Martin Geisler Online

Stéphanie and I were watching the yearly Eurovision Song Contest yesterday, and it was a lot of fun! And let me just reveal here at the beginning that Denmark didn’t win… and neither did Switzerland… but Denmark lost to Switzerland! Grrr! :-)

At the beginning things looked really well for Denmark. Our song was quite nice and we quickly rose almost to the top of the charts. And we were ahead of Switzerland, even though they followed us closely.

But then something went wrong and suddenly Switzerland was leading the competition, to Stéphanie’s huge enjoyment! Their “Cool Vibes” song by the Vanilla Ninjas was okay, even though the text was a bit strange, containing a chorus with the text “Why did you kill me?”. I think the idea was that someone beyond the grave would talk back to some murderer?

A little later Switzerland have to leave the first place, and Denmark came ahead of Switzerland again. The score remained like that with Denmark being 5-10 points ahead of Switzerland, but then at the very end Switzerland got the maximum 12 points and jumped ahead of Denmark! (Stéphanie was jumping too… :-)

But in the end it didn’t matter — Greece won the contest with a song by Helena Paparizou. In old Greek mythologi Helena was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world — and the present day Helena still looks quite pretty.

I don’t remember what the song was about, but I remember that there was some lively choreography where she was lifted up in the air several times. At one point she played something that should look like violin strings while being held in the air — a bit amusing, but nice to look at.

Next year the show will be in Athens, for the first time in the history of the Eurovision Song Contest. Seen in that light, it’s only fair that Greece wins after having tried to do so in 31 years :-)

I’ve been putting the old posts into proper categories, fixing mistakes in the conversion, and generally making sure that they integrate properly in their new home in [WordPress][].

I’ve also added comments here and there as can be seen on the right where the Fuzzy Recent Comments plugin shows exactly that: a fuzzy amount of recent comments :-)

I’ve finally managed to convert the news from the [PhpWiki][] era into [Markdown][] syntax and import it into [WordPress][]. So I now have a complete archive of news all the way from the very first post to the five year anniversary post. New posts include my enthusiastic announcement of the WikiWikiWeb, something about the art of writing BETA code (and making it look nice in [LaTeX][] afterwards), my “live” report from The Party, playing with Freenet, handing in the dOvs project, the very first release of PEL, and 97 other more or less interesting tidbits from the last three years!

I’ve imported the news into the “Uncategorized” category, and I will sort it in the next few days. There’s probably also still some quirks left behind from the PhpWiki markup, even though I was able to convert most of it.

The conversion is actually pretty cool — making so-called reference style links in Markdown, and doing word-wrapping too, just to make the source look nice! The code is available for download — if you click on the link, but don’t like regular expressions, then please close your eyes…

This much:

(Observant people will see that I’m nerdier than Kristian… :-)

[][eth] Why did I not think of that before I travelled from Buchs to Zürich…! :-)

Today I have classes from 11 to 12 and from 14 to 17. The exercise class was somewhat boring since the TA just quickly went through the next exercise — something which I would just as well have read myself.

Afterwards I got lunch and waited until the next class. But nobody was there! Then things started to come back to me, and I remembered that the lectured had said something about that there would be a two week break now.

Well, at least I then got an exercise done while waiting, so now I wont have to think about that next week.