a scam that has appeared some years ago and that is interestingly still alive - russian girlfriends.

they send a nice story and pictures of nice blond women. So please upload the pictures and stories to flickr and collect them here:

https://www.flickr.com/groups/mynewrussiangirlfriend/



I started with Maria, the new russia girlfriend of a blogger who documented the whole exchange.

I have been tracking everything "semantic desktop" for the last years, but this beauty has evaded me until now. disclaimer: this may not help much to explain the ideas, and is a bit long, but the mystic sound and nice appeal make it mesemerizing to watch - if you can, enjoy this in a relaxing atmosphere....



Here's an animation I did a few years ago to explain the idea of the "social semantic desktop", using Lego visualisations I made in the LDraw CAD package. Music is by yours truly from https://johnbreslin.com/wiki/index.php...

Roman Polanski was arrested for child molesting, he was on charge for that for years and avoided going to the USA because of the prosecution.

There was public outcry over his arrestment, which of course interfers with a lot of his movies and art going on and some people working for him will lose money and jobs and good press if he goes to jail. Anyway, this is one side - the other was him raping a child, which interferred a lot with this one life.

Two links:

• Thoughts for Polanski apologists, by another woman raped at 13. - the article on the excellent blog boingboing which pointed me to the very uncanny side of this case
• the transcripts from the actual rape as on court (allegedly, you never know, maybe this is a fake, don't trust the internet) - uncanny ... creepy ...

may be needful for you in discussions on the topic

If you are interested in my PhD, you can now buy it on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.de/Semantic-approach-Personal-Information-Management/dp/3866244495/

as blogged before, I finished and published my PhD. Its a good reference on all topics related to the semantic desktop: personal information management, information extraction, pimo, application plugins, semantic wikis, and how people used them.

Now, my work did hit the Amazon store and can be bought by you together with other interesting books such as Founders At Work

P.s.: Disclaimer: If you buy it through the links on this page, you support me, I took this opportunity to join Amazon's affiliate program ;-)

As I just also blogged on OSCAF. I will be there, see that you can join also.

Sebastian Trüg from NEPOMUK-KDE organises a social semantic desktop workshop, a practical meeting to bring pragmatic implementers together.

After the first Nepomuk workshop in June being a great success it is time
to start the planning for the next one. In fact there will be two workshops
before the end of the year: one dedicated to the open social semantic desktop
and one general Nepomuk hands-on coding sprint for everyone interested in
Nepomuk development.

The Nepomuk Open Social Semantic Desktop

techbase.kde.org/Projects/Nepomuk/OpenSocialSemanticDesktopWorkshop2009

This workshop will be focused on the discussion of social features in Nepomuk
and the integration with platforms such as OpenDesktop.

Today Nepomuk allows to handle local resources and data can not be exchanged
with other users. The next step needs to be the integration of such
functionality. It needs to be possible to define privacy parameters on Nepomuk
information, to share Nepomuk data with other users, to integrate information
from online sources, and to enrich online data with the information stored in
Nepomuk.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together experts from the semantic
desktop and ontology design as well as those from online services and peer to
peer communication. Together the theoretical (and hopefully also
technological) basis for an open social semantic desktop in KDE will be
created.

Important projects related to this topic include Telepathy, Kopete,
OpenDesktop, Silk, and OSCAF, the new desktop ontology project.

The workshop will take place in Freiburg, Germany again (it is just so
convenient for me ;)

If you are interested in participating please add your name, email address,
and the dates that are convenient for you to the Workshop wiki page.

Be aware that the e.V. is sponsoring the event for both travel and
accommodation expenses.

I am looking forward to seeing you in Freiburg.

Regards,
Sebastian Trueg

On the weekend we have been on the Ars Electronica Festival - the 30th anniversary version of this art&technology festival in Linz. Awesome.

I will blog and put pictures online in the next weeks, here a few previews:

Leobard doing the headbanghero.com game - its guitar hero with headbanging. röckers, you häve to dö it.


Here is Ingrid in the Nica-Award winning Nemo Observatory, its a "private tornado", you sit on a comfortable chair in the eye of the storm. Polystrene balls and ventilators build the storm:


And we visited the MIT exhibition, traditionally a place where the best interactive media art people in the world gather. Drawdio really cought us, a simple rep-rapped device using an electrical current going through your body and watercolor paint to create a musical painting experience, at (I would guess) a low cost of 10$ per device and electrical materials you have in your drawer at home. Googling for it, I instantly found that they published it on Instructables in a pencil-based version. Just enjoy the movies: