Der Gedanke, für knapp 50 EUR ein Jahr lang unbegrenzt oft in eines meiner bevorzugten örtlichen Museen gehen und noch eine weitere Person mitnehmen zu können war zu verlockend. Daher bin ich seit heute “Friend of DOX“.
Gibt es eigentlich noch weitere Museen die so etwas machen?
Zudem ist 512 voll die schöne Potenz von 2!
In case Miguel makes it popular to take the name of a previous company and change the order of the letters a bit to find a name for a new company, this is my proposal for Nokia (as I pass that shop quite often at night when going home and have to smile everytime):
It was raining outside, and suddenly also inside. That’s nothing new – normally I can blame my windows for that.
But this time the reason was platform-independent:
It’s one of the (unused) network cables.
Oder in abgewandelter Form:
Rest in Peace, Christoph Schlingensief.
Ich bin dankbar für all die Einflüße.
Besides the usual paperwork there wasn’t much to do when my grandmother passed away one year ago. She only had a few belongings in her flat in the house of my family and they were quick to sort out. She was a clear family leader with quite some principles. While I agree with some of them, others were unintentionally funny to me. For example she once went for a walk in this small town where everybody knows each other and passed a person she knew without saying “Good afternoon” or at least nodding. So her daughter asked her “Why didn’t you greet her? You know her”. My grandmother answered “She is two years younger than me! She has to greet me first!”. Both ladies were in their late 80es already.
Same with using a walking stick. Unimaginable. It would have been a sign of weakness towards anybody who would have seen her.
My other grandmother was quite the opposite. No strict rules especially in the late years, at least from my limited grandson’s view. Probably the nightmare of parents when it comes to television and sweets consumption of their child, but great as I could stay up late and spend hours of watching MTV Europe back in those days when they were still playing music clips and speaking British English only. Neither my grandmother nor me understood a single word, but it was cool.
Until a few years ago she still rode the bike to get to the supermarket. At the beginning of this year we had to realize that everything comes to end though. The funeral took place one week ago.
This grandmother never threw away anything. Though her flat in our house wasn’t that big, we found lots of stuff. Lots. Imagine you buy everything twice because the first one could break, or that you always have lots of food in the storage room because you have seen two world wars, the huge inflation of 1923 and four currencies in your life. She knew well what “bad times” can really mean.
Though I’m sad (I have lost the person that I always went for dinner to whenever I was home, every evening) it was also kind of fun to go through clothes from the 60es that are trendy again nowadays. It was interesting to find old stuff like handwritten cookbooks written in Sütterlin or some personal documents from a long time ago. You really dive into the life of another person.
Still, going through all this felt weird as I care about privacy but went through all the belongings of another person. On the other hand there’s no other option anyway – You cannot simply put the complete flat into a big bag and throw it away.
I am very proud that both my grandmothers passed away at home, in the environment that they had lived in for decades, in their beds, while sleeping, most likely without pain, and that my family took care of them in the last months, sometimes to an extend that is hard to imagine (like getting up 13 times per night). I wonder if I can also be that strong and caring once my parents might need some help in the future, nor do I know if I will live nearby. Our time makes it way easier to leave the village that you grew up in and offers you more opportunities, but for example this also destroys the traditional family advantages like grandparents taking care of their grandchildren from time to time so the parents have some time for themselves.
My sincere and deepest respect to those who care about family.
“Compassion, loving, brotherhood, loyalty /
This is friendship and all its meaning is worth to me /
Patience, kindness, intensity, all about /
Never turn your back on your friends and family.”
(Ignite: “Call on my brothers”)
Wer als deutscher Staatsbürger im Ausland lebt in welchem ein deutscher Personalausweis als Identifikation anerkannt/geduldet wird und wer genauso wie ich kein Interesse daran besitzt, dem deutschen Regime zwei seiner Fingerabdrücke für einen deutschen Reisepass zu geben, der kann sich als Adresse “kein Wohnsitz im Inland” auf seinen Personalausweis eintragen lassen. Wohl am einfachsten in der deutschen Gemeinde in welcher man als letztes gemeldet war (und für die verwirrten Mitarbeiter der Stadtverwaltung am besten zuvor den einschlägigen Paragraphen im jeweiligen Landesgesetz nachschauen), sollte aber auch in jeder anderen deutschen Gemeinde funktionieren.
Spend a day at my parents’ place this weekend and cleaned up a bit. Found this old application for Western German citizens to enter East Germany. Interesting to see all the stuff that was asked for. Also wondering why it’s also in English and French, but not Russian…
Exactly ten years ago we bought a modem as my sister had convinced my parents to not wait until my birthday in October (yes, I’ve never used anything like BBS and mailboxes). So I was able to send my first email to a friend from my parents’ place on July 12th, 1999 using Mozilla 4.6 on Windows98. Later on I switched to “The Bat!”, and Evolution 1.0.3 in May 2002.
Friends of mine had gotten internet a bit earlier and it was interesting to see the new opportunitities offered by it, e.g. chatting or access to information. We were also able to use internet at school – three Windows 98 computers (with 166-233MHz if I remember correctly) were available.
alt-232, btk3003, t69m & me founded Shutdown Crew – another anniversary to celebrate. From nowadays’ point of view I’d call our activities scriptkiddieing but still I pretend that it was about experimentally using available technology at that time (while having lots of fun). 
For a few months I even had a dial-up flatrate at home (until that company went bankrupt). So Napster was running only at night and my parents could use their phoneline at day. The first usage of IRC probably took place here too.
After moving from my parents’ place to a town with a university I still used to have a modem dial-up connection for years until our neighbour offered us to share his broadband wifi. After that you won’t go back.
When I started bugwork on Evolution in Ximian Bugzilla my IRC usage was totally different to nowadays – guenther described it with “Got in, asked three questions to Gerardo Marin (the Evolution bugmaster) and immediately went offline again”.
Later on my workflow was to have a table and a textfile with bug numbers and required actions that I took with me to the university where I spend time on IRC and downloaded the latest testing rpm files to install on my home computer (I finally bought my first laptop *years* after that). I could not reproduce bugs directly at the university as their GNOME/Linux installation was ancient.
It’s only a few years ago but now all this somehow sounds strange to me – internet has become way more ubiquitious.
Same when I think about mobile phones and the society.
All in all it’s been an interesting ride and I’m looking forward to the next ten years of communication somewhere between good old email, SMS, IRC, IM (ICQ, MSN, Google Talk), Facebook, Twitter/Qaiku and blog comments plus a good indexing service that makes finding sent & received information easier with all those different communication channels around that I sometimes use…
