All right. I’ve overcome the gastro virus my little nephew handed the whole family for Xmas, flew half around the globe and am in the process of setting up life back home in Switzerland. First off I have to recommend a fantastic book that I’m reading right now:

Soon I Will Be Invincible, a novel by Austin Grossman

Doctor Impossible—evil genius, diabolical scientist, wannabe world dominator—languishes in a federal detention facility. He’s lost his freedom, his girlfriend, and his hidden island fortress.  Over the years he’s tried to take over the world in every way imaginable: doomsday devices of all varieties (nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological) and mass mind control. He’s traveled backwards in time to change history, forward in time to escape it. He’s commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasions. All failures. But not this time. This time it’s going to be different…

Now the links:

• How to avoid looking like an American tourist
• AdWeek’s top media & marketing innovations of 2008
• A video of a great white shark circling kayakers in Sydney’s northern beaches
• Jalopnik’s top ten car lists of 2008
• BusinessWeek article on recent discussions around the ethics of pay-per-post blogging
• Vertor – verified torrents (of course you shouldn’t use this technology for pirating copyrighted materials but you knew that already, right?)
• One year in 40 seconds (of a bunch of trees that is)
• Bomb explodes under lake (would have been a good surf)
• Cityrag’s celebrity plastic surgery overview of 2008
• 50 inspiring vintage advertisements
• Ebooks hit mobile phones
• LiveLeak vids of a laptop sale frenzy in Russia and a very lucky forklift operator
• A video of Russian talking turkeys
• Last and least Donatella Versace in a bikini (trust me you don’t want to click this link)