ZDnet has an interesting article about the average visitor spending more than an hour on Apple's website. While this is interesting - I also find it very very interesting that Apple had more visitors than all the others listed together.

It was about time. I wanted a motorcycle again for a long time. We started looking when we were still in Canada, but there a bike wouldn't have made sense for us. Too expensive, the summer too short and the weather too unreliable to have real fun.

But now here - with about 9 month of absolutely gorgeous weather per year, why not?

Today I went for a really nice motorcycle ride - about 50 miles, through the Mountains here. It was just plain fun. Page Mill Road is one of the nicest roads for a motorcycle I have ever seen. Lots of nice curves, not too tight, not too wider. Just plain right.

The F800GS is such a nice bike, it handles so well and has enough power without being overly aggressive. I had lots of fun!

Right now, I'm in San Francisco, the Whitcomb hotel and listen to an interesting session held by Chuck Hill about validation in WebObjects.

WOWODC is happening, it's very exciting and I learned some really interesting things here. Also WWDC is coming up, so I'll be in San Francisco for the coming days.

Today I found one of the best articles about using Gmail with IMAP I've ever seen. I'm going to archive it locally, but for you, here is the link:

Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail

So, I got comments and mail sending working again - some configuration issues were preventing SSL connections to the mail server. Problem solved now. Hopefully.

The tag cloud wasn't really reflecting the currently displayed blog - it was picking up tags from every blog in the database. And, as you may agree, this is not quite right. This is fixed now. So, switching between the blogs will now display the proper tag cloud.

I removed the stupid Google Ads and the Digg badge now from the blog. They weren't doing any good, so why have them at all and make the site slower and less responsive to the user.

It didn't matter for my data transfer as all the scripts and the content came from somewhere else, but now the pages definitely load fast for visitors as for example the stupid Digg CSS was about 60kB for just that simple yellow badge on the detail page. Totally ridiculous. This is gone now to make the surfing experience better.

Uffz. We had a mild shock this afternoon: our espresso machine stopped working. The display showed only that it needed venting, but that didn't work. The pump didn't get any water through.

For about half an hour I tried everything I knew worked before, but nothing actually did. So, remembering what normally works with a computer, I turned it off and let it cool down for a while. After that, at least hot water was working again but no steam. Okay. Next step. Hot water is working, so I can do a full decalcify cycle. Did that, and afterwards, everything worked again! Phew.

On Tuesday we got our new car - a Golf GTI. We didn't get it for the GTI part, but it was the only Golf with the features we wanted to have: bucket (sport) seats, Xenon headlights, manual transmission.

For a German it sounds completely ridiculous that you can't configure a Golf to your liking, but in North America options are very limited. You can only get the standard Golf (Rabbit) with one engine: a 2.5l, 170 horse powers - and yes, this is the "smallest" engine you can get from Volkswagen in the States, if you leave out the TDI with a 140 horse power diesel engine. This is plain jackass sales policies given the economic disasters and today (or at last yesterdays) oil and gas prices

Next, there are some more constraints: