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78 - amazing

When we are here in Arosa, we take ski lessons with Adi - a known teacher here. He’s fun, talkative but most of all, he is an amazing teacher. Not so much in what he shows you - I guess many other teachers can do that too. But Adi has a gift of making his pupils believe in themselves. He spent two hours with Daniela who is on skis for the first time again after 25 years. After those she had a big smile on her face, and skied faster and more secure than before. Today he spent two hours with Zoë and me - and we raced the mountains like I never would have believed possible. He just smiles at you, says “let’s do this” and you are totally confident that it’s a good idea to go straight down the steepest slope (and of course I forgot to track this and see how fast we really went, I enjoyed it way too much). Zoë now skis faster and technically better than me - and she enjoys every second of it. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
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80a - really responsive design

Just stumbled upon this gem of a responsive website. It uses your Laptops webcam and a JavaScript headtracking library to determine your distance to the screen. It then adjusts the fontsize of the website to fit. Great idea - and really neat. Reminds me of a discussion about an idea I had with someone random at Lift a couple of years ago. We talked about the computer being able to detect if the user was concentrated while working on the computer (determined by face recognition and eye tracking) and fading out all windows expect for the one you are working in. If, on the other hand, you are un-focused, the computer will show more or different windows (not sure, if this would help becoming more focussed, but it seems like a fun idea anyway) ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
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81 - The eve of holidays

The family and I will be packing up tonight and heading to the mountains tomorrow for a week of sunshine (promised), skiing (expected), dwelling in the spa (relaxed) and pampered by be the hotel (appreciated) This is the third time we are heading to the Hotel Altein in Arosa and we are very much looking forward to it. The only thing missing now is to finish the packing, an event that causes endless screaming and shouting and loosing of nerves until finally we have all pieces needed (minus those we forget) in the different suitcases and rucksacks. The most difficult part (and the one that is strangest) is the amount of electronics that the family brings. An unscientific count shows these devices: ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
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82 - Wordpress looses connection to MySql intermittently

This is more a plea for help than a real blog post. Those of you that visit this blog with a browser might have seen the “Database connection error” page instead of the content. Usually, a simple reload takes care of the problem, and the you can read my ramblings. However this is annoying. More annoying, that I have exactly the same problem on another server with the same setup. Both servers are stock Joyent Smartmachines (small ones). Nothing special is configured on them, I have used the Webmin tools to configure the domains, setup the database and uploaded the Wordpress folders. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer