i·mag·i·na·tion - Misc

Winter

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:53:00 +0100

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This is what winter looks like in my City. Now you might want to argue that it's still autumn - which of course is right, but winter is right around the corner and the past winters have looked exactly like this. I'd really like some snow this year - yet I doubt we'll get some. What can I say, somehow you'll get used to the lack of seasons, basically we only got one huge season over here in northern Germany.

Slow motion skating

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:05:14 +0200

I love this, apart from looking absolutely marvelous all the tricks seem so easy - which they aren't - trust me on that. I wish I could skate like this.

Back in the days...

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:03:00 +0200

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After reunting with a lot of friends from a long time ago last Sunday and upon realization how much time had gone by, I decided to do a little homage to the good times that I had with all of them.

This one goes out to my cousins, my old friends, my family and all of you that have spent time with me 12 to 15 years ago.

Those times will never be forgotten. Enjoy.

Homecoming

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:45:11 +0200

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I always wondered why "Homecoming" of Kanye West's latest album "Graduation" never was released as a single - well, I guess it was only a matter of time...

Now there are finally pictures to the lyrics. Chicaco all over the place, Common is in there too, together with a lot of pictures that will forever remind me of my trip to the USA last year. Especially Chicago, which was the beginning and the end of my road trip. I'm coming home again.

Good times.

Change

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:21:00 +0100

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It's funny how sometimes the unexpected strikes and changes things. Things that had been set for a long time, things you thought you already learned and things you didn't even knew were possible.

Of course you can enforce change and see what comes around, but it really is the unexpected change that matters the most. This usually happens when something indescribably good or bad happens and you've got to realize that life will never be the same again.

Changes like this make you grow up, get wiser and realize that there always might be something to learn after all. Change can tear down boarders, free you from prejudices and give you back hope. Change can wipe the slate clean.

Trouble is that changes like this are usually very personal, it's nothing you can hand to the next person in order to enlighten or help them. It seems like everyone is on their own here.

I know that there are a gazillion of things left to learn for all of us, but for now I'll just sit down, relax and be grateful for this latest lesson I was taught.

Thank you, whoever you are.

2006 - A Retrospect

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 23:24:00 +0100

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In the tradition of the last two years, here comes my retrospect of 2006 - the truth, the truth and nothing but the truth. I hope you all had a good start into 2007 and unfortunate happenings like the one Kris (German Trackback) had to deal with remained an exception. Reading through my retrospect of last year I thought I'd start with a few comments to my wishes and intentions I had for 2006.

My Weblog: It actually took me until November to finally do the cleanup I had already spoken about in my retrospect of 2005. I deleted several categories, clearly straightening out this weblog and giving it a definitive direction. I've been much more happy with it ever since.

Photography: The 2005 retrospect said something about 'going digital' which did not happen. Actually I got rid of pretty much all my stuff and currently don't even own my own camera. The good news is that I know what I want to do and where to go. I've been shooting with one of my dad's spare middle-format cameras and really fell in love with that format. In 2007 I'll probably come up and buy my own middle-format camera, I just haven't decided if I want to go with Hasselblad or Rollei.

There are two more things in my 2005 retrospect I want to comment on, the first thing is my wish for going skiing again - which sadly never happend, but I am going to keep on wishing it for 2007. The wish of 2006 getting a calm year for me, considering all the good and horrible events of 2005, definitely was fulfilled.

My 2006 started off with another move, which is clearly visible in my article statistics. Nearly no entries in April due the move. My girlfriend and me saw nearly 50 appartments and had a real hard time finding something we both thought was acceptable. It seems like the time of choice for our move was pretty bad, as the offers just didn't seem suited for us at all. This has been my 5th move in this city and hopefully the last one - next time I am moving it definitely has to be out of this city.

Workwise 2006 has been allright, our team grew quite a bit and brought in lovely people that I gladly call my friends today. The last month of 2006 brought quite a few changes at work for me, which I first had to get used to, but then welcomed with open arms. The last two weeks of work certainly have been some of the best I've had in 2006 and I am excited to find out what 2007 will bring.

Above all 2006 certainly has been the "Year of Sneakers" for me. As I already mentioned in my Easter Orbituary, I've spent lots of time and money in collecting my beloved "Nike AIr 180" sneakers. When it was one cabinet at the end of April it now are more than two - which immediately brings us to a wish of 2007 - buying no more, or only very vew new sneakers.

Overall I am happy with 2006, things generally turned out good. My girlfriend finally finished her university, earning a degree and even found a job here right in front of our doorstep. I visited Kopenhagen, which is a lovely city, though smaller than I would have guessed beforehand. Berlin became one of my favourite cities of Germany and I visided it quite a frequently, so did Cologne. I paid Heidelberg a visit and just a few weeks ago Garvin visited Kiel and we spend a few lovely days together.

Talking about Friends, in 2006 I missed both my close friends Simon and Philippe quite a lot and one of my biggest hopes for 2007 is to visit both of them more frequently (unfortunately I am off to a bad start with this intentions, as the meetup with Philippe for New Years sadly failed).

Otherwise I am excited what 2007 will bring, there are quite a lot of things going on right now and I am sure its going to be very exciting year - maybe even one the most exciting I'll ever have...

Premium, Baby!

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:21:00 +0200

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It sure took me long enough, but now that Salon.com has switched their daily free site-passes to Flash 8 redering it impossible for me to view the site at all, I finally bought a Premium Membership. A lot of goodness originates from Salon.com and I think it is money very well spent, especially now that I don't have any ads at all anymore visiting their site it will be way easier to read it. With the Premium membership on my hands I'll finally be able to dive deeper into Salon.com, reading more than just the latest Movie-News and certain selected articles turning it into one of those Webpages I visit every day.

Back up and running

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 22:59:00 +0200

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Here we go, today finally my DSL line has been connected and therefore articles should be flying in more regularly now. On the other hand, please keep in mind that the soccer world cup just started and even though I am no real soccer fan there are some real intriguing games going on all the time, which very well might also lead to some slight delays. I think that's pretty much it for the time, so stay tuned - I'll keep you updated.

Disconnected

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sat, 27 May 2006 18:34:00 +0200

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-- This is a sticky Post --
Due my recent move into my new appartment I am currently disconnected from the Internet. I am obviously working on getting back online, but I think this is going to take at least two to three weeks. I am able to keep up with my mails and all the other imortant stuff through friends and my workplace, but sadly there isn't enough time for whole articles. Mabye I'll start writing articles offline and just publish them whenever I get the chance to, but for now there sadly are no news. Please stay tuned for further updates.

Relocation in Progress...

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sun, 14 May 2006 23:23:00 +0200

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The reason for the recurrend silence in this blog originates from my fifth relocation inside this godforsaken city. I received the keys recently and therefore pretty much spend all my free time settling in, carrying stuff around and spending lots of money for stuff I'd rather wouldn't buy at all. This weekend was very exhausting, I can feel every inch of my body and tomorrow I'll probably have a bad muscle ache.

But on the bright side, we've managed to get a lot of stuff done throughout the last couple of days. The holy dvds are already in the new appartment and so are all my CDs - so except the TV and my bed there isn't much keeping me in the old appartment. If everything works out as planned the move probably will be completed by the next weekend. Throughout the next week there are some shelves that need to be mounted and some others that need a little tweaking to fit against the wall, but all in all the new appartment already starts to look pretty comfortable.

In consideration of the crap I have to deal with right now, please excuse that it might be a little quite in here now or then. I expect it to be better real soon. I'll keep you updated and maybe even get around to shoot some pictures once there is something intresting to show.

Easter Orbituary 2006

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 18:29:00 +0200

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Looks like I am not dead afterall. I know my blog has been deserted for the last weeks, but trust me there was (and still is) a lot of stuff going on in my life. First of all I want to say sorry to all of those that have been coming here daily checking for news, many of you contacted me through email already checking if I was okay or asking what happend. No I haven't stopped blogging and yes, I am confident that there will be more life in here again from now on. I am not entirely sure yet how much, though I am sure more than the nothing we had going on here through the last weeks.

There isn't a general happening that took place that kept me from blogging, it rather was a pattern of events that did the trick. The most time absorbing event was the fact that we decided to move for another time. Our landlord informed us that he wanted to sell the apartment he was renting to us and so we all sat together and decided that it was a good time to move out and search for a new place. So, starting May 15th I am going to be living together with my girlfriend in Kiel / Knooper Weg. This is my 5th appartment in Kiel already and to be quite honest, I am pretty tired of this city.

The road to finding this appartment was very long and me and my girlfriend saw about fourt (40) appartments before we chose this one. This huge number explains the lack of blog entries, each of the past weekends was packed with appointmens, aswell as many of the work days. I don't know why it took us so long to find the right place, but I think it might be related to the time of the year. Well, now that it's done I've obviously got the move itself coming on through the next 2-3 weeks. So that will certainly punch holes in my blogging timetable aswell.

Another thing that kept me away from blogging was my workload, there has been a few things going on and it even went so tight that I spent the complete last week in Duesseldorf, in order to setup a new server solution which is scheduled to take up its service in the beginning of next week.

Through the easter days I've been family hopping, starting with my girlfriends parents, then back to my mothers and later on my fathers. A four day frenzy in which I ate so much that it really got disgusting in the end.

Nike Air 180

The last thing that kept absorbing my time is my more or less newly found sneaker addiction. I've written about it previously already and since the beginning of this year it has grown on me as quite a few more of the precious 'Nike Air 180' sneakers got released. Nevertheless I don't think that my blog is the right place to write stories about my ongoings, most of you anyway would either think I am insane or stupid and I couldn't say I'd argue with that. Fact is that my interest in this particuar sort of sneakers kept me busy and that I bought so many of them that I already need a dedicated shoe rack for them. Ugh.

So what about the movies? I haven't seen much. Just a couple of new ones, which I'll be trying to catch up on. I avoided to watch movies I haven't had seen before because I knew there was no time to write about them.

So much for the explanations and lame excuses - it's gonna be better from now on and I am certain that once the move is done and I am connected to the net again, ragular movie articles will be popping up here just as they used to do.

Random Junk

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 21:36:00 +0100

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Usually I try to see my blog not as an attic to post every random junk to, but I've got to make an exception today. Ever since I read about this image at Boing Boing I've got headaches.

Now look her in the eyes and tell me you don't. Here is the one who is responsible for it.

2005 - A Retrospect

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 19:53:00 +0100

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Just like I did last year, here are a few of my thoughts on the past year. The biggest wish I asked for in my previous retrospect was for 2005 to be a little more quiet than 2004, this wish neverthess wasn't granted - far from it. Explicitly good and indescribable bad happenings were chasing eachother and if I look back to 2004, I actually might call that year slow. As most of it is very private stuff I am not going to lay it out here.

What I am going to tell you are all the small things I finally got done or haven't got done. The things I had on my list to do or don't in 2005. For example I finally managed to meet up with Garvin, even more than once and we had a really great time. I am more than certain we'll meet up again in '06. Beside our first meet & greet we also managed to get things done and even went out on an excursion to shoot some nice pictures.

Which directly leads us to something I felt I've been neglecting, at least blogwise. I have been very active taking pictures, but I didn't find the time to bring them online mostly because I used all the time I had to stay up tp date with the movie section. I am not sure what to do about this, I thought about dropping the dvd and cd updates and use that time to rather do updates in the photograpy section. Then again I barely find time to do those updates aswell, so I am really not sure what to do about this.

In the Photography department I think '06 might be the year I finally go digital - I don't know with which manufacturer yet, but there certainly are a few Cameras out right now that seem interesting. Other than that I have to say that in '05 I pretty much got all the equipment together I need, a special mention here goes to my super cool tripod.

So what are my wishes for '06? Well, I'd say _CALM DOWN_ for another time, but that's not going to happen anyways. I see enough things appering on the horizon today already that certainly will turn this year into anything but a calm year. One of the maybe more practicable wishes I have for '06 is to finally go skiing again, hopefully sometime between this month and sometime in April, so wish me luck. :)

Other than that I'll just relax and see with what '06 waits up for me, It certainly won't get as contrary as '05 has been.

Hermstedt Hifidelio

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 15:47:00 +0200

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Here is another thing I've been doing last week. I've been evaluating the Hermstedt Hifidelio. I've been looking for a device to play and stream my CDs from, for several years already. I don't have any desktop-pcs standing in my flat anymore, all I've got is a Laptop which means I needed a device with a harddrive to store things on. Feature wise the Hifidelio is exactly what I've always been looking for.

The Hifidelio plays cds and has been awarded for its sound, it stores cds in various formats on its drive (flac, mp3, etc.), it has 4 RJ45 jacks to connect it to the network and e.g. stream music from it, it has WLAN aswell, it plays OGGs, it's beautiful and fits into your stereo rack perfectly and last but not least everyone (yes even your wife/girlfriend) is able to handle it.

This is exactly what I always wanted and the Hifidelio has it all, there is just one tiny problem with it and that's noise. CD-Player aswell as DVD-Player are not supposed to make any hearable noises and in case they do you probably bought on of those cheap 50$ crap players. Noise is a no-no and there is no featureset that can make up for it. The only way to find out whether there is a cd/dvd spinning in your player is putting your ear onto it, under no circumstances you hear it sitting 4 feet away from it. Sadly there even are different levels of noise the Hifidelio generates.

First, there is the noice it makes when you instert a CD, it sounds like you bought the cheapest piece of hardware ever set foot on this planet but I actually don't care about that sound - as long as it is quite afterwards. (FIX: Use a Tray and no Slot-In)

Second, there is the noice it makes when playing a cd, you clearly can hear the dvd spinning, which is totally annoying and unacceptable for a devide with a pricetag beyond 600 euros. This noise actually only lasts for 10 minutes or so, until the cd has completely been read into the local memory and is been played from there. (FIX: Use a 4X or WhateverX speed CD-Rom drive that is so slow that it doesn't make any hearable noises, I don't care how long the ripping or burning takes as long as it is SILENT, we can always go faster when the technology evolves)

Third - and this is the most shocking one - the noise it makes when it doesn't do anything. My girlfriend and I where sitting on the couch yesterday, talking to each other until my girlfriend suddenly asked me what this noise was she was hearing, I shrug and started to listen up. Yeah, she was right there certainly was something going on. In the end we figured out it was the hdd of the hifidelio which was spinning in standby. The hdd of course has to spin, even during standby in order to be able to stream from it into any other room, but for heavens sake there is just no way you are allowed to hear it. (FIX: There are more than a dozen ways to silence a hdd properly, see what all those pc-tuners do.)

So, here we are at the end of our review - beatiful device, all the featues you need and want, exactly the device of your dreams but sadly completely unusable by anyone who seriousely listens to music and has intact ears. Most of the noises I written about aren't 'loud' per definition but they're hearable and sadly that is more than enough to completely spoil it.

This was the reason I paid Hermsted a visit at the IFA in Berlin and just after I had started asking whether my device was broken or not, they gave me a disc with an beta firmware (2.1b9) for my Hifidelio and the remark that it all would be fixed with this. I walked home with a warm feeling around my belly knowing that this might turn out good after all but sadly the firmware upgrade was nothing but a letdown. None of the noises was fixed but therefore the Hifidelio was behaving completely unacceptable. It took ages to identify cds according to it's local CDDB, it stopped playing CDs after a couple of tracks for no reason whatsoever and the most hilarious one is, when I exchanged the cds one time it kept playing the old cd I just had ejected from its memory. No, I didn't rip it, it played it from its chache.

I had to erase the whole thing to get it back to the old firmware release, which to me seemed completely alright, except for the noises of course. Reading through the inofficial user forums at Hifidelio-User.de (german) I found out that these noises are completely normal, it's just that some care about it and some just don't.

Well, for 600+ euros dear Hermstedt I certainly expect the device to be completely noiseless, as long as it isn't, it sadly is unsuited for my living room.

The art of buying DVDs

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 15:15:00 +0200

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When I'm out in the net buying dvds I often follow the most different leads, this explains why my dvd updates look pretty exotic sometimes and why it now and then takes me quite a while to finally watch a disc. There are many sources from which I get my ideas of movies that could be interesting for me. Friends, the internet, magazines, et cetera. Once I dug up a movie of interest, I always keep my eyes open - some I watch in the theatres, some I rent on dvd and some others I just buy when the price seems right.

When I'm buying dvds, I do it differently than most of the people because I often buy dvds of movies I haven't seen before. I think it's about a year ago that I thought my collection of 'must-haves' was complete, obviously I find holes all the time, but I try to fix them promptly. Then there are the new releases that sometimes also want to be bought, but there is this steady growing amount of dvds I buy purely on referral or out of interest.

DVDs in the end of 2003

If I am aware that a movie of my interest is already out on dvd, I keep my eyes open for it wherever I go. I watch the prices all the time and once it falls under a certain level I just buy them. When such a movie finally reaches my home, I sort it into the to-watch shelf and sometimes it stays there for a very long time. I am just happy that it's there, even when I am not in the mood to watch it. Yes, it might even stay there, sealed for about a year until its time is come.

It might sound odd to you that after hunting a dvd for a very long time, I just put it into a shelf for another long time, but it makes pretty good sense to me. On one hand I know that I got a bargain and it doesn't lose on value as long as it stays there, on the other hand right from that moment I put it in that shelf I get reminded to watch it every day. Sometimes I just don't find the time, other things are more important, or I promised I'd watch the movie with a friend that I haven't seen in a long time. Whatever it is - the movie is there and it will stay there until I finally reviewed it.

DVDs today

Often movies like this wander from the to-watch to the to-sell shelve, others manage to obtain a space in my steady collection. Sometimes I watch a movie asking myself, where the heck did I dig up that weird movie? And sometimes I am ashamed which beauties I find and I wish I'd have watched them way earlier.

Now that you've read this, you'll probably understand me when I begin another one of my articles with something like: "After the dvd had stood in my shelve for xx months, I finally.." and see that there is at least a little bit of a reason behind it. Oh, and by the way my to-watch shelf usually carries round about 20 dvds, it's the bottom shelf on the right side in the 'today' picture.