A Poem To Cats

I’ll just post this “as is”. I wrote this – ahem – poem about three years ago (2005) when I got my second cat and just felt incredibly inspired …

Please note that this is my first and last and always poem I’ve ever written!

It is in German, I’ll try to translate it, but I guess it will lose all of – what? what has it got? – what it’s got in the process. It mostly consists of rhyme and beat – in and out of rhythm, but I didn’t care at that time, I just wanted to express my thoughts concerning my two cats. For now, I’ll just provide a translation that keeps the tenor (and beat) of it, but in no way rhymes or feels like the “real thing” …

Hope you enjoy …

A Blog Of Kitten Pictures …

OK, right now I’d like to introduce my cats, named ‘Simba’ and ‘Karlo’.

They both are quite ordinary farm cats (tomcats to be specific) that I ‘rescued’ from being drowned in a bucket if no one had ‘adopted’ them. One of them, Simba, is a light-/dark- gray tabby cat, the other one (Karlo, named after “Black Pete” of Disney’s, just because he looks so … and is called ‘Kater Karlo’ in the German versions of Disney’s Comics), over here he would be described as a so called ‘cow-cat’, because of his painting …

Just before it gets too boring for any possible reader of this post, here are the pictures:

This used to be the place where my TV-set rested ... Introducing: Karlo!

This is my favourite, just because it's my first one ... Introducing: Simba!

The reason I’m just now writing about my irrelevant cats is the following:

Simba got engaged in a heavy fight last night and got severely injured at the base of his tail. Tomorrow I’m taking him to the vet, and to prepare for it, I took his cat-carrier and placed it in my living-room to get him acquainted to it (again). Guess what happened? Right now he’s sleeping happily in it and I think I’ll just have to close the lid tomorrow morning
and can get off to the vet.

It could have been much harder, believe me, this is not the first time to take him to the vet …

Loveparade

Ok, I admit that I – despite my age and my conditioning to rock music at an early age – like electronic music (aka. “Techno” over here) a lot. Oh no, I have not been (never have, never will) to this year’s Love-Parade in Dortmund, Germany (too much folks packed in too little space), but two of my friends have been.

Here’s a picture of them shown on SPIEGEL-Online (SPON) (whole article, in German).

Nice, almost ‘heavenly’, as SPON put it.

[Edited to show image inline:]

Two Angels At The Love Parade 2008, Image courtesy of Spiegel-Online

That pile of shit again …

This post is in reference to the “Visual C++ Team Blog“

Just a short quote as a teaser:

At first glance it does appear that the user is correct – but looks can be deceiving. Just because the string class has a converting-constructor from a string-literal doesn’t mean that the compiler has to use it. For the first argument to the function call, the conversion is straight forward – both of the candidate functions expect a string and so the compiler will use the provided converting constructor to convert the string-literal to an instance of the string class. The second argument is not so straight forward. For the first function the compiler can again use the converting-constructor, but for the second function it can use the standard pointer-to-bool conversion to convert the string-literal (which the compiler will consider as type “const char*”) to bool. As this is a standard conversion, the C++ Standard considers this conversion to be cheaper than calling the converting-constructor (which is a user-defined conversion) and hence the second function is a better match than the first function and the compiler, correctly, calls that function.

No need for me to comment on this. ’nuff said.