Blog

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. ...

“I can sleep when I’m dead” and “sleep is overrated” Those were things a younger me said one in a while. Not anymore. If I find myself at the end of an all-nighter (those have happened lately), I’m toast the next day (at least). And now something else has come up, the last few days I have slept incredibly bad: waking up in the middle of night, heart pounding, feeling driven. Often accompanied by weird dreams or nightmares. (Tonight I first finished my song outline for the first assignment in the Coursera Songwriting class - sadly I can’t remember it, and then went on a killing spree with bow and arrow in a 100 vs 5 scenario in some medieval setting) ...

As I have nothing really to say today, I will use this space to make a meta tweet. I already have made it one third through the 100 day blog challenge. Some days it was easier, some days more difficult - especially when being tired. But all in all, its a lot less work than I thought it would be. Hopefully you, dear reader, have found one or two posts that have brought you something… ...