Praise to the Lord. My 19"CRT finally broke. The red signal went missing. Probably only a problem with the cable. I suppose going to LAN-Parties did not help either. I actually spent a weekend at a LAN-Party without the red channel. The manufakturing date on the Acer 99sl is given with August 1999, so may it rest in peace.
First impression on the Samsung 2493: impressive amount of screen real estate, can not set to 1920x1200 over dvi-port (probably fault of my old nvidia 5700) and the beast is creating such frequency interferencies, that I can not clearly receive fm4, Ö3 (from Austria) or Deutschlandfunk Kultur over antenna anymore when it is on. Not nice! Is there a good rescource on radio disturbances somewhere on the net? Other than that, I will keep you posted when I know, wether more screen real estate actually means more productivity.
I loath all those sweets during advent. Everywhere you go, people offer
you Lebkuchen and other christmas sweets. Disgusting. I suppose the problem might be, that, as I am getting myself candy whenever I want some,
and suddenly I get even more candy. Probably a feeling of lost control?
I heard, Advent was originally a time of fasting.
The blood donation service of the bavarian red cross distributed tickets for the thermal spring in Bad Birnbach. I got five of them. Never been to a sauna or thermal spring before, I must say: "Boy, that is the good live."
Yes, really, just two days ago, I had a load of stuff I wanted to write about. Well whatever here comes an alibi-posting.
I did vote counting for our state elections. Now as public-servant, I even get 1,5 days off for it. Nice - compared to the fact, that I did election service just for the fun of it several times in earlier times. Always scary to see vote-participation drop from election to election. "People! Go to vote! Vote unvalid, but vote, ffs."
I am off for vacation, so do not expect me to read my email for some time.
More or less exactly like the reviews said. I already missed the optical viewfinder during times of glaring sunlight - sigh. Pictures are extremely big. Stupid pixel masturbation. Will have to discpline myself and eliminate and scale some of the monsters down. Or better, make a test series with the low JPEG-quality settings. Those might actually be good enough. Otherwise pretty satisfied, should be even better with firmware update. Oh, one thing! "I want real high speed funtionality! I need my 8000 frames/second for shots of feeding birds like seen on top". Looking forward to do some experients with HDR-photograpy in the near future.
I finally got to the Zugspitze, germany's highest mountain. There is even a small gallery. The peak is not recommended for foreigners, only for natives who "have to be there once in their life".
I had the chance to ride the new high speed train tracks during a seminar trip. Very impressive. Of course I got myself a place behind the conductor cockpit.
All the international street-artists brought a pleasent cosmopolitan feeling to sleepy town of Landshut - very nice. The weather was kind of cold, but it stayed dry all the time. See you next time.
I compiled my hiking tours in the alps together in a table and a visual representation with google maps. Go check it out, feeback welcome
Mickey-mouse-cartography is a term coined by a professor at the faculty of geomatics at the university of applied sciences in munich, by which he expressed his utter contempt with internet cartograpy. Welcome to a german instituion of higher-learning.
As my IXUS I got myself in 2001 after my well paid internship with Smallworld is making problems I got myself a Lumix TZ5. I will keep you informed about customer satisfaction and stuff.
The reason the IXUS is giving up on me is probably not because it is a crappy product, but because I kept it with me in my backpack all the time - which gets some rough beating from time to time. The leather work done for my IXUS BAG become obsolescent. Tell me, if you need some IXUS I equipement.
The TZ5 is pretty big in current standards. Thats due to its 10x optical zoom. But its good to have something in your hand. What man wants a small spy-lady-cam? Well it is still small enough to be kept in you pocket. I read something about a firmware update - crazy shit, all those devices you got to charge, to patch and what not all.
Well, I got myself a pair of shoes for 260€. Actually the most amazing pair of shoes I ever owned. They feel really good. One has got a really firm stand in them, even though the leather sole still feels kind of slippery on some surfaces. Head over to handmacher.de to read about the manufacturer. I shall keep you informed of further experiences with my new shoes.
This brings us directly to the question of the month: What is more pathetic? Writing about your shoes on your website or actually reading on someones else website about that person's new pair of shoes?
Friends of mine did a new website for their uncle's business. Now they need some links to that page in order to boost its google page rank. Quite senseless linking from here, cause my own pagerank probably sucks big time.
However washomat.de is the website of a great self service laundrette chain in Munich, Ingolstadt and Augsburg. I am always doing my laundry at waschomat when I am staying in Munich for some time. They even got some kind of appartus to remove the excess lime in the Munich water - to soften it up. Trust me folks - its the greatest shit around. IIRC the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported about it as well. They also give back to the community and allow the homeless people to spend one night or another in their laundromats. Even the nobles visit their place from time to time.
Waschomat is highly recommended. Girls dig boys with clean underwear. Go to waschomat for a better sex life!
The geomatics department of the University of applied sciences of munich has a cooperation with the Centre Archeologique Europeen du Mont Beuvray in Burgundy, France.
The mission of this institution is to research the celtic life in the ancient settlement of Bibracte. In the time from approximately 300 bc. to 50 bc. it was the economic, political and religious capital of the tribe of the Eduens in that region.
The cooperation of our department with the french and Dr. Schubert, the project manager, intends to survey and document the topographie of the area with the traces of the town and its fortifications on the Mount Beuvray.
In february/march of 2002 Markus, Ruppert and I went for the yearly surveying campaign to france. Now finally there is a gallery with some impressions online, only six years late.
You remember the game, where you had to find a search term in google, which returned exactly one website? Try Vermesserkacke ftw.
Obviously I do not feel obliged to do regular postings here on this site, which is a good thing as the relevance of these postings tends towards zero, and I should not be wasting too much time with them.
As the new year is already six weeks old (3/24th over) I shall not write a summary of 2007 or an outlook for 2008
Some thoughts on video this month:
Last december I did some video editing for the birthday of my dad. I avoided doing video until then, but it was an interesting and enlightning experience. An amazing medium offering endless possibilities for creative visions. Well, my sister did the scripting and directing, I was just the cutter.
In case you should ever start out with adobe products there are some fine video tutorials by Curt Wrighley. They are done in premiere 6.0/.5 but they helped me just fine with pro 1.5
Surprisingly the weakest link in my hardware was my audio equipment. My headset sucked for audio recording. Secondly I suspect my on-board audio card to suck as well.
I started to play some BF2 lately. Of course I lack the necessary killer instinct and suck pretty much, as I am not going to school anymore and thus do not have endless playing and training time.
Fortunately there are nice people out there, who do video tutorials for suckers like myself to learn and improve. Quite exceptional in my humble opinion is the BF2 Sniper School by Ryam Pahl.
Profund and comprehensive: See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.
ArmyDoctor did some nice tutorials on helicopter combat: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Of course there is always the fun stuff. Absolutely damned funny is the Noob Hunter by wisemo. Of course you got to be familiar with BF2, the original crocodile hunter and the concept of teabagging to truly appreciate the video.
A beautiful peace is the
BF2 spoof of the first
sony bravia commercial.
What did we do before we had videos on the net? The WWW actually got pretty old. Twelve years ago images were rare. Now video has become a comodity. Well, low-res video has become a comodity. Video in the net is probably, where images where 1995. Back then, one thought about downloading a 2MB picture. These days one thinks about downloading a 2GB video. So there is progress. I am wondering what we will think about twelve years from now.
It is however amazing how helpful video tutorials can be for getting a quick start with a piece of software. Of course searching in a video can suck, and a written html-doc is of advantage at times, but it is amazing how extremely comfortable a video can be. Of course it will not replace practice.
Interesting fact on the side: a video is 2D, as is the computer-screen. I think this is especially advantageous. A real world 3D process projected onto a flat surface (take your favourite TV cooking show) can never be as graphic and direct as a tutorial for a piece of software. We will have to wait for holodecks for good 3D tutorials.