This was very surprising. I just wanted to look after my frontierville-account when I got kicked out of facebook. Well this happened once in a while so thought logging in again would solve this minor problem but not today. I immediately got to a page called roadblock where I had to put in a stupid captcha code and then had to answer a security question I set up once. But also I certain about the answer it didn’t work. I tried about 50 variations but none worked.
So it looks I never can log into my account until suddenly the right answer will appear in my brain. I tried to find a solution for at least one hour in the huge help section when I eventually found a possibility to contact facebook. Now I’m waiting for a response.
The interesting part is that I am not missing facebook at all. I have a lot of spare time on my hands and all the friends which are important to me I can access via several chats outside of facebook.
And for all superstitious people: the incident happened on a friday 13th

Today I made a very interesting discovery. Usually you use *.ico graphics for your small little favicons which are displayed in modern browsers right next to the url and in the bookmarks. Those are transformed *.gif files. And those don’t have the ability to set up a certain transparency per pixel. The only thing you can do is to say whether the pixel is completely transparent or not.
Especially for favicons with transparent and semi-transparent sections this looks kind of awkward in some cases because semi-transparent pixels become not transparent at all.
BUT if you use *.png as a favicon directly you can use the alpha-channel to have semi-transparent pixels and the shape of the icons become very smooth and the look improves massively when using *.pngs. I tested that in the actual firefox and opera and it works in both. I don’t care about the other browsers

I actually love all the Rambo movies. They are all pretty good and I will never be tired watching them. My favourite ranking is 1 – 4 – 3 – 2. Nevertheless I love a good parody.

This one is from Weird Al Yankovic

And this one from a German parody series called Switch:Reloaded. Very good indeed!

I was playing the tour de france browser game this year because I thought it might be fun letting your own riders climbs those mountains, race those time trials, get the points.
The idea of the game is to develop certain skills for your riders and distribute the researched points to your drivers. In addition you have to set up the team and individual tactics and distribute the massage sessions to the riders to regenerate them.
You can buy motivation points (to increase the daily morale of the riders), massage sessions, bike equipment and a research planner. But I thought I try it without spending money.
The start was pretty bad. I lost minutes on the first stages and thought the game for my team was done. But with persistence, a good tactic and the right researches one can manage to get the team better and better during the tour. And so I concentrated on mountain, fighter, stamina, recovery and time trial skills. And I concentrated the researched points to my mountain riders and the tour favorite Step by step my team increased it’s performance and the deficit decreased and decreased. In the alps my best riders were fighting the actual leaders and they managed to lead the team ranking
But the most important step was the individual time trial at the third from last stage. My riders got the positions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10
After that my tour favorite had 3s advantage and at the last mountain stage up to mt. ventoux my favorite got the stage victory and cemented the 1st position in the total ranking. In addition one of my U25 riders won the according ranking.
Means: I won all the time rankings (total, young riders and team ranking) without spending any money

Since yesterday I was using Kaspersky Internet Security software. This software was driving me mad at the end of the using period. There were pop-up screens appearing incessantly, the system needed 10+ minutes to boot and the browser was faltering every 2nd minute for 2-4 seconds. So I decided before buying a new registration key, I’ll try something different.
At work we are already using the actual version of Norton Internet Security and it prooved to fast, elegant and not disturbing.
Fortunately the deinstallation process was very easy and so I installed the previous downloaded Norton suite within 40 seconds. This was awesome. I am using the software for testing purposes yet. But until now I have to say: the change was due. Booting of my system only needs around 70 seconds now. The browser doesn’t falter at all and no annoying pop-up screens are appearing.
I did a full system scan after installation. I have about 550k files and the test took about 50 minutes which is very fast.

This is a follow-up to the Webcam #1 post. I also have a look on the webcam showing the Geiranger Fjord in Norway: