Musings

Es hätte schlimmer kommen können. Til Schweiger als neuer Hamburger Kommisar bringe einen eher unrealistischen, Action geladenen Tatort. Keine Reflektion, kein Seelenstriptease, dafür viel rumgeballere und einige coole Sprüche. Trotzdem ist das bei weitem nicht so schlimm herausgekommen, wie zu befürchten war. Dennoch - ob der Tatort unbedingt US lastig (was den Munitionsverbrauch angeht) werden muss? Bis jetzt hat mir eigentlich ganz gut gefallen, dass die Tatorte wenigstens in Ansätzen den Anschein hatten, knapp etwas mit der Realität zu tun zu haben. 2011 wurden in Deutschland 36 Schüsse auf Personen abgegeben, davon 6 mit Todesfolge. Der neue Hamburger Tatort brauchte dafür gerade mal 90 Minuten… ...

Everyone with a teenage son will know that this species spends an incredible amount of time in front of game consoles and computers if left to their own devices. I don’t want to go into the fights we have with our son about his excessive use of electronics (after all, I am guilty of too much electronics myself). One thing however, that I have absolutely no understanding for - and that surprised me, when I found out is the following: ...

It has been a long time since I was out in a bar with a friend, talking for 3 hours over a couple of beers. Walking home, I realized how much I have missed this. Thank you, friend, for your stories, your insights, your listening, your advice, your cheers. Hopefully, it wont’t take that long until the next time.

When I teach my students the beginning points of monkey patching I usually get a gasp or two, a muttered curse and something like “I will never want to maintain something like that”. Being the Ruby and Rails developer I am, I console them and tell them that in practice hardly anything bad happens, that Ruby gives you a sharp knife (instead of the plastic implements the Java people get dealt) etc. I also actually believe that this is so. ...

The Coursera Songwriting and Music Production classes I’m taking are being discussed over on the Justinguitar forums. Here’s the text I wrote as an answer to the bitching about the courses being all wrong, shallow, etc… I’m taking both the music production and the songwriting class, and so far have been enjoying them (each in their different way). I have been dabbling with audio for 30 or so years, but even so I have still learnt quite a bit on the basics and a few new things that weren’t obvious to me. I am working on a video presentation of how to record an acoustic guitar and I have learnt how different polarities of my mic (cardiod, omnidirectional, stereo) sound (by actually trying them and recording some stuff with that setting). I have learnt more about iMovie and syncing of video and music than I cared for (and I have learnt that iMovie probably isn’t the right tool for that kind of video production). Is it strictly about music production what I have learnt? No. Have I learnt something? Yes. ...

Today I was invited to a friendly talk with two Orange network engineers to talk about - tada - the Orange Cellular network in Switzerland. @Stephtara had facilitated this meetup for bloggers and members of the Orange community and Orange brought in two engineers that are working on the actual network. In a really interesting roundtable discussion, we were able to fire off lots of (technical) questions about cellular networks in general and the Orange network in particular. ...