LostFocus

A weblog by Dominik Schwind

I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

The Community you’re looking for doesn’t exist.

By Dominik Schwind

Another example why it’s important to have sensitive copywriters.

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.

Sometimes it takes years

By Dominik Schwind

However, to make good software, requires lots of thought, trial and error, evaluation, iteration, trying the ideas out on other users, learning, thinking, more trial and error, and on and on. At some point you say it ain’t perfect, but it’s useful, so let’s ship. That process, if the software is to be any good, doesn’t happen in 24 hours.

Dave Winer

Messages

By Dominik Schwind

Messages

There is now a public beta of Messages out. It’s the old iChat with included iMessage – which now works on the desktop and on the iPhone. That’s extremely neat.

A Ship Adrift

By Dominik Schwind

A Ship Adrift is pretty awesome.

And yet – it’s itching me slightly to make my own ship bot. More than following that one. (Which of course I immediately did.) [via]

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. ↩

Horse_elostfocus

By Dominik Schwind

Thanks, Horse_ebookmarklet

Larvae

By Dominik Schwind

We are a baby hivemind spinning our training wheels.

Cat Valente [via]

Maps

By Dominik Schwind

If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction—doesn’t matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps. Lots and lots of maps.

Thanks, Victoria Johnson for The Maps We Wandered Into As Kids [via]

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.

The F1 season 2012 is going to be ugly.

By Dominik Schwind

And by ugly I mean: What is going on here?!

Ferrari F1 2012

Force India 2012

[via @racingblog]

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. ↩

The Knutsens

By Dominik Schwind

At some point a couple of weeks ago, in one of those weak moments late at night, I went ahead and ordered a Samson Meteor Mic – it’s really pretty and Dan Benjamin called it “really impressive”. I told Teymur about it, who is already doing some podcast stuff and we decided to give it a try. We recorded a pilot episode on tuesday and decided we’ll turn it into a regular show.

The pilot episode is over here – give it a try and let me know what you think.

And at some point we might even explain the name.

Mapstalgia

By Dominik Schwind

Mapstalgia: video game maps drawn from memory. [via]

Updated Podcast list

By Dominik Schwind

I’ve blogged about it before, but Teymur asked me to update the list. So, I checked my Instacast and here is the old list:

And since then, these were added on:

Holy fuck. And I was thinking the last time that I am obviously listening to too many podcasts. But these days I am quite ruthless about marking single episodes as heard, especially with the interview podcasts – if the guest or the topic doesn’t win me over in the first couple of minutes, I’m gone.

  1. even though I really hope he does something about the audio quality. ↩
  2. This one is awesome to listen to while working. Their voices are so calming, I stop listening to them completely and get kicked right into the Zone. ↩