yeah gunter, as if: picture of the century. well, one has got to try. for the uninitialized: we probably shall not see the church st. bonifaz open, to be viewed from a distance from the whole southside like this in the next onehundred years - including the concrete-pump and the crane.
during the day i am selling my soul and coding vba. but, as soon, as the twilight of the night sets in, i am hacking java.
well bullshit. vba can be an extremely powerful toolset to enhance windows — especially ms office — applications. i never tinkered with the api of openoffice, but the transition of vba-empored ms-office documents/databases, or rather the lack of transition, should be a major obstacle for the adoption of open office in a lot of companies.
it is amazing, how many hundred lines of banal code one can hack away in a day with clear specifications and targets. some of it is apparently one shot spaghetti code, some of it is kind of modular. i shall see, how much fun i will have with maintaining my code.
another thrilling experience is the maintainance of some other person´s application´s. but as i am working on a stable foundation and got the number of my predecessor, i am very optimistic.
pretty soon after some days i had the image of a kerndlfresser (negative bavarian term for someone who is trying to nourish healthy, in the same sense of a tree-hugger) even though i do not have lunch together with my colleges on a regular basis. for every time i have a salad, i would have to eat five times liver-loaf to avoid the verdict of a kerndlfresser. but i am being accepted nonetheless. thank you.
there is a small but nice new feature on this site: visual denazifaction. head over there and check it out right now.
merry christmas to everyone. thou shalt not forget my personal wish list.
sometimes i feel unsatisfied with my little ixus i, but some shots compensate for that.
the last time i saw a museum from the inside was three years ago in vienna. for five years i actually studied no more than 800m apart from some of mankind's greatest pieces of art without ever putting a foot inside of one of the pinakotheken.
now i exposed myself to a mainstream art event in the lenbachhaus: the putatively most comprehensive franz marc exhibit ever. it probably was not a inspiring, but for sure a very delighting and refreshing experience. go check it out in munich till the 8th of january 2006.
my accompaniment had to struggle with her stereotypes, that somebody, presenting himself in traditional bavarian garbs, could actually belong to the artistic avant garde. see the following shame-attack-picture:
it seems that there are at least two very different work environments in germany. experiences in the last months shook me up quite a bit. i don't know, how this is going to work out in the long term. i feel quite unsettled about all this. i walked the world pretty ignorant up until now. i shall not go into detail here, but if you know me, you might know what i am talking about.
in september and october i was involved in a topographical survey project along the danube river. there were several extremely stable high pressure areas over central europe during that time and i had to apply sun protection on a daily basis if i didn't want my skin to totally dry out.
a lot of the area is actually a nature preserve and it was quite pleasant. i was happy to own a cellular phone with an audio-player and especially a radio as i caught myself talking to myself one time.
special thanks to bayern2.
i can not really evaluate the ecological value of the flora and fauna along the waterside, but the conditions for gnats must be quite good.
i am all for donating blood, but this is too much. not only did i need sun-blocker, but anti insect as well.
the more serious plans for upgrading / extending the waterway, which the danube is, would most likely destroy the waterline as seen here. definitely a bad thing.
an isolation-mattress can actually be used to compensate the vibrations of a floor while surveying. some kind of atr is recommended.
the picture of the month is not necessarily a current picture, just something to ease the feeling of the page. this picture is for example about six month old.
i did a skin for the great, powerful and flexible image-gallery-generation software jalbum. i would love to get some feedback on usability and looks. you can also download the skin and push its download statistic!
i am finally back in employment. and i didn't really use the spare time while being in-between-projects. damn. i knew, this was going to happen. for example i actually wanted to get, at least, this page going with a new layout and an actual domain. bad, bad florian.
here is a preliminary draft for a new layout of this website. head on over and check it out. then give me some tough feedback.
i made a trip to berlin for two nights, helping my sister finding a flat or room. it was actually very exciting and inspiring. i should go for vacation more often. compared to my last trip four or five years ago, the city evolved quite a bit. there is even a small picture gallery. check out the trashed election posters.
there is the theory, that electronics can get as wet as one can make them, as long as you do not send any power through them while still wet. conclusion: two keyboards tested, fifty percent casualties. thus it would be unethical for me to recommend you to take your keyboard with you under the shower. even though it is great to see all the dirt emanating from between the keys. however i advocate not leaving bottles of sweet sodas standing on your workdesk. during my military service there was the saying, that a soldier, who really loves his rifle, takes it with him below the shower in order to clean it. oh well.
another duty to the german society would be fathering and bringing up lots of children, ahm, i mean tax-payers. but that is another whole story.
back to myself looking for a job. most important is of course me getting a paying profession as fast as possible so i can pay tribute into our public pension- and health-care system. this ain't fun.
i did some ego-surfing. florere is acceptable placed in the yahoo/altavista index. it is neither in the google nor the msn index. being the snob i am, i don't necessarily want to be found by msn users. not being indexed by google is acceptable and understandable, as the page-rank must be somewhere below zero, not being linked by nobody. i however remember this site to be placed very prominently in the google index for about eight weeks in spring of 2004. back than i linked my dhtml slides project in one of the site point dhtml forums. somehow this single link catapulted my site up to incredible heights in the google index.
so what did i learn out of this? spamming site point forums with links is probably a bad thing. ethically right would be to create good content. there the circle closes again.
i made a leather bag for my ixus. leather is nice.
apropos ixus - those mobile digital devices are getting out of control.
one evening after work, i catched myself reading out the pictures from my
maybe it will be possible to transport energy wireless. recharging your mobile,
by putting it in the microwave.
ethics? you should probably go out and pay four bucks for a plastic case for your camera, so the poor soul working in the vietnamese sweatshop can support here kids.
probably a new feature, provided that i am able to provide a stream of fresh, high-quality pictures.
this is the sign of a wheelchair-accessible toilet inside a bmw plant. i guess when you are building cars with a sporty image, wheelchairs got to be sporty as well.
so i got my first own car after a while. i tried to avoid it, but i failed. this car is equipped with a cassette player. at first i reactivated the cassettes i had put away in a drawer. deja vu! those cassettes where taped in 1997/1998 - what a flashback!
after some time i got tired of the old shit and decided to get
some new music in the car. as i did not feel like investing in
some new media player for my car the choice was clear: i got to
record some new tapes. in
a cheap memory stick with 0,5gb and a mp3-player costs less than 100€. it can not take too long till we see some more advanced audio playback capability at affordable prizes for cars.
latest recordings: gotan project: la revancha del tango, battelfield vietnam, ost and placebo, sleeping with ghosts.
so this page is one year old. i am curious how it will evolve over the years.
i probably should order some dirt-cheap webspace offering a little bit mojo e.g.
php, perl and a real domain. but that is all inane without content, of which we
did not see too much lately.
i just read in an article, that personal, very elaborate websites with galleries
and blogs are a thing of shy people who otherwise do not present or depict oneself.
well duh, but interesting to be confronted with the facts from time to time.
our company has been purchased by another company. right now, we are being
integrated and i have a strange feeling of
our new company does not yet know for sure, what they actually bought. but they
are trying hard and i am agog for the things to come.
i put a personal wish list online. not that i expect anything out of it - but one has got to be prepared.
i stumbled over an interesting approach towards procrastination by john perry. he has a ph.d. in philosophy, whatever that might be worth. don't hesitate to go there right now! ;-)
the snow situation this winter was great for us flachlandbayern ([german]: flatlandbavarians). we had lot of snow in february followed by stable below freezing temperatures. it was great. thanks to the weather gods for this. i see myself full of yearning in the following years for a winter like this. maybe i should relocate to some location with a more dependable snow-situation. and in the middle of march, when it seemed as spring took over, we had a grand finale with another 30cm of wet, packing, children's delight snow - snow glory and my bike [picture].
at times my workplace as surveyor in factory halls can feel anything from strange to disturbing. when running between conveyor belts, moving with the rhythm of the machinery, i feel like super mario in some jmp-n-run adventure. sometimes, when its hot, loud and the machinery is especially bestial, it feels as if i were right in the pits of isengard. and occasionally, when it's especially lonesome, eerie and strange, it feels like a kafkaesque nightmare. i love those moments, when fantasy strikes...
i finally had the chance to ride in an
ice 3 train
by siemens for the first time and get some in-person impressions: the interior seems
to be an improvement. i didn't like the chrome on the luggage department.
my seat made some undefinable cheap noises. the bathrooms are identical in
both the first and the second class. they are fitted with classy,
big mirror fronts [picture].
unfortunately the route was not prepared for high speeds and
we couldn't test our 330km/h potential. and even though we rode in the
flagship of the deutsche bahn, we were 20 minutes late. sigh.
on law-and-order in bavaria, and munich especially. i'll start with some background information:
| so two of my colleges and myself walk through the streets of munich after having something to eat at a restaurant: | |
| colleague number one from berlin said: | |
| colleague number two from peru stated in conformation: | |
even though they both exaggerated (i hope so), it still feels kind of nice, that a system, based on public trust, is working. on the other side, it can happen to you, that you are being confronted by some cops whether you smoked something because you look suspicious to them. well, it is not like bavaria is a police state - not at all, but still. so what is it, that i wanted to say? i guess, everthing has its pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, and the way of the middle is mostly the best.
another fat "duh!" for myself
from the experiences i made with writing these sometimes monthly entries i would say, that writing a daily blog in a non-native tongue is probably not very intuitive and spontaneous. it is possible, but it is probably not a good idea. it can never be as intensive as writing in your own language. well - duh. it is probably okay for a very functional, objective and error tolerant blog.
okay, those are not the bravest statements i made, but they are still statements. i thought, rather than wasting screen estate of my visitors with blank space, i might as well use it to promote some opinions. it is not too offensive for the eyes, is separated from the content, hell it looks like a fucking google ad! redesign suggestions are welcome. it degrades gracefully, even though not the way i would like it to do. shit, i wanted to concentrate on content, not layout. did i mention, that ie has some problems with web-standards?
maybe i should switch to quarterly updates ...
been working on some content for the site in recent times. i hope to publish something in the next months. i think it is good to put oneself under some pressure.
been doing some hacking lately and i keep observing myself ignoring basic
development rules all the time. fortunately i am not doing this for a living.
i would have to fire me.
i just found a sourceforge project tackling a problem i already spend some time
on. funny. when i last checked about ten month ago, there were no started projects.
now there is one beta-product and about three other projects which have of course
not yet released anything.
but i don't like approach he took, and want to finish my project.
now i understand, where all those open-source-projects come from.
I could have a running first version of my approach up and running, but you know,
feature creep and stuff.
I am having problems with recording radio-programs over my line-IN
on my computer. Both under Linux and Win2K. Very quit and scratchy. I think
it might have to do with the level provided by my
![snow glory and my bike [picture]](../news_pics/0503_snow_final.jpg){kind=link}
![big mirror fronts [picture]](../news_pics/0503_ice3_mirror_front.jpg){kind=link}