Version 1.0 Gold of Galactic Horde went live today. Top new feature would be the Universal War. I think it’s top because I helped write it :)

Although I think Universal War is a bit of a strange name - makes it sound like a war that is compatible with everyone or something…

I picked up Michel Thomas’s 8 hour German course from the library today. And it’s cool. It might even be better than Pimsleur. The learning idea is basically the same as Pimsleur with no writing and no memorizing but the format of the audio itself is different.

Firstly in Pimsleur I’m guessing they use voice actors reading out a script for both the English and foreign speech. In this Michel himself talks. Also this is not scripted word for word at all. I’m assuming he has notes of some sort to keep him on track and there may be judicious editing that we don’t hear, but basically everything is presented as is.

This is an important factor considering exactly how the lessons are presented - as a private lesson with Michel and two students new to the language. The benefits of this are you hear the sorts of mistakes people make (ranging from slight pronunciation problems to missing out a word to saying something completely different or nonsensical). It also makes it quite funny since (in the German at least) one student is clearly doing better than the other).

It loses out in ease of use though. Pimsleur comes with built in pauses, with Michel you have to pause it yourself. It does mean though that 8 hours of Michel is denser than 8 hours of Pimsleur.

One final not is he has a slightly unorthodox order of teaching but one that makes sense in some ways. For example the (almost) first thing he teaches is “Do you want…” (“Wollen Sie”) which is normally left until quite far along because of the complication of modal verbs and their effect on word order. There are at least two advantages to this: first it gets the students used to the whole verb-at-the-end-of-a-sentence idea and secondly he focuses on words that are similar in English and German, and most modal verbs are (muss - must; kann - can).

Overall it’s cheaper than Pimsleur, £70 in bookshops. Another glaring advantage is that I have actually seen it in bookshops, even W. H. Smiths. My usually suggestion applies hear though, get it from a library. Most libraries will order books from other libraries for a nominal fee (my local library charges £2.50 but they had it in themselves anyway).

The final drawback is it is only available in four languages: German, Spanish, Italian and French. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if versions starting from something other than English are available (French -> Spanish for instance).

Oooh, Feedburner have put my new Item Age feed flare unit thingy on their 101 Flare Ideas for a Better Tomorrow page (#10).

It lets you display the age of an item in a Feedburner feed in a nice human format (17 minutes old, 4 days old) etc. It’s really dead simple but I figured Feed Flare might be useful and it was good idea to practice before writing something really cool.

You can see it in action in my feed.

Ooh, I checked another site of mine and suddenly noticed it had a PR of 4, instead of none.

For a long time my earnings with Google AdSense were very erratic - now they seem to have settled down. In fact for the past week I’ve gotten the equivalent of almost exactly $0.01 per impression. Now all I need is more traffic :)

P.S. Google spellchecker corrected “Adsense” to “AdSense”…

According to Reuter’s “Oddly Enough” Iranians have renamed Danish Pastries when sold locally. They will now be called Roses of the Prophet Mohammad.

Can anyone say freedom fries?

Apparently Iran is holding a competition to find the “best” cartoon depiction of the holocaust as a test of Western principles and ideas of freedom of speech.

Firstly I’ll make my stance on freedom of speech clear. With rights comes responsibility. Although I think that people should be allowed freedom of expression and that people should be allowed to draw cartoons of what they like, that doesn’t mean that I think it’s necessarily a good idea to. A lot of unpleasant situations in the past have arose because of freedom of speech ideals.

On the other hand killing people for saying something you don’t like could rarely, if ever, be justified.

If Iran (or whatever newspaper or person came up with the idea) goes through with their plan, the outcome will be fairly obvious. There will be condemnation of the cartoon(s), people will say it’s an insult to the millions that died as well as those who lived through it. Despite all that I’m fairly sure you won’t see Iranian embassies burnt down nor death threats against the cartoonist or publisher.

Whatever argument there might have been that the cartoons were wrong has been completely overshadowed and rendered insignificant compared to the response. As I was told when I was at school: “If you have to shout, you’ve probably already lost the argument.”

I did a bit of comment moderation for Oliver today, since he had a few obvious spam ones. Firstly I didn’t know I could actually moderate comments, but there you go… Secondly, why do people try to submit such obvious spam, I mean it didn’t even try to get around the spam filter! Plus its not even remotely tempting to click on them, so what the author aimed to get out of it I just don’t know! Anyway, three cheers for the WordPress spam detector! :D

This will be a somewhat controversial post.

The violent reaction to the cartoons depicting Mohamed continues to escalate. The form and severity of this reaction is wrong for several reasons.

Firstly, Islam forbids the persecution of non-believers. That is people who just disagree with the teachings of Islam should not be punished or treated any less than a Muslim. Unlike the invasion of Iraq for instance, nobody (Muslim or otherwise) was actually hurt by the cartoons. They simply didn’t believe that drawing them was wrong. This represents a difference in beliefs and the cartoonists should not be punished (according to Islamic beliefs).

Secondly, Islam strongly upholds the sanctity of life. Killing an innocent person is said to be like killing the entire human race. The argument here is who is considered innocent? Well it isn’t really relevent since killing someone could only be condoned if that individual disregards others’ right to life. Essentially only murderers may be executed. Calls for the death of the cartoonists are fundamentally non-Islamic.

The Great Me is 22 :D

Er, that’s about it really…