My side of the camera

This surely is the end of the world as we know it.

Seems this will be my last blog post as germany will cease to exist in two minutes...

Hi folks!

Friends who know me will not believe it, but this post is about football.

To be clear: For me, football is totally boring. Its best usage is helping me to fall asleep faster when I accidentially switch to it on tv.

But okay, why not. Surely I like hundreds of things which most other people find extremely boring. I could tell you about linux kernel compilation now, but you would leave my page after 2 paragraphs. So I just don't do it.

And that's the point of my post. I don't do that. I will never force somebody to listen to my linux adventures. I will never force anybody to listen to my strange EBM/Goth/Darkwave music. I would never ask somebody to wear black clothes, too.

So why on earth are football fans unable to celebrate by themselves?
Why do they shout at me while I'm shopping?
Why do they honk when I'm driving by?
Why do the wave banners on the middle of the road when I just want to pass along with my car?
Why do they detonate fireworks until midnight and even longer?
Why do I have so many problems when I just want to buy some f***ing toilet paper without a football theme on it???

This is that intrusive, I really miss the right words for it. It's kind of mental rape!
They forcefully try to make me believe the same as them.

In germany, we have a strange sect calling themselves "Zeugen Jehovas". They are forbidden to try to evangelize you on the street. They may stand there and offer you brochures, but they are not allowed to talk to you for this subject. I think this is absolutely fine. I don't want to get evangelized by the Zeugen Jehovas, not by a catholic priest, not by a Scientology member and for sure also not by a braindead football fan!

They just need to meet each other in soundproof rooms and call themselves "anonymous shoutaholics" and I'm fine with them again.

I will now lock my doors and windows, put on my earmuffs and won't go out until the world championship is over, or I ran out of food, or I need to go back to work.

Whatever happens first.

Do you know those physical laws you cannot find in any serious scientific book but which are existing nevertheless?

Murphy named a lot of them....

Like today:
My way from office to home is 16 kilometers (about 10 miles). Before I leave off work and in case I'm the last sysadmin, I have to lock the server rooms and activate the alarm system.
I was the last admin. Guess when I remembered to lock the server rooms? Right: Just after stopping in front of my house.

And another law: Time is diametrically opposed to gasoline and anger is diametrically opposed to time. So when I'm angry about my lack of brain mass, I cannot drive in a gasoline-saving way. So I minimized my loss of time but maximized my loss of gasoline.

Well, now I'm back home for enough time that I cooled down again. Somewhat tricky at 32 degrees celsius...

Cya!
Daniel

Now I have done my first tests using RAW pictures.

I'm rather impressed what you can do with them regarding color adjustment.

But I still have to fight 4 problems:
1. My camera cannot compress RAW pictures, so each is 16 MB in size.
2. My cam additionially stores the JPEG version of the image, so each image actually takes up to 20 MB on the storage card.
3. My SD storage card is very slow, so after shooting, the cam takes 6 to 7 seconds to write the image to card.
4. My free RAW converter (RawShooter Essentials 2006) doesn't keep EXIF tags, although the option is there and activated.

Well, in spite of that, I think I could have some new pictures from RAW shooting the next days here.

Best,
Daniel

Hi Folks!

On Sunday I gently forced some friends to join me watching The DaVinci Code.

Without knowing the book, I had some splitted expectations about that movie. On one hand, Tom Hanks surely is an exceptionally gifted actor, the critics were mostly fine and the story is very promising.
On the other hand, I already knew much about all those little or not-so-little grail myths which were used there. So I knew what's true, what's unproven myth and what's fiction used for glueing those together.

But while watching I didn't have any reason for even thinking about that, because it was incredibly exciting how fast-paced this story evolved. Everything was glued together that tight and seemingly logical, that I simply didn't want to care about my background knowledge.

I was a little bit reminded to Jerry Bruckheimers "National Treasure", because of the run for treasure while solving thousand puzzles and being chased and trapped all the time. But whereas that one was partly very long winded, "DaVinci Code" never let you relax for more that 2 minutes, despite of its length of 150 (!) minutes! Just incredible in my opinion.

I sometimes had the feeling, the director even had to shorten up some scenes with a heavy heart like "I would like to tell you more background now, but I don't have time for it", but that's allright, because an even longer film would have been too exhausting. So the cut was absolutety fine that way.

Concluding I can say that this is a pure must-see!

So long!
Daniel