LostFocus

A weblog by Dominik Schwind

I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

Week 7

By Dominik Schwind

Monday, February 13th, 2012

ಠ_ಠ

But at least there was some snow.

Snow!

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

During the night between Monday and Tuesday, a fire under the highway A57 managed to destroy the bridge well enough to have to closed at least until March. Yes, that is my commute. Bastards.

Also, we taped a new episode of the Knutsens and there’s a nice new Meg Myers song.

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Giacomo came over to have dinner at Tsun Gai and some after-dinner coffee at Café Relax, which is always a nice way to spend an evening.

Vietnamese Coffee

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Because it’s carnival and the people of Cologne take their carnival really seriously, I got to go home early. Early enough to install the Messages beta and read some Mountain Lion previews.

Friday, February 17th, 2012

Wir sind zu viert und ich bin der faulste von allen. Baue ab und an mal eine kleine Hütte. (We’re four people and I’m laziest of them all. Once in a while I build a little hut.)

I was talking about Minecraft, which is awesome. Fabian liked that quote so much, he printed it out and pinned it to our office whiteboard.

Saturday, February 18th, 2012

As it was carnival weekend and I do not like carnival, I was hiding inside most of the time, thankful for finally having a reason for that and alternated between playing Minecraft and watching The Wire. In the evening I had dinner with my sister and a friend of hers, which just made me realize that there are probably no normal people out there.

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

I turned a big net of oranges into some orange juice. Look at me, being proud of myself.

Week 6

By Dominik Schwind

Wow. Survived another week.

Monday, February 6th, 2012

There was a big fire on the Autobahn on that morning – a truck laden with coffee crashed into a small transporter which had some machinery in the back that immediately caught fire – and the coffee truck started burning, too.
All of that happened before I drove past, all I saw was a burning truck, a helicopter and more fire engines than I thought to be necessary. It also smelled like burned coffee.

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Teymur and me taped a second episode of The Knutsens – which we of course called Episode 1.

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Dinner at Takumi. Nothing beats dinner at Takumi. Nothing.

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

I listened to K-Pop all day while working. And someone showed me this video of Werner Herzog talking about chickens.

Friday, February 10th, 2012

Mr Kaiser stopped over at our office and we went to have lunch at Ban Thai.1
Later on I hung out with Teymur at his studio, ate away his waffles and played Minecraft while he “worked.”

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

I checked out the anti-ACTA protest in Düsseldorf which turned out to be pretty huge. Because I’m a wuss, I went back into the warmth of my apartment pretty fast and decided to do terrible things to brussels sprouts. I cooked them, fried them with some bacon and soy-sauce2 and had them with udon noodles on the side. Tasted good, looked disgusting.

I also started watching the fourth season of The Wire which brings me right to…

Sunday, February 12th, 2012

I watched The Wire all day.

  1. Yes, yes. Food is important, so I will mention it all the time. ↩
  2. Don’t ask me what I thought there. ↩

Week 5

By Dominik Schwind

So, Martin thought that the blog post about his fifth week of the month shows the ultimate insignificance of his life and I warned him that I could top that. So here we go:

Monday, January 30th, 2012

No Entry

My Day One diary shows no entry for this day. Not even a single “Bitching about stuff that isn’t worth bitching about entry.” And give that the little Day One entry box is easy to reach and I basically write everything into it that I don’t dare to tweet in public, that says a lot. I think I got called into some meeting or another, but I really don’t remember at all.

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

So, this happened.

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

I spent most of my free time watching the new Die Antwoord video. According to my twitter timeline and my feedreader I was not alone with that.

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

I learned something new. Sadly(?) only second hand through the internet – but I think in this case, this might be enough.

And yes, it was cold.

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

Friday, party day!
So I went home and watched 30 Rock and The Wire.

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

I pondered going to the Düsseldorf Photo Weekend which was more a Photo Saturday. But given that the only exhibition that I am really interested in – State of the Art Photography – will be open until May and that it was still really bloody cold I decided to just do a quick run to the Chinese supermarket and the normal one around the corner to get some food and just spend all day on the couch, watching the whole second season of The Wire in one go.

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

I slept through most of the day. Then I tried to make the pak choi that I bought the day before. And I found that I ran out of soy sauce.

Pak Choi

One should never run out of soy sauce. So instead I tried beer for the sauce. Now that tasted weird.
And then at night I decided to watch the Superbowl for about an hour, which was long enough. The good stuff was online as animated gifs anyway the next day.

Week 4

By Dominik Schwind

Even though Week 5 is almost over, I shall try to write down how my fourth week of the year was. I don’t remember most of it, actually.

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

恭喜发财 – Water-dragon year. Yeah.

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Two weeks are over again, so we went for the Traditional Asia Dinner1 again. This time (and of course because of Chinese New Year) we went to Tsun-Gai which has very authentic Cantonese food. Awesome and a fun evening.

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

I have no recollection of this day.2

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

I think I played some Minecraft.

Man, this weekly blogposts are depressing.

Every day is the same.

Wake up.

Drive to work.

Work.

Discuss where to have lunch.

Work.

Drive home.

Minecraft.

Bed.

Repeat.

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Funniest lunch ever. But I promised I wouldn’t put it online. But seriously.

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

Finally I managed to go to Naniwa. So tasty.

Later: More Minecraft.

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

Drove to Bonn, listened to Satomi play viola in a huge orchestra playing Mahler’s Symphony No 2. That was rather okay even though I doubt that Mahler will be one of my favorite composers any time soon.

  1. I told you about it. ↩
  2. This happens a lot. No reason to worry. ↩

Week 3

By Dominik Schwind

Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you – in fact, most of the days were so uneventful that I don’t even remember them now, just a couple of days ago.

Monday, January 16th, 2012

Alfred App

I have (finally?) switched from Quicksilver to Alfred. Since I just use those as application launchers and mostly ignore their advanced features, the change was completely transparent to my daily workflow. In fact, someone could have changed them for me and I would probably have not noticed. Except that Alfred yet has to close itself at random times, something that Quicksilver was prone to do to lately.

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Moo Facebook Cards

I got my Facebook Moo cards. Fun!

Alcatraz

I have given Alcatraz a chance – it’s the new TV series by J.J. Abrams and has the pretty interesting premise that the last batch of prisoners on Alcatraz somehow vanished in 1963 and now return one by one, going back to being murderers. The first two episodes weren’t bad but nothing too special – I’ll keep watching, in the hope that the “murderer of the week” type of episodes weave a nice mythology arc.
Oh, and it has Parminder Nagra who I’ve liked since Bend it like Beckham.

Oh, and Sam Neill.

Sam Neill

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

The day Wikipedia went black.

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Or: The nerds are back in town

For the last two weeks I’ve had blissful solitude here at the office – the three guys who share the room with me were in Munich to do Munich stuff. As someone who snaps out of the zone pretty easily working two weeks without any real distraction was a pretty good thing which ended on that Friday when they came back. 1

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Ladies

I don’t know.

I bought Onigiri again and fed one to my sister, who was crashing at my place, as she tends to do when she goes to her courses in Düsseldorf.

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

The Minecraft bug bit me again, so I basically was digging around on our server all day.

  1. And as I said in my inception post a couple of weeks ago: it’s nothing personal, I just prefer to work in solitude, with random breaks of socializing (which does include proper meetings, not just watercooler stuff) in between. (See also.) ↩

Week 2

By Dominik Schwind

Monday, January 9th, 2012

I so want to stay in my bed.

timehop – and yes, it will make me sad forever.

That being said, Monday was pretty good. We had our “Traditional Asia Dinner” at Kushi-Tei. 1

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

Went to have lunch at Südstadt Burger with Marc, Fabian and Dominik. (Who forgot his part of the deal – tztz.)

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

I’ve watched this video and had lunch again – this time at Bona’Me.

I know. Excitement – but hey, I warned you.

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

I don’t even know why I watched the first casting show for the German entry for the next Eurovision Song Contest.

Friday, January 13th, 2012

A whole bunch of German bloggers wrote about their trends in Social Media usage, started by this blogpost by Cem Basman.
My answer to that was a rather short post:

Grumpy on all channels.

But basically my Social Media usage is currently Twitter, Tumblr2 and here. Besides that, I’m also using Instagram and Path, which are both fun. Foursquare, too. But that should be about it.

After all this, I decided to annoy Jan Manuel:

Hah!

Sorry about that.

Saturday, January 14th, 2012

For some reasons I decided to check out the remodeled Sevens mall at Königsallee in Düsseldorf. I turned around pretty fast – it’s just a big-ass Saturn electronics store now. All things considered not too exciting.

Finally, after many, many unsuccessful tries3 I finally managed to find the Onigiri store at Immermannstraße open and bought some Onigiri.

Sunday, January 15th, 2012

Sunday was a nice, sunny day. So of course I stayed in all day, making this thing here a bit prettier, listened to podcasts and ate instant Rösti.
My glamorous life.

Prestigious

  1. For those who wonder what that might be – a couple of months ago I bullied Jan Manuel into coming to Düsseldorf to have food at Takumi and because Düsseldorf has a lot of really good Asian restaurants, we decided to go ahead and do that every couple of weeks. Sometimes we are joined by many (like this Monday) and sometimes we’re just a couple of people.
    So if you’re around Düsseldorf, let me know and join up! ↩

  2. Tumbalah! ↩
  3. Two, to be precise. ↩

Week 1

By Dominik Schwind

So, Martin/@schneyra is doing this thing where he recaps his own weeks. (Here is week number 1.) And because I am me, I am now going in all gung-ho into this and do it, too.1

January 2nd, 2012

So, here we go, first workday of the week and while the streets were blissfully empty – as they were all week – nothing much changed.

There was some fun on Twitter in the evening, though, the hashtag #lessambitiousbook.

January 3rd, 2012

War mal im Fernsehen

This was the (only) highlight of the day. It translates to:

Was on TV once.

January 4th, 2012

For some reason everybody looked up the song that was on top of the single charts on their birthday. Mine was Roland Kaiser’s Santa Maria.

♬♪ Sie war ein Kind der Sonne, schön wie ein erwachender Morgen… ♪♫

My co-worker Evghenie (@svinohod) brought his own big-ass monitor to work and was really proud about it.

Also, this happened.

January 5th, 2012

After getting to work through a scary, scary snow/rain/thunder/end-of-the-world storm, I coined the term Chrononormativism – I was proud as fuck. Nobody really noticed, though.

And I wasted all in all way too much time with the Pony Creator.

January 6th, 2012

I still can’t believe those heathens in North Rhine-Westfalia don’t recognize Epiphany as an official public holiday. May they burn in hell.

Talking about hell – my lunch was rice and Club Mate and the soundtrack of the day was the Portal 2 soundtrack, which I got via Mrgan.

January 7th, 2012

REAMDE

January 8th, 2012

REAMDE 2

  1. Very soon it will become very obvious that my weeks are all pretty much the same and all pretty much boring. But, here we go. ↩
  2. Yes, the whole weekend I did nothing but read Reamde by Neal Stephenson. Maybe at some point I’ll write a short review – but for now it should suffice to say that I loved it a lot and everybody should read it. ↩

KW 44

By Dominik Schwind

Mit diesem Mist habe ich mir ja einiges aufgehalst – jetzt wird man schon renitent, wenn ich den Artikel nicht schnell genug schreibe.

Jedenfalls – während der Dienst, der das Web der Amateure lange Jahre vor dem Web 2.0 möglich gemacht hat, geschlossen wurde, hat ein anderer, bei dem wirklich jeder Depp mitmachen kann, eine Möglichkeit bekommen, Kontakte in Gruppen einzusortieren. And There was Much Rejoicing. Und wenn nicht, dann gibt es auch was, was wirklich jeden zum Lächeln bringt.

Und wenn man wirklich wissen möchte, was man so von der Banner- und Werbewelt denken sollte – naja, eine Million Fliegen können nicht irren.

KW 43

By Dominik Schwind

Oha, fast vergessen, schon wieder sind wir alle eine Woche älter.
Und sowohl Microsoft als auch Google haben offen zugegeben, daß Twitter das schwarze Loch ist, in die das gesamte Internet eingesogen werden wird. Währenddessen hat Flickr (endlich!) ein Feature von Facebook übernommen, die Schweizer haben einen neuen Sport erfunden und die selbsternannten Kreuzritter der deutschen Blogosphäre haben zur Hatz auf einen Pfotenabdruck geblasen.

KW 42

By Dominik Schwind

That woman was sexy…Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won’t screw you, don’t do it for them.

shitmydadsays

Und schon wieder ist eine Woche rum – eine Woche, die aus der Zukunft sabotiert und in der die FDP zum Liebling des Internets wurde. Polaroid kommt zurück – ein unmögliches Projekt? Und generell gab es sehr viel Liebe und Respekt für die SEOs.

In Amerika flog ein Ballon – ganz ohne Boy, bei Flickr gab es das 4000000000ste Bild und der Film der Woche ist ganz eindeutig Turbo.

KW 41

By Dominik Schwind

Was ist diese Woche eigentlich alles so passiert? Beim ZDF gab es Fisting-Attacken, Obama bekommt den Nobelpreis, Marge Simpson ist auf dem nächsten Playboy-Cover, die Amerikaner beschießen den Mond und man kann das Kindle jetzt auch hierzulande bekommen.

Und ich erfreute mich an Canabalt und Regretsy [via] und wunderte mich über den Relaunch von Brightkite und eine neue Version des Disqus-Plugins, das hier erstmal die Kommentare zerschossen hat.