LostFocus

A weblog by Dominik Schwind

I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

Google Buzz!

By Dominik Schwind

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about something else.

I am sure everybody with a blog or a twitter/facebook account or something similar had those moments, after writing a blog post or an update, when the finger is hovering over the submit button and then the brain kicks in. “Can I really write/say that?”1
Sometimes certain links, images or jokes might be appropriate for 4chan, maybe reddit or when hanging with buddies – but not at a place where they can actively found in the context that carries the real name – and might be read or found by people who don’t have the same kind of humor.
And while I usually subscribe to the school of “You can laugh about everything – but not with everybody” and don’t mind posting rather dark or tongue-in-cheek stuff on my blog over at tumblr, there’s still stuff, that I won’t even post there. And it is itching in my fingers to start an anonymous blog with accompanying twitter account where I can just bitch and rant – but I just know that once there are a bunch of followers, my vanity will take over and I’ll put my name there. So… I guess it has to be 4chan then.

  1. And please tell me that I’m not the only one who has those moments. [↩]

I’d blow your head off, if someone paid me enough

By Dominik Schwind

Today someone seems to have started a planing group on Facebook for our upcoming 10-year high school reunion. And as things go, when you’re suddenly forced to face the nicely suppressed fact that it has now almost been ten years since you left high school, I started to think. I’m hardly in contact with anyone from my high school time – to be honest, I couldn’t even remember all of the names of my classmates and we sure were a small class. And as much as I personally think I have changed since then,1 I will probably fall right back into the old roles from then, gossip with the same people about the same other people. And so will everybody else. And while everybody will have changed – some more dramatically than others – once we fall back into those roles, we’ll all be thinking: “Phew, those people didn’t change much. Luckily I’m not like them and have grown in so many ways since then.”

All in all, it will be fun. If someone asks, what I’m doing these days, I’ll tell them that I’m a professional internet celebrity.

  1. Well, I have a lot less hair. [↩]

Bonn

By Dominik Schwind

3:44

Today I went to have some brunch with some nice Flickr folks from the Bonn International Photography Club and some random people from the Fotocommunity. And because I’m still full from the plentiful food at that event, and most of my body’s energy is around the stomach area, digesting, I’ll just put a stupid joke here, that never fails to amuse me. Mostly because it is so dumb. It helps a lot when you think of that joke being told in kiwi-accent. At least for me.

So, a grasshopper walks into bar. The barkeeper says: “Woah, dude. We have a drink named after you!” So the grasshopper replied: “You have a drink named Kevin?”

Kackn00b of the Day-Award

By Dominik Schwind

Somewhere in the part of my brain that tries to make sense of all the input that constantly and without any real break bombards me, the part that turns this cacophony of data into what constitutes as my perception of reality, there is a tiny little sensor that tingles when someone is being a complete and utter Kackn00b.

You might now wonder what this weird word means. If you don’t: skip this paragraph.1 Kackn00b is a weird mixture of German and the language that might be called 1337speak. A n00b – or newbie – is someone, who is new at something and therefore makes mistakes. That is not so bad, beginners make mistakes, learn from it and then – either give up and do something else or get better. Or, as a third option, refuse to learn from their mistake, from advice and just bumble on doing dumb stuff over and over again, often oblivious to their – and I want to excuse the language here – epic fails. Very often, these people like to think that now, that they have done so much of the same thing, they could be considered experts. These kind of people in moments when they think they completely are ruling the world and yet at the same time are doing so dumb and obvious mistakes – those I like to call Kackn00bs.2
And yes, I am well aware that there have been moments in my past and most likely will be (many) moments in the future where I might very much be part of this group of people.

Anyway, let’s welcome back the people who already knew all this and decided to jump over the last paragraph and go straight to the award ceremony for the irregular crowned Kackn00b of the Day.
The winner today is the pretty anonymous person behind the Facebook user account Photokina Imagingworld.
This looks like the official Facebook account for the actually very interesting photography fair Photokina in Cologne – entries from the 2008 event and pretty official sounding posts made me think so at least. Now I am the last to say that companies and events shouldn’t use social media. Pretty much the opposite, in fact. I want them to embrace it. But being a Kackn00b doesn’t help. I do not want to be a friend of an international fair. I want to (and try hard to) be a friend of people. Human beings. I on the other hand have no problem what so ever to be a fan of a company, a product or an event. I’d probably the first who’d click on the “Become a fan” page of the Photokina. In fact, I did. So who is Mr “Photokina Imagingworld” and which one is the official profile/page of the fair? I might not find out, nor do I care too much. Registering a profile as an event instead of using the fan page mechanism on the other hand seems pretty daft to me though and thereby I aware the award to whoever did it and thought it would be a good idea to try to add me as a friend.
Especially after the PR department of the Photokina managed last year to give out my email address that I never gave to them, to ominously only one company that then proceeded to spam me with random junk. All in all I get the feeling that the whole PR/Social Media department of the Photokina seems to be in a fine mist of kackn00bery deluxe.
And please correct me, I would like to be wrong.

  1. Or don’t skip. It’s your decision, really. Who am I to tell you what to do anyway? [↩]
  2. Your definition might be different. [↩]

Random Foo

By Dominik Schwind

This blog post here is hastly thrown together at Teymur‘s couch – once again just before the end of the day. And as I once again don’t have any time to think of actually anything to say, I’ll just give you some nice links to look at:

The Art Of Akira Exhibit is a pretty cool project where a dude is collecting the original material of the 1988 anime classic Akira and exhibits them in the aptly named Toonseum.

Snoop Dogg and Darth Vader – I always knew there is something.

A movie that I definitively have to watch is Cop Out, a cop buddy comedy by Kevin Smith. Here is the trailer, which made me laugh very hard.

A banker happily surfed sexy pictures of Miranda Kerr on his work computer – while a camera crew was filming a news report right behind him and caught him unaware. Miranda Kerr herself was on his side and would be willing to sign a petition to not get him fired.

Roomba

By Dominik Schwind

If there is one thing I really consider getting all the time, it is a Roomba. Given how bare my apartment’s floors are one of those little buggers shouldn’t have a hard time at all to at least keep the rooms free from dust and I could nicely get rid of my weekly floor-sweeping ritual. At the moment the smallest Roomba sells for around 300 Euro, which is pretty much exactly how much I’d be willing to pay for the early ancestor of the machines that one day will take over the world. Clever as I am so far I completely managed to forget about Roombas every single time my “money to spend on something that I don’t really need” budget is around those 300 Euros. Maybe next time, I’ll remember and then I’ll probably call in sick every second day just to watch the little machine work for me. And beg it to spare me once their revolution begins.

Day 3

By Dominik Schwind

I hate to admit this on day three – but this is starting to be harder1 than I thought it’d be.
Sure, it would be easy, if I just get it over with some time during the day, when I’m still kind of awake and not just after I’ve been watching Serenity for the umphteenth time while having a beer and generally not giving a fuck. But all in all not giving a fuck should be pretty useful for the near future, when I’m hopefully more awake and more willing to tackle some stuff that I’ve wanted to put in a blog post for a long time. Even if I won’t get invited to the captain’s dinner.

  1. Not hard as in: “I don’t know what to write about” but as in: “Why exactly am I doing this again? I’ll rather watch some TV or go to bed.” [↩]

Sleep Cycle

By Dominik Schwind

Since about two weeks ago I’ve been using the Sleep Cycle App on my phone to wake me up more gently.

The app is measuring the movements in my sleep through the accelerometer in the phone to calculate the right moment to wake me up – preferably at a time when I’m in a time of light sleep anyway. And while some clever scientists found (Spiegel Online in German) that the whole thing is not really working at advertised, I have been quite happy with it so far.

There were only two slight problems I encountered – for a while every time I was in a light sleep/dream phase, I couldn’t enjoy those because for some reason I was thinking that any moment now that stupid thing would wake me up. The other problem was a bit later in the night, just before getting up – I get up a bit and usually I’d turn around and sleep another half an hour or so. But now I’m too scared to make that stupid machine think that I’m in light sleep and start beeping and was just trying to lie there as still as possible until the normal wake-up time.
By now I’ve adjusted to it and unlike that article said – I’m pretty happy with it. I wake up at a good time1 and don’t feel too tired, too.

  1. Placebo effect or not, I don’t regret buying the app. [↩]

Two big boxes and a messenger bag

By Dominik Schwind

As a rule I don’t do resolutions for a new year. I know I can never follow up with them anyway and then they just make me look silly.

So one of those resolutions that I don’t have for 2010 is to reduce my earthly belongings1 to until they will fit into two big boxes and a messenger bag. Even though I’d probably not ever do it, I like the idea to just haul all my stuff into my normal-sized car and be able to go somewhere else. That should be pretty doable – when I see which of my stuff I am actually using, it is not that much. Most of it is just… there. Collecting dust. Because I wanted to own it at some point in my life.
I had a time where I just bought stuff because I didn’t want to rent it. A lot of media that I’ve only used once or twice – music on CDs, movies on DVDs, books, I even have two huge boxes full of VHS tapes. Basically stuff that I could just as well have in digitized form somewhere on a hard disc or – OMG buzzword alert – in the cloud. I think this will be my first angle of attack on my stuff: See which content I actually even want, check if there is a way to have it in digital form, get it in this way and get rid of the physical object. That won’t be so hard with DVDs and CDs, some books might be really hard to let go. And they might not go at all. And for some of the others I might need to find some place that might actually like old, obviously used books.

  1. not including furniture and appliances [↩]