2017-12-01

Why i liked listening to this old guy

When i was really young, i discovered musician Heino while shopping with my parents. Back then, "compact discs" were a new thing, at least for us, because we didn't have a CD player. This is why i was looking through shelves with "cassette tapes". I saw this old blonde guy with black sunglasses on the cover art standing out, and i made my parents buy it for me. Since then, i kept looking out for him, because i wasn't exposed to a lot of music, except for the tapes my parents already had, and i liked to pick things i already know.
I got my first audio CD from our landlord Manfred Camphausen in Ratingen as christmas present. It was a album from Backstreet Boys, 1996. I was around ten years old, and we still didn't have a CD player at the time, so it took me a couple of months to expose myself to a new world of music. Because i wasn't listening to radio, or liking any specific songs at all, except for German "Schlager" in form of Heino, also known as Heinz Georg Kramm.
Back then, i was already occupied with Lego bricks and Lego trains, watching TV, taking things apart, collecting things, being outdoors, doing camping in the garden, biking, and discovering new places on my own. My mother was obsessed with Tetris, but after moving to Ratingen, i had the Nintendo Game Boy to myself. And i played with RC cars from my uncle, who came from Hong Kong for three years to help in the kitchen of our restaurant, till 1996. Later, in Bonn, i had RC boats and even a RC helicopter, long before quadcopters became a thing. But i learned the hard way that some things are too costly for me to maintain. I never played like the other kids, probably because i saw how exhausting my parents worked, and i didn't understand why.
Around ten years later, in July 2007, i was visiting his coffee shop in Bad Münstereifel for the first time, together with friends from school, Melanie Jülich and Matthias Kleist. It was nothing too special, except the owner was Heino, and the decoration was targeting to fans like me. I got a piece of cake and some photos as souvenir. I already lost track of him at that time, and my music taste changed, but it was fun to warm up memories, especially with people i like.
2017-11-29

Things i never get tired of: 1937 to 1990

Since a couple of years, i'm building a collection of movies and series i liked in the past. A handful of them were published before i was born, but are still good after all this time, because they bring joy and meaning. Unlike most popular music these days, cinema is constantly reinventing itself through new technologies. Things are getting easier to achieve and are pushing the boundaries even further. This is why i like to make videos myself. There is more than one way to do it, just like in the Perl programming language. But with understanding comes the prediction, and when i get tired of the present or the future, i like to watch these movies from the past:
2017-11-28

Things i never get tired of: 1993 to 2016

There are not many movies i want to see again after some time has passed. It needs a lot of care in the storytelling to make me come back. But once it's in my heart, i hold it tight, to make it a part of me. Some movies i may forget, just to be remembered after a couple of years, when i feel lost. They make me refocus on things i have not valued enough, more than any written text could, because "a picture is worth a thousand words", and if it's sort of entertaining, even better. I like seeing lives broken down into moments, and trying to make the connections, the things that explain why they did what they did. I wrote a Windows batch script file to get all names automatically sorted like this:
2017-11-25

How i lost my chains

Over a decade ago, i had a lot going on on the internet and in real life. I was developing and running several large sites on the web, studying geography at the University of Bonn, writing my first "published" book, and doing many other things, like photojournalism or playing table tennis at DJK Blau-Weiß Friesdorf. I was pretty close to being an average person, except maybe the body weight.
But then Dirk from Sömmerda sent me emails in 2007 and a letter from his lawyer in 2008 terrorizing and threatening me to sell him one of my domains for less than it is worth, because he had a registered trademark that was supposed to match the web address, but was just a watery "Bildmarke" with no stand in this case. He had already .at, .biz, .ch, .de, and .net redirecting to his website, but he was hungry for my .com regardless.
I kept the domain, but i lost my chains, thanks to this troll. I became free by realizing that i'm different and not in any way like these greedy Germans. I wanted to leave this country, because Germany did nothing good for my parents and me. I didn't want to be a part of this "food chain" anymore. I am neither a shark nor a fish.
Thanks to my relatives in Hong Kong, who helped me to get the necessary documents, i got the option to go and stay somewhere warm. This alone made me feel better by not being bound to this harsh cold place. Because there are still some nice people left on this planet. I wanted change. And i started with myself by reducing my footprint on the internet and in real life. There you have it, my burn out.
2017-11-17

A door to another world

I always liked animated shows and movies, because they were a door to another world, where bad things can happen, but no one gets hurt for real. And since i'm an only child with working parents and few friends, this is how i learned many things in the first place, for better or worse, because life is not a cartoon.
I grew up with Alvin and the Chipmunks, Asterix and Obelix, Batman, Bugs Bunny, Hey Arnold, Inspector Gadget, Ninja Turtles, Pink Panther, Pinky and the Brain, Rugrats, Scooby-Doo, Scrooge McDuck, SpongeBob SquarePants, Superman, Sylvester and Tweety, TaleSpin, The Flintstones, The Real Ghostbusters, The Smurfs, Tom and Jerry, Wallace and Gromit, and, as you already know, The Simpsons and Futurama.
But except for Sailor Moon, Anime never found the way to me, until i stopped watching German TV some years ago, and started to get my shows and movies exclusively through the internet, without all these ads and nonsense. In the past couple of hours i binge-watched and really enjoyed:
2017-11-13

Why i'm tired of people

Usually, i like to write here about the rare good people in my life, because it makes me happy talking about them, like the neighbour in my childhood. But to give you a sense of the level of stress i have to live with on a regular basis, i let you know this: Since over a decade, my neighbours around me are Medizintouristen, basically noisy tourists from the Middle East, living several weeks or months in my town to get their health fixed by German doctors. Just imagine overexcited monkeys escaped from the zoo paying some serious "oil money" to physicians and landlords in Bonn.
And to be fair, occasionally they literally throw a few cents out the window too, if a beggar gets their attention. The whole district is catering to them, and enabling a "parallel society" to grow. If i had the choice, i would be somewhere else, far away from this, because they live in their own time zone, and it is tiring: Some of them don't get started until the Sun goes down. And these illiterate people don't know how to use their doorbell and ring ours to come inside.
Back then, when i was a student, i had for several years annual passes to the Cologne Zoological Garden, just an hour away from Bad Godesberg. I enjoy seeing all these animals from a distance, but i would rather not like to live next to them. At least i'm here with my parents: I love them so much that i even wrote to Santa Claus in Himmelpfort and put their well-being on the top of my wish list. Maybe in some distant way they are monkeys too, but at least we speak the same language. And unlike these animals, my parents have to work really hard for their money.
FYI, in 2010, i had a Bahncard 100 for one year, which allows unlimited travel on the entire public transport network across Germany. And i got me an annual pass for the Zoo in Berlin because of panda Bao Bao, who died five years ago, in 2012, as one of the oldest male giant pandas in the world. Back then, i made many photos of him, while i sat on my Walkstool folding chair, with my white Canon lens resting on a Manfrotto monopod: After a long train ride, he made my day, everytime.
2017-11-05

Eleven years on Facebook

Eleven years ago, i joined Facebook. I have a love-hate relationship with the site. Back then, i run my own online community, developed by myself, written in Perl, long before Mark Zuckerberg with his "social network". But i never got that many users on my side, and it was only available in German, which might be the reason. There just weren't that many people on the internet at the time. His trick was to make the website a exclusive thing only for students worldwide. In November 2006, i was a geography student at the University of Bonn, and i had my own university email address, the former key to sign up for Facebook. But now everyone can join, it became mainstream, and animated GIF images have become a bit silly.
This is why i never used it that much, just like Twitter. When i was down for some reasons, i occasionally removed people from my friends list, because it didn't make me happy seeing them there. I had the people close to me on ICQ, "MSN Messenger" and other instant messaging apps anyway. It felt easy to do it. But as i slowly burned out, i cut off all these connections, till i found myself. And there i was, with only two friends on the list. I remembered former schoolmate Matthias Kleist saying that we will always be friends, whatever happens. And he accepted my friend request on Facebook again. But nothing was like before. A lot of time has passed. People change, and i changed. I wanted to say sorry for not having explained myself, and i really missed the time we played board games with Johannes Kalle and David Rahman. They all have jobs now, while i'm still trying to get it all to work. There is not much left to glue back together.
My social activities are quite limited these days, even more than in the past. But i search for the right amount within my means, by looking out for opportunities. Let's call it "Low Power Mode" to save battery life. Occasionally someone is saying or asking me something, while i'm folding my origami cranes. Just like a couple of days ago on the campus: She asked me where to find the coffee shop. I didn't know, but we looked each other in the eyes, much longer than we needed to, till she left. It felt good to give and get some attention. It was like seeing a big bang, the birth and death of a universe.
2017-10-05

Happy anniversary Thinkpad

My first laptop was manufactured by Hewlett-Packard, second by Sony, third and fourth by IBM. In 2005, the Thinkpad X41 made me stop looking for another maker in this device category. I already had a IBM Aptiva desktop computer with Microsoft Windows 95 from 1998 at the time, but i didn't know Thinkpads existed back then. My last traditional Thinkpad is the X60s from 2007. Both are still working today, but only the X60s has Windows 10, while the X41 is still running Windows XP. I was never a real Apple person, although i had a non-Intel "Cheese Grater" Power Mac G5 from 2005, a first-generation iPad, several iPods and iPhones, when Steve Jobs was still alive.
My old Thinkpads are not much heavier than modern notebooks, but many hardware parts can be swapped, like the battery, keyboard, memory, and harddrive, as i have done. I took them to school, press events, university, and basically everywhere, till they got too slow for my needs. I didn't try to run RollerCoaster Tycoon or SimCity on them because of this. I would have needed an external CD drive anyway. Since Thinkpads were always on the expensive side, i stopped buying them, although i like their contemporary devices. Without IBM personal computers, i probably wouldn't be here. Thank you and happy anniversary, Thinkpad.
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