2004, 2005, 2006

i was young and i needed the money, december, 2005

i knew, those macs were good for something

mirrorfront in the lab

former picture of the month: picture of the century ?

picture of the century

yeah gunter, as if: picture of the century. well, one has got to try. for the uninitialized: we probably shall not see the church st. bonifaz open, to be viewed from a distance from the whole southside like this in the next onehundred years - including the concrete-pump and the crane.

the secret double life of F. L.

during the day i am selling my soul and coding vba. but, as soon, as the twilight of the night sets in, i am hacking java.

well bullshit. vba can be an extremely powerful toolset to enhance windows — especially ms office — applications. i never tinkered with the api of openoffice, but the transition of vba-empored ms-office documents/databases, or rather the lack of transition, should be a major obstacle for the adoption of open office in a lot of companies.

it is amazing, how many hundred lines of banal code one can hack away in a day with clear specifications and targets. some of it is apparently one shot spaghetti code, some of it is kind of modular. i shall see, how much fun i will have with maintaining my code.

another thrilling experience is the maintainance of some other person´s application´s. but as i am working on a stable foundation and got the number of my predecessor, i am very optimistic.

working and eating in a traditional environment in lover bavaria

pretty soon after some days i had the image of a kerndlfresser (negative bavarian term for someone who is trying to nourish healthy, in the same sense of a tree-hugger) even though i do not have lunch together with my colleges on a regular basis. for every time i have a salad, i would have to eat five times liver-loaf to avoid the verdict of a kerndlfresser. but i am being accepted nonetheless. thank you.

nazi aftermath

there is a small but nice new feature on this site: visual denazifaction. head over there and check it out right now.

merry christmas

merry christmas to everyone. thou shalt not forget my personal wish list.


inspiration for the masses, november, 2005

theatiner burning

munich at night

sometimes i feel unsatisfied with my little ixus i, but some shots compensate for that.

franz marc resurrected

the last time i saw a museum from the inside was three years ago in vienna. for five years i actually studied no more than 800m apart from some of mankind's greatest pieces of art without ever putting a foot inside of one of the pinakotheken.

now i exposed myself to a mainstream art event in the lenbachhaus: the putatively most comprehensive franz marc exhibit ever. it probably was not a inspiring, but for sure a very delighting and refreshing experience. go check it out in munich till the 8th of january 2006.

my accompaniment had to struggle with her stereotypes, that somebody, presenting himself in traditional bavarian garbs, could actually belong to the artistic avant garde. see the following shame-attack-picture:

munich at night

parallel work environments

it seems that there are at least two very different work environments in germany. experiences in the last months shook me up quite a bit. i don't know, how this is going to work out in the long term. i feel quite unsettled about all this. i walked the world pretty ignorant up until now. i shall not go into detail here, but if you know me, you might know what i am talking about.


envy me, for i am a surveyor, october, 2005

my best fall ever?

sunrise in fall

in september and october i was involved in a topographical survey project along the danube river. there were several extremely stable high pressure areas over central europe during that time and i had to apply sun protection on a daily basis if i didn't want my skin to totally dry out.

a lot of the area is actually a nature preserve and it was quite pleasant. i was happy to own a cellular phone with an audio-player and especially a radio as i caught myself talking to myself one time.

special thanks to bayern2.

i can not really evaluate the ecological value of the flora and fauna along the waterside, but the conditions for gnats must be quite good.

i for one welcome our new bloodsucking mosquito overlords

mosquito in action

i am all for donating blood, but this is too much. not only did i need sun-blocker, but anti insect as well.

it's comin' right at me and it got a laser!

laser at my face in darkness

to eat or not to eat?

disturbing green mushroom

to destroy or not to destroy?

tree at river

the more serious plans for upgrading / extending the waterway, which the danube is, would most likely destroy the waterline as seen here. definitely a bad thing.


back in business, september, 2005

new developments in surveying

stabilized tripod

an isolation-mattress can actually be used to compensate the vibrations of a floor while surveying. some kind of atr is recommended.

the picture of the month is not necessarily a current picture, just something to ease the feeling of the page. this picture is for example about six month old.

jalbum skin

i did a skin for the great, powerful and flexible image-gallery-generation software jalbum. i would love to get some feedback on usability and looks. you can also download the skin and push its download statistic!

caught in apathy?

i am finally back in employment. and i didn't really use the spare time while being in-between-projects. damn. i knew, this was going to happen. for example i actually wanted to get, at least, this page going with a new layout and an actual domain. bad, bad florian.


another summer wasted, august, 2005

pimp my website

preview of a new layout

here is a preliminary draft for a new layout of this website. head on over and check it out. then give me some tough feedback.

trip to berlin

i made a trip to berlin for two nights, helping my sister finding a flat or room. it was actually very exciting and inspiring. i should go for vacation more often. compared to my last trip four or five years ago, the city evolved quite a bit. there is even a small picture gallery. check out the trashed election posters.


ethical questions to be discussed, july, 2005

to shower, or not to shower?

showering keyboards

there is the theory, that electronics can get as wet as one can make them, as long as you do not send any power through them while still wet. conclusion: two keyboards tested, fifty percent casualties. thus it would be unethical for me to recommend you to take your keyboard with you under the shower. even though it is great to see all the dirt emanating from between the keys. however i advocate not leaving bottles of sweet sodas standing on your workdesk. during my military service there was the saying, that a soldier, who really loves his rifle, takes it with him below the shower in order to clean it. oh well.

ethical question of the month

looking for new employment. with what position should i be content with? should i settle with a job below my capabilities? apart from not being challenged, and probably feeling uncomfortable, i am actually wasting resources, which could otherwise server economy and society. the fact is in germany college is free (right now). and, by reading the business section of the newspaper from time to time, i learned, that the economic growth in germany will be obstructed by lack on engineers in the near future. of course those articles are talking about electrical engineers and similar faculties. hey, i got useful skills as well!

another duty to the german society would be fathering and bringing up lots of children, ahm, i mean tax-payers. but that is another whole story.

back to myself looking for a job. most important is of course me getting a paying profession as fast as possible so i can pay tribute into our public pension- and health-care system. this ain't fun.

understanding search engine indices

i did some ego-surfing. florere is acceptable placed in the yahoo/altavista index. it is neither in the google nor the msn index. being the snob i am, i don't necessarily want to be found by msn users. not being indexed by google is acceptable and understandable, as the page-rank must be somewhere below zero, not being linked by nobody. i however remember this site to be placed very prominently in the google index for about eight weeks in spring of 2004. back than i linked my dhtml slides project in one of the site point dhtml forums. somehow this single link catapulted my site up to incredible heights in the google index.

so what did i learn out of this? spamming site point forums with links is probably a bad thing. ethically right would be to create good content. there the circle closes again.

leather work and our electronic devices

i made a leather bag for my ixus. leather is nice.

apropos ixus - those mobile digital devices are getting out of control. one evening after work, i catched myself reading out the pictures from my ixus(usb) and taking the batteries for charging. then i read out some surveying data from a leica tcr703(legacy seriell port) total-station and charged its batteries. then i moved some data from my usb-stick to my box, followed by moving some mp3s to my cellular phone after hooking it up to the charging-adapter. we are slaves to our devices!
maybe it will be possible to transport energy wireless. recharging your mobile, by putting it in the microwave.

ethics? you should probably go out and pay four bucks for a plastic case for your camera, so the poor soul working in the vietnamese sweatshop can support here kids.


feature creep or incremental development? june, 2005

picture of the month

probably a new feature, provided that i am able to provide a stream of fresh, high-quality pictures.

restroom door sign

this is the sign of a wheelchair-accessible toilet inside a bmw plant. i guess when you are building cars with a sporty image, wheelchairs got to be sporty as well.

the return of the mc

so i got my first own car after a while. i tried to avoid it, but i failed. this car is equipped with a cassette player. at first i reactivated the cassettes i had put away in a drawer. deja vu! those cassettes where taped in 1997/1998 - what a flashback!

after some time i got tired of the old shit and decided to get some new music in the car. as i did not feel like investing in some new media player for my car the choice was clear: i got to record some new tapes. in 2005. right now i am burning cds from my mp3s and than using those to record tapes in my parents hi-fi unit. yes, pathetic it is, but it works. unfortunately the stereo can not handle cdrws, but media is cheap. cheaper than creating some creative solution. and no, the stereo can not handle an auxiliary-input.

a cheap memory stick with 0,5gb and a mp3-player costs less than 100€. it can not take too long till we see some more advanced audio playback capability at affordable prizes for cars.

latest recordings: gotan project: la revancha del tango, battelfield vietnam, ost and placebo, sleeping with ghosts.


florere is one year old, may, 2005

this homepage

so this page is one year old. i am curious how it will evolve over the years. i probably should order some dirt-cheap webspace offering a little bit mojo e.g. php, perl and a real domain. but that is all inane without content, of which we did not see too much lately.
i just read in an article, that personal, very elaborate websites with galleries and blogs are a thing of shy people who otherwise do not present or depict oneself. well duh, but interesting to be confronted with the facts from time to time.

job opportunities

our company has been purchased by another company. right now, we are being integrated and i have a strange feeling of deja vu. during my second internship while studying i was able to observe a similar process as an outside observer. back than the gis company smallworld was integrated by ge. first there where gesmallworld coffee-mugs and shirts, than the name smallworld vanished and now there is only ge network solutions. back than, as a student, i didn't take part in six sigma programs and similar madness, i just just observed the moaning of my coworkers. currently i am experiencing the insanity first hand.
our new company does not yet know for sure, what they actually bought. but they are trying hard and i am agog for the things to come.


spring is coming, march, 2005

how do you know spring is comin'?

  1. you leave the house in the morning and think: "hey, it's kind of mild.", even though the thermometer still indicates -1° below zero.
  2. those damn birds delight me with aries even before i get out of home
  3. those skirts are becoming short. some women must have been desperately waiting for a chance to take those pieces out of the closet!

personal whish-list online

i put a personal wish list online. not that i expect anything out of it - but one has got to be prepared.

procrastination for the pros

i stumbled over an interesting approach towards procrastination by john perry. he has a ph.d. in philosophy, whatever that might be worth. don't hesitate to go there right now! ;-)

great winter

the snow situation this winter was great for us flachlandbayern ([german]: flatlandbavarians). we had lot of snow in february followed by stable below freezing temperatures. it was great. thanks to the weather gods for this. i see myself full of yearning in the following years for a winter like this. maybe i should relocate to some location with a more dependable snow-situation. and in the middle of march, when it seemed as spring took over, we had a grand finale with another 30cm of wet, packing, children's delight snow - snow glory and my bike [picture].

work in the wonderland

at times my workplace as surveyor in factory halls can feel anything from strange to disturbing. when running between conveyor belts, moving with the rhythm of the machinery, i feel like super mario in some jmp-n-run adventure. sometimes, when its hot, loud and the machinery is especially bestial, it feels as if i were right in the pits of isengard. and occasionally, when it's especially lonesome, eerie and strange, it feels like a kafkaesque nightmare. i love those moments, when fantasy strikes...

ice 3

i finally had the chance to ride in an ice 3 train by siemens for the first time and get some in-person impressions: the interior seems to be an improvement. i didn't like the chrome on the luggage department. my seat made some undefinable cheap noises. the bathrooms are identical in both the first and the second class. they are fitted with classy, big mirror fronts [picture].
unfortunately the route was not prepared for high speeds and we couldn't test our 330km/h potential. and even though we rode in the flagship of the deutsche bahn, we were 20 minutes late. sigh.

law-and-order in munich

on law-and-order in bavaria, and munich especially. i'll start with some background information:

fact one:
bavaria is ruled by the conservative christ-socialist-party enforcing - compared to other states in germany - a kind of tough "law-and-order" policy.
fact two:
in munich quite a lot of newspapers are sold in unlocked boxes where people can take a paper and place the appropriate money in a deposit slit. there are of course black-sheeps, but generally this system works quite well.
so two of my colleges and myself walk through the streets of munich after having something to eat at a restaurant:
colleague number one from berlin said: "these boxes are open? unbelievable — in berlin, the box would be plundered after five minutes and the papers would be sold twenty meters farther ahead on the road. after ten minutes someone would have broken into the money department of the box and after 15 minutes the box would be burning"
colleague number two from peru stated in conformation: "yes, just like in peru."

even though they both exaggerated (i hope so), it still feels kind of nice, that a system, based on public trust, is working. on the other side, it can happen to you, that you are being confronted by some cops whether you smoked something because you look suspicious to them. well, it is not like bavaria is a police state - not at all, but still. so what is it, that i wanted to say? i guess, everthing has its pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, and the way of the middle is mostly the best.

another fat "duh!" for myself

blog opinions

from the experiences i made with writing these sometimes monthly entries i would say, that writing a daily blog in a non-native tongue is probably not very intuitive and spontaneous. it is possible, but it is probably not a good idea. it can never be as intensive as writing in your own language. well - duh. it is probably okay for a very functional, objective and error tolerant blog.


yes it's fucking political, february 2005

okay, those are not the bravest statements i made, but they are still statements. i thought, rather than wasting screen estate of my visitors with blank space, i might as well use it to promote some opinions. it is not too offensive for the eyes, is separated from the content, hell it looks like a fucking google ad! redesign suggestions are welcome. it degrades gracefully, even though not the way i would like it to do. shit, i wanted to concentrate on content, not layout. did i mention, that ie has some problems with web-standards?


more nullities, january 2005

maybe i should switch to quarterly updates ...

been working on some content for the site in recent times. i hope to publish something in the next months. i think it is good to put oneself under some pressure.

been doing some hacking lately and i keep observing myself ignoring basic development rules all the time. fortunately i am not doing this for a living. i would have to fire me.
i just found a sourceforge project tackling a problem i already spend some time on. funny. when i last checked about ten month ago, there were no started projects. now there is one beta-product and about three other projects which have of course not yet released anything.
but i don't like approach he took, and want to finish my project. now i understand, where all those open-source-projects come from. I could have a running first version of my approach up and running, but you know, feature creep and stuff.

I am having problems with recording radio-programs over my line-IN on my computer. Both under Linux and Win2K. Very quit and scratchy. I think it might have to do with the level provided by my bose-radio. If anybody knows of a nice page about digital recording of radio-data please let me know.

← home