Gotta love these short movie mods – thanks to Jimmie for this find!

Here is another gold nugget from TED. Helping out with the exam preparation for one of my children I have been on a wonderful journey this morning looking for background information on the Higgs particle and the Big Bang theory.

If you want to keep learning, this is probably a good source – world leading experts giving remarkably inspiring presentations. you really should treat yourself by visiting TED.com once in a while.

Now, cancelling a subscription is never that easy. It has to be done well in advance of the invoice renewal – if you miss the deadline, you will have to pay for another year. When I cancelled my account, I had 6 months left before next invoice would be issued.

Four months later I discovered that my email and my webmail was no longer working.

I could not access my control panel either. And this was critital – that is the only way, you can check your invoice status or any of the settings at one.com.

It turned out that my account had not only been cancelled, but everything had been deleted – despite the fact, that I had 2 more months paid for. Precious time that I would have spend backing up and migrating all my users to the new provider.

That was not bound to happen. All attempts trying to convince One.com to restore my files, give me access to a raw IP number or help me in some other way was fruitless. Unless I agreed to pay for their services, they could not care less.

Pause

This left me in an unexpected situation. Imagine being called up by a friend wondering why his email to you has bounced and then realizing that you have no email server anymore. And what is worse, you have just lost all your online email archives.

My first priority was to find an appropriate replacement for the mail server and then worry about the website later. After a little research I made the decision to sign up with Google Apps and have been positively surprised how well this has been working for me and my family over the last year.

Status

Unfortunately I have not been that good at backing up, so what I can bring online today is really old stuff.

To be honest I have been really tempted to drop this platform and continue my website on Google Site services instead. However, this is a perfect opportunity to redo the layout of my old site, clean up and drop the accumulated plugins and modifications I had customized and patched again and again over the years.

And WordPress has evolved quite a bit while I have been busy ignoring this website. So many things to look into again :-)

Looks like you can purchase a DVD with a live portrait looking at you from your screen. Nothing else.

This very simple concept is almost scary, but apparently designed to help people cope with their introvert or shy nature and maybe develop a more natural relation to other people.

Have a look at this example:

Obviously there are many more personas available – I just like this one a lot for some reason ;-)

If this is a big seller already, my last reservations estimating the market for personalized robots as almost infinite are gone.

A few years ago the situation would have been very different. A great number of my acquaintances have been visiting this and other latin countries over the years and experienced total lack of concern from the authorities when attempting to report theft or fraud.

The Italian authorities would surely not have made such a dramatic move unless they were realizing how devastating bad reputation can affect the tourism in general. And apparently it was a prudent move – the Japanese language version of this Reuters story was one of the most popular stories on Yahoo! News Japan yesterday!

I bet this is not the case in the US … sometimes it sucks to life in this part of the world.

But it is not. Just very well made – almost feel like drinking this stuff now.

So funny and reminds me of “Big Man Japan“. If you have not seen that one yet, make it a priority.

After deciding to start learning Japanese over Christmas I have only made modest progress so far. It started well and with the Hirakana and the Katakana in the belt after no time, I felt I was on track. But no matter where I look, there seem to be so much more to learn. Oh well, with a sound interest and true fascination of the Japanese culture, I am sure I will get there eventually.

How about this getting up and getting ready demonstration – you gotta love this new world.

I am amazed. I just discovered another gold mine of inspiration and knowledge for the masses at the Academic Earth website. I really did not plan to publish this many articles here, but this one deserves a bookmark.

I found a nice presentation from one of my heroes Guy Kawasaki on entrepreneurship and a marvelous session by Professor Paul Bloom with a nice red thread to another fantastic presentation on happiness by Dan Gilbert, made available at the TED talks archive I wrote about a couple of days ago.

Time is a precious resource for most people today – so decide what you want to with your breaks. Here is your opportunity to find a topic you always wanted to look into and without obligations check out if this is something you may want to pursue. From your couch or wherever. And for free!

Life is good!