few simple rules: No games in the office or on my work-computer, and no games before 6pm or on the weekend.

A collection of these games is available for the XBox with the XBox Live Arcade collection. This allows you to download some of those timewasters to your XBox and play them on your TV. For my taste the individual downloads are not cheap (between $9.99 and $19.99 per game), but I bet I would have fallen for a few of those (I paid about $20 for the above mentioned PC versions of the games also - $10 to $20 is about the trashhold I'm willing to invest quickly on a game).

The question I have is: Why is the "XBox Live Arcade" product only available in the US and Canada? How difficult can it be to 'port' them to the rest of the world? What is the problem ?? Licensing? Converting to the PAL screen resolution?

I want to wast more time senselessly in front of the XBox - get me my XBox Live Arcade collection in Europe!