Oooh well.....

Yesterday I saw a women in the train. Her face was like :( all the time. She didn't look very unhappy, just the corners of her mouth were bend down. Then after a while, she packed away her magazine, reached into her pocket and took some chocolate out of it. She ate a piece, then quickly another and another. While she was chewing, her face more and more became like this :-| , I even think at a moment it looked a little bit like this :-) , while she was getting the last bit of chocolate from between her teeth. I guess chocolate really can make people happy.

Since my last post I spent a lot of time working on my laptop.... After I had installed almost everything, somehow my office died on me. I tried some fixes from the internet, but eventually I couldn't uninstall it, I couldn't install it and well it didn't work. So yesterday I spent my whole freaking day reinstalling everything... again. It was a frustrating job. When I was done around 11pm, I still had to write my first concept for my seminar paper. They moved my hand in date to two weeks earlier... So actually I was one week late yesterday. But since they only told us yesterday... what could I have done? But I did want to finish it, so I worked at it until 3am... So this morning was fairly bad and considering I need to get up tomorrow morning at 7am and I am blogging right now, I won't get a lot of more sleep this night x) At least I can look forward to a loooong weekend with my girlfriend :)

Today I realized that my interest shifted from programming to photography again... I've had crappy thing ever this since I can think.... My interests can change dramatically within just a few days. I'm still going to pursue my Aurora project, but right now I feel more like photography again :-/ Luckily photo editing feels nice and fast with this new laptop. Hopefully I can find a better balance between coding and photography when I am not wasting time waiting for my images to load :)

Also, one more thing I want to share today: neural networks feel like a big box of black magic. You but in parameters at one side, and evil emerges from the other. At least that is if you have no clue how to treat the box, like me x) So far I haven't been able to train a single useful network in the last 10 hours I worked with it :-/

But well enough for today :) Here is a cool video about photography!

One million people!

A few days back I heard about this new project called "The Listserve". It's a pretty cool and simple idea! They opened a mailing list where everyone can join, one person is randomly picked every day, to write whatever they want to the whole mailing list. Obviously I joined and so far I got three pretty interesting mails.

Currently there are almost 20000 subscribers, so if you join now you can say you've been there from the start ;) One mail more a day can certainly not hurt and who knows what kind messages you will read from somewhere throughout the world! I just love this idea since it is pretty much like my blog, On here, I tell you guys something I care about, but now someone gets a chance to target a really big audience. If I get it correctly their goal is one million people. Just imagine if you could tell one million people something you care about!

I'm really excited to see what people will write, or maybe even if I get picked! To be honest I wouldn't know what to write, but I guess the chances are fairly small ;) If you want to check it out, here is the link. The site is fairly simple, but the video they created is really cool as well!

Oh goodie, oh goodie :D

It's been a while again, to be exact a week. While I have taken quite the liking to blogging again, I somehow had many other things to do as well! Wednesday I worked a pretty long time, to make up for my lost time on Thursday. Again there was some kind of weird holiday in Germany. It wasn't quite the holiday I expected though. Instead I worked on the exercise for data mining algorithms the whole freaking day, together with my two teammates! They really overdid it for this exercise!  The fact that they put in an extra bonus exercise was hilarious....

Thursday evening I then went to my Girlfriend, I arrived pretty late, but we went for a little walk through the city and a park. I'm really excited to go there with my tripod sometime for some fancy night shots :) I think there are many nice places for shooting! The next day I actually wanted to study while my girlfriend was at the university, but well... Kara no Kyokai was a lot of fun :D I watched episodes two through six which leaves me with one more for some time soon ^^' After her lectures were over we came back to my place to spend the weekend. Most of the time she worked on a presentation she had to do this week and I played FFXII. On Saturday we also went to the vegan restaurant in Aachen, since I had invited my mom for mothers-day. The weekend was over way faster than expected and even though we got into an argument about clothing, it was a really nice weekend!

Sunday evening she went home again and I watched some of the leftover series, but there was pretty much just one thing I could focus on by that time! The next day would be Monday and my new laptop was going to arrive. So that was pretty much what I ended up doing on Monday. I waited for my new Laptop x) It arrived somewhere in the afternoon and I spent the rest of the day backing up the OS, reformatting it, installing everything and fixing stupid bugs :-/ I stayed up so late that the new episodes of Game of Thromes was already available online...  Since I had to work today, I decided not to watch it though. A very good decision x) Would I have gone to sleep any later, today would have been just a disaster x)

Now to the laptop! It's a fine piece of hardware. It is of course heavy and I am somewhat afraid that it will get very loud under load, but the performance, the design everything is pretty much awesome! At least after I installed a fresh copy of Windows :) Although I must say that there was less bloatware than expected. The battery life is superb when compared to that of my old laptop and the 670gb of real space on the HDD is a nice touch too :) What I dislike is the fact that there is no numlock emulation anymore like there was on my old laptop... So no fancy signs using alt and numpad numbers :( But I think I can live with that since I never was able to remember the codes anyways x) What I also miss is the little volume wheel, but I guess that I'll get used to the volume keys as well :) So a great laptop :D Although the attached price tag was pretty harsh x) I just hope that it will keep up the good looks and feel it has presented so far!

Today I went to the university and after work and my lecture, I came home again. I knew today I would watch the last episode of House ever :( I must confess that while I watched the first three or four seasons from a streaming site, I never watched season 2 because I couldn't find it back then :-/ And to be honest I don't want to dig back into old episodes again. Still I feel like House has been a part of my life. I know it sounds silly, but watching all the episodes, some of them more than once because they are so awesome.... that does leave something behind. I think House's character might have rubbed of a little on me from time to time. I'm not proud about it, but often I felt just a little more like a jerk after watching an episode. But well ^^ it was an interesting ending. I would have loved some more story, but I felt it was very satisfying. It was a good point to stop the series, yet another team change and yet another new girlfriend wouldn't have been so much fun. I can just say "
Thank you!T to the whole House crew for making such an epic show!

That's pretty much it from me right now. I still have to do my seminar and well.. I'm still not motivated. At least next week is the hard deadline, I guess I'll be motivated by then :) See you soon, hopefully faster, now that I have my new fast laptop ;)

Lytro, a new way to look at things!

My friend Isaak told me about the cameras made by Lytro today. I had heard about them earlier, but somehow I dismissed them as weird and useless. After seeing some of their sample images though... I must say I am impressed. The above image can be clicked at any point to refocus on that location! Now I must admit that I did not read up on light-field photography as this technique is called, but it is very interesting. Next to looking cool, it also gives the option of converting a single image into a 3D image. This can be done as the images created by a light field camera store depth information in the image. Many new possibilities arise here!

It does of course come with its drawbacks. It is still a fairly new technique even though the idea has been around for a long time! Also the resolution of 1.2mp isn't very stunning, but all the techniques started small and who knows where this will end some day! I still remember my 2mp camera and I was cool with such a high resolution a few years ago ;) The price would also have to be reduced a bit, but I bet that will come with time. Right now I wouldn't trade my DSLR just yet for a Lytro camera, but I would most definitely see it as a cool additional feature for DSLRs, or maybe even phones?

You can check out their website for more example images! I will be very excited to see what will come of this technique :) To be honest I don't think it will revolutionize the way people use photography, but I bet I will some day look silly for this statement :p

What the hell.... ?!

Today I read another one of these things where you just think, WTF?! I was early at work and nobody was there yet, so I had a lot of time to read my rss feeds. The feed from the German news channel N24 did a story on an art project of two German art students... Let's rather call them "art students".... The guys, named Materne and Rezei, bought a sheep, called it Norbert and built a sheep guillotine... Now they posted a poll asking if they should kill the sheep or not. Luckily about 60% of the 4 millions votes go to no. Although I wonder what sick fucks would indeed vote for yes... Their motivation, as they say, is to show how democratic choices influence our lives. But why drag a poor sheep into the damn thing :-/ ? My girlfriend told me it is not allowed to kill animals without good reason in Germany. And that art is indeed not seen as a good reason. I'm just hoping they will get fined for this crap!

Now I must admit the Guillotine looks really nice. It comes as no surprise that the latest reports talk about bids of around 2.3 million dollars for the Guillotine. I'd be fine with it, but apparently it is not decided if they will kill the sheep first or not...

As you might notice I am outraged by this kind of crap. But as I also see the value of these kinds of experiments, I came up with an experiment of my own :) Happy voting!