And now for some upbeat news

While I certainly like to rant, one shouldn’t forget about the more sunny side of life (unless you want to go berserk). So here are some random positive things:

Some songs which I like:

A funny image from a friend:

A couple of great freeware programs for the Windows platform:

• CDBurnerXP – does everything Nero does, for free!
• DVD Flick – while from the technical standpoint it is “just a wrapper” over FFMpeg and similar tools, it does a great job – you can create your DVD in a couple of steps
• foobar2000 – a great little MP3 player, especially for those of us who liked the old Winamp, before it tried to do everything. At it can also do batch transcoding!
• IrfanView – the free image viewer / converter!
• 7-zip – open source WinRar. Supports a lot of formats
• Far Manager Open Source – a great native win32 file manager with a retro look
• BB FlashBack Express – a free screen capture software which works great
• VideoLan (or VLC as it is better know) – the simple solution to play all your media, without having to install tones of codecs. If it would have a little better playlist management, I would use it as my primary media-player

A great quote: “the difference between communism and capitalism is that in first men exploit other men, and in the second it is the other way around”. Found it via this New York Times blog, written by the authors of Freakonomics (and now the sequel '>Superfreakonomics). It is a great blog, worth the read. Where elsewhere do you find a rigorous analysis of the logic in newspaper comics?

So there you have it, have a great day! An maybe listen to some french striptease songs :-) (just a little SEO for a friend ;-))