Year: 2009

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2009

40 Years

by cimddwc · 2009-07-15

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing of the Apollo 11 mission, my blog header will display images that roughly follow the course of the mission from the launch on July 16 to the moon landing on July 20 to the return on July 24 (even though the actual timeline isn’t matching exactly1) – here’s a little appetizer in thumbnail size:

(These images still have to randomly share their spot with “Zensursula”, protesting the installation of an internet censorship infrastructure in Germany, falsely pretending to effectively fight child pornography.)

The photos are of course from NASA (and as such in the public domain), some taken from Wikimedia Commons, some from this exhaustive NASA Image Library.

The Big Picture currently also shows a nice selection of photos.

A great site re-creating the mission in a “re-live” kind of way and offering many images etc. is WeChooseTheMoon.org – check it out! (via)

Oh, and those still doubting the moon landings were real should have a look at Bad Astronomy or Clavius.

and the launch photo is actually from Apollo 15, the rocket stage split from Apollo 6 ↺

Projekt 52/28: Large and small

by cimddwc · 2009-07-15

The next topic of Projekt 52…

Topic 28: Large and small (1)

Or in this case: Something small looking large, the withered blossom of a spathiphyllum, photographed with a retro adaptor which lets you mount a lens in reverse to achieve a great magnification (these photos show the entire image area – the petal is just about 1½cm in total – ans have just been resized for web-suitability).

But we can go even larger:

Topic 28: Large and small (2)

The same blossom from the side, even more magnified.

That’s a still good-looking petal:

Language and Link Changes / Sprach- und Link-Änderungen

by cimddwc · 2009-07-13

I have changed the link structure from the ?p=1&langswitch_lang=xx style to the clearer pretty permalinks such as 2006/09/06/hallo-welt/ (plus ?langswitch_lang=en for the English version) – WordPress automatically redirects the old links, so they still work1 –, and since I’ve got more German readers and am writing more German-only posts, I also changed the default language to German.

You are currently reading the English version, so no need to change anything if that’s what you want; just as a reminder:

On the web, click the language link above the post/page title on single-post views or the flags in the top right corner on any page.
For the feed, you may want to change your subscription to the proper new URL
cimddwc.net/feed/?langswitch_lang=en. This applies to feeds of specific tags or categories, too; update: old per-post comment feed URLs that contain & instead of just & may have ceased working. Sorry for any inconvenience.

If anything’s wrong, don’t hesitate to comment…

(This post is intentionally bilingual.)

Ich habe die Link-Struktur meines Blogs vom ?p=1&langswitch_lang=xx-Stil zu den übersichtlicheren “pretty permalinks” à la 2006/09/09/hallo-welt/ (mit Sprach-Anhängsel fürs Englische) geändert – WordPress leitet die alten Links automatisch um, sodass sie weiterhin funktionieren2 –, und da ich mehr deutsche Leser habe und mehr rein deutsche Beiträge schreibe, ist die Standard-Sprache nun auch Deutsch.

Eine Sprachumschaltung ist wie immer oben mit dem Link über der Überschrift in den Einzelansichten oder auf jeder Seite mit den Flaggen rechts oben möglich; wer den Standard-Feed ohne Sprach-Code abonniert hatte und jetzt deutsch statt englisch erhält, muss ihn unter cimddwc.net/feed/?langswitch_lang=en neu abonnieren; dies gilt auch für Tag- oder Kategorie-Feeds.

Am bisherigen deutschen Feed müsst ihr nur was ändern, wenn euer Feedreader keine Weiterleitungen beherrschen sollte – was aber sehr nachlässig von diesem wäre. Update: Kann aber sein, dass die alten Kommentar-Feed-URLs zu einzelnen Beiträgen nicht mehr funktionieren, wenn sie & statt einfach & enthalten, sorry.

Falls euch etwas auffällt, das nicht stimmt, bitte Bescheid sagen…

(Dieser Beitrag ist absichtlich zweisprachig, also nicht darüber wundern.)

well, it requires a plugin like Redirection to do so with 301 permanent redirects instead of temporary 302 on this server; my local XAMPP test didn’t need it ↺
auch wenn es hier seltsamerweise ein Plugin wie Redirection benötigt, damit’s ordentliche permanente 301-Redirects statt temporärer 302 sind; meine lokale XAMPP-Testinstallation schaffte das auch so ↺

Album Songs of the Day (July 13)

by cimddwc · 2009-07-13

Singles On the 36th anniversary of the release of the first Queen album, I’ve got a few songs for you that have not been released on singles:

» “My Fairy King” (still-image video) – this vocally interesting song has an additional story (quote from Wikipedia):

Before writing this song Mercury was known as Freddie Bulsara, and this song is said to have inspired him to change his surname. Its lyrics contain a verse with the words “Mother Mercury, look what they’ve done to me.” Brian May has said that after the line was written, Freddie claimed he was singing about his mother. Subsequently, Freddie Bulsara took the stage name Freddie Mercury. This was another attempt to separate his stage persona (“extroverted monster”, as Mercury himself once described it) from his personal persona (introverted).

» “The Night Comes Down” (still-image video) – A ballad written by Brian May.

» “Modern Times Rock ’n’ Roll” (still-image video) – Not just written by Roger Taylor, he was also singing, and somehow this song’s always modern.
When played live on stage, though, Freddie was singing, as here at the Rainbow in 1974.