Tag Archives: time

The grey flap

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Always talking about changing gets quite odd and is simply not the bottom line I actually want to drop here. I’m saying this, because I just wanted to start this very post with words like “Something has to change” or “It’s time for a change”. But that’s basically wrong, after rethinking the choice of my words. A correct term would be something like “I’ve to continue following and influencing evolution”

So, what does that basically include. First of all, it will include a change, but for certain reasons I won’t and can’t mention it here. Details will follow in a couple of month, when everything is safe and secure to talk about here. Period.

On the other hand, I will start doing sports again, no matter what. My spare time shrunk to a minimum, which is still pissing me off, because most of the time that it has finally gotten that way is because of the incompetence of others. I’m a person that don’t like to fail because of the mistakes of others. The only fail I can accept, is when it’s based on my own faults. Messing up, just because of anybody else, is completely unacceptable.

But back to the actual point – sports. I gained an overweight that became badass dead serious. It’s like 25 to 30 kg too much and it’s getting more and more the more weeks do pass by. I’m not having a detailed and completely scheduled plan at the moment, but the basic rules are set. It’s the ban of sweets again. Nutrition has to change as a whole in my life again. Even though there’s a lot of seduction going on with commercials and ads in the supermarket popping your eyes like a needle. I simply have to learn to resist again. I pretty often think back to those days where I lived straight edge. And then I remember how lucky and happy I actually was.

It wasn’t only a thing because of the endorphins that were pumped through my body and brain in this sports period. It was also a thing that all the poisons that I once ingested were gone and my whole body fell back to its basics. This sounds pretty much like the words of an odd and creepy philosophy professor, but that’s what describes it the best. More than ever do I feel like I’ve to get back to this way of life again. I’m probably go to make certain rules again, but not that strict like I did back in the days.

The other thing that I’m currently try to improve on is my creative eye. I revisited my photo collection and reviewed all the pictures I’ve done on several journeys and it’s terrible. Apart from all the technical mistakes I made, it’s a creative disaster. Seriously, out of around 7,000 pictures I took, only a handful is actually worth using and editing. It has improved during the last couple of month, because I took a lot of effort by studying workflows of other photographers, their techniques and composing pictures itself. I underestimated how much wrong camera settings can do, to actually destroy your vision of a certain picture you have in mind.

I have tons and tons of examples in my collection to prove that particular fact and I will continue working on getting better and drift as far away as I possibly can from these terrible results. I’ve recently ordered some books to give me more theoretical understanding in the field of composing and simply seeing things creatively. One of the reasons I’m doing this, I’m tired of only working with computers and networks, they bore me to death.

These are the things for now, my plans on how to influence my own personal evolution and give certain things a flap and improve. Because improvement is what makes lives worth living.

Chastity’s curse

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Back in the days, when I was in my teen-years and a major part of my twen-years I was driven by something, let us say, intense libido. I’m not sure if it’s a natural development progress I’m going through or if it’s a side effect of my ‘focus-on-the-logic’ attitude, but my interest for any kind of sexual activity has reached absolute zero. And by saying that, I mean, I lost interest in everything that stands in relation to the act of replication.

Back in the days I was, what common people would call horny. I seriously have no glimpse of an idea what’s different these days, but like I said before. Sexuality disgusts me somehow. Even things like porn movies, where I was once a “big fan”, do not catch my attention or interest. I already started deleting a lot of the movies I collected over the years.

It’s like my field of interest has drastically changed over the month or years or whatever. For some people is sex some kind of deliverance. But for me currently, even the thought of sex, independent from who, where and how, gives me the creeps. When a slight glimpse of sexual related content enters my brain I instantly start to think of something like retarded monkeys banging each other out of a mood of boredom the whole bloody day. I’m not a monkey, God damn it!

 Chastity

Don’t confuse this issue with relationship problems, it’s definitely not. This is asexuality. I was thinking a lot about how to fix it. I imagined some creepy, wild, naughty things. I imagined some stereotype, trivial things. But I always end up with a distressed comment to myself that says “D’oh! This turns out to be work. Leave it!”

And I see monkeys banging each other.

I accuse mass media to be responsible for this problem. And the lack of time. And the fact that I’m always tired. And the pressure to perform that has infected today’s culture and society.

Honestly, it’s not bothering me that much, because I don’t feel bad because of it, but it made me think. And, additionally, I simply don’t feel the sodding need to exercise anything sexually related. I was just determining this issues and was wondering where it came from. Why it’s there? And maybe, how can I get rid of it. Last but not least, do I actually have to solve this “problem” when it’s not actually bothering me?

Blurring lines

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The dog gets a dry nose when he’s not doing well. Common people get fever or feel odd when they’re not doing well, too. Me, I stop playing video games and almost every other activity that basically used to entertain me. Something is currently terribly wrong and I can’t exactly tell what it actually is.

It starts with the alarm clock in the morning and ends with the toothbrush in the evening. I feel totally uncomfortable with everything. Everything bothers me. Everything gets on my nerves. Everything bores me. Everything gives me enough arguments to hate it. I’m always tired, which is one of the reasons for everything previously mentioned. And I feel exhausted as well.

The thing that bothers me the most is the fact that I can’t locate the origin of this disease. It’s easy to say, “I’m don’t feel right because of, …”

That is the crux. If you ask me what is wrong, I wouldn’t be able to answer. One thing I could guess, the traveling each and every day. A couple of month ago I felt happy about the fact that there’s a period in my schedule that allows me to relax and come down and turn the switch. That’s a problem I suffer from for many years. When you’re into a job that includes activities that are also a part of your spare time activities, you barely have the chance to completely get rid of such things. The lines between job and hobby blur and finally lead to a stress factor that in reverse cause this kind of burn out.

I first noticed this issue almost a decade ago, where I agreed to make a long term test with a psychologist we had in my company back in the days. I ran through different written tests that were set on specific dates over a period of something like two month. I’m not certain how long the tests actually went.

After running through these tests and several conversations with our psychologists I received the result. Conclusion of all this was, I’ve got a serious problem with making a straight cut between work and spare time. The reasonable fact that my hobby does not really differ from the things I had to do at work increased the degree of my problem. I always suffered from burn out like symptoms in almost every job that stood in any relationship with IT.

To be honest, I considered changing my occupational field for years. The wish for a change repeats in time intervals tending to be quite shorter than the one before. In other words, I feel like I’ve reached a dead end street not sure for how long I can push myself to do what I currently do. On the other hand, this is the only thing I’ve learned. And my own comic book store or video game store, for instance, would lead to the same problem. A hobby turned into a job.

I’m so jealous about those people doing something for living that has nothing in common with things they use to do in their spare time. Meanwhile, I always feel terribly annoyed when someone asks me about computer related things or wants some help. Years ago, I was starving for opportunities like these. Nowadays I just feel bored to death. It’s only a handful of people receiving help. Seriously, my “talent” disgusts me and in the meantime a lot of people noticed this and my generic aversion. Without a doubt, my entity’s changed and my sodding work has a lot of proportion on that.

The Commuter

Another theory of mine what it could be, that bothers and puts me down. My current location. It’s not a problem with the location where I live, I feel depressed by the village I work at. When you’re a person who lives in bigger cities for quite major part of your life, you’re used to several conveniences the “big city” brings with. I literally work at the edge of an abandoned field, a duck pond in sight and utility poles on the horizon. No infrastructure around. And that’s the point.

It’s not that I’m the kind of a guy permanently being off office and enjoying an extended lunch break, but I’m the kind of guy who seems to get terribly disturbed by the fact, that his infrastructure he was used to is gone. Seriously, I hate the fact that even my way home wastes like one hour and a half and that I can no longer do some private business whenever I want, because I simply don’t have the opportunities right here. Meanwhile, I doubt that I’m a commuter. It sickens me. It’s fun for several weeks, but I can barely imagine doing this for years.

That kind of luxury I once had and which is currently lost seems to be part of my desolate condition I’m currently in. In these very few moments that I have to wander around in my hometown, I walk around with eyes wide open and my chops fall down. Like one of these village people that have a great experience to get when they “visit the city”. For f#$k’s sake. I bloody miss this, and it chokes my throat every morning where I leave my city by train. I’m a Sissy in this special case, but I seriously feel like handcuffed at the moment.

To get the facts straight, I got myself into this and sooner or later I’ll get rid of this. Currently I’m saying to myself that I have to get through this and take this as an experience. Maybe, just maybe, my mind and my attitude will change on this whole suspect. Maybe I should take a long vacation somewhere far away to recharge. Maybe I should ignore all this and live kind of sad into each new day, wearing a mask with a grin. Actually, a lot of people will get confused seeing me with a grin on my face. Most of this emotional baggage is a result of years living a luxurious way of live which does not depend on money.

Now, more than ever, I’m aware of the preciousness to have time. One or two hours can make such a big difference these days.

Draft N odyssey

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A while ago, four month to be exact, I had the fine idea to upgrade my network. I wanted to switch my WiFi to Draft N and my LAN should be 1000 MBps. That was the plan. My old setup was a Netgear FVS338 in combination with two Linksys WRT-54G. This was a dream setup and actually no good reason to upgrade, despite the WiFi bandwidth was at its limits. I sync music and videos via wireless LAN connection and a copy progress that lasts for like 10 hours is not acceptable.

On last year’s Black Friday I bought two Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N. I wanted to replace all my devices I had in use with these two. One should work as router, switch and access point. Tasks that were shared by the Netgear router and the Linksys access point. So far so good, this setup worked. The second Buffalo router should work as a client bridge. Bummer!

It’s almost impossible to get this router into a working or at least stable client bridge mode. Sometimes the router wasn’t able to connect to the current WiFi. Sometimes I had a WiFi connection but no access to anything else. After a long time of research, I finally found one firmware version that offered a stable client bridge mode. But after all I’ve experienced, it seem to depend on the weather and the current moon phase. In good times I was able to have stable connections for days and in bad times it crashed after almost five minutes. I replaced this stupid devices with my old Linksys access point and everything was fine.

Another problem left, I couldn’t get a stable connection for my HTC smart phone. I connected, had WAN access for like 10 minutes and then it dropped for good. I had to reboot the phone to get back on the track. I replaced the Buffalo router with a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND. It was a good device, though. But finally, it was based on WRT firmware and had the same Draft N issues like the Buffalo router. Retoure.

Last but not least, I got back to the roots and bought a D-Link router. D-Link has been a good companion in the good old days, when I had my first broadband connection and it was one of the most stable devices I can remember, beside the Netgear FVS338, which is an absolute killer device.

So, I got this D-Link DIR-655 and set up my net again and after a long period of pure despair, WiFi was running perfectly fine. For one reason did my broadband modem start to play some tricks on me by crashing and reconnecting randomly. I was near to return the D-Link router, but I gladly noticed those weird blinking LEDs on my modem. Culprit found.

I’m still trying to get the Buffalo working in client bridge mode when I find the time to set this stupid thing up and can do some research on this particular problem, but no real solution so far. The devices uses to crash whenever possible.

A taste of ice cream sandwich

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According to the fact that there are no impressive game releases these days and I have a small amount of time left in my spare time, I was digging a little the Android scene. My main intention was to get some hands on on the latest Android – Codename “Ice Cream Sandwich” – and see how it works in my phones. The HTC Desire S and the Motorola Defy.

I tried the Virtuous Quattro RC3 and the CyanogenMod 9 Alpha builds for the HTC Desire. The Defy got stuffed with the experimental builds of CyanogenMod 9 as  well.

At first glance, for all devices, ICS looks amazing and the overall redesign looks very homogenic and a lot of obstacles in the menu structure has been ridden. When you’re used to Android and use it for quite a long time, you’ll find yourself in a re-orientation situation. But ICS is very user friendly and now, in my opinion, on the same level with Apple’s iOS.

Virtuous Quattro RC3 was one of the first ROMs I installed and my impression was, ‘Yeah, looking gooood.’ But in the end, the speed and smoothness of this ROM was terrible. And even though it was an RC it felt more like a fast pushed alpha version. It had several bugs like the clock crashing and syncs that did not sync. All in all, it looked cool, but it felt awful.

CyanogenMod 9 for the Defy was, because it was alpha, the same buggy experience, but it felt usable, except for the camera, but that’s a problem on lot of devices. I was expecting that this ROM would not work completely fine and that it would be another first look thing. Anyhow, despite the slow performance can I say, that the CM team is definitely on the right way and without a doubt, the old Defy is capable running ICS.

Last but not least, I installed the alpha build of CyanogenMod 9 on my Desire S. I tried the builds from January 27 and 30. The first one had almost the same low performance like the Quattro ROM, but the nightly build of January 30 runs almost smoothly and came pretty close to what you are used to with CyanogenMod 7.x

Only one camera is currently working on the Desire S. With the latest release I got some issue with syncing Facebook to my contact list. This ROM still’s got the issue that WiFi is not running fine with certain router/access points and various encryptions. The issue is well known in many bug reports, even for stock ROMs and I was hoping for a final fix. Bummer!

As a summarization can I say, the AOSP ICS developers have done a great job so far and I’m so dead certain that CyanogenMod 9 will be a giant hit. On the other hand, there’s still a long road to walk till it’s time to announce the first beta releases and it’s even further more away to announce a real release candidate. Lots of RCs that you can find these days for many devices are quick born, badly supported ROMs that you should only use when you like to do some bug fixing or if you’re just interested in Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

I personally switched back to CyanogenMod 7.2 on my Defy and will also switch back to Reaper (CM7 derivate) on my Desire S.

Driven by an unknown source

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It’s been weeks now that I suffer from these weird depressions I’ve mentioned in one of my previous posts. I actually do not understand where they come from and most importantly, why I’ve got them. The depression period is much longer than the previously mentioned weeks, a couple of month to be more exact. But it’s a couple of weeks now that I recognize them with more awareness.

Curiously, this is a condition that I’ve never experienced before and additionally did I never believe, that I could probably notice a depression without even knowing the cause. I’m a very cynical person and I also don’t give that much about mind related illnesses. According to this I find this current state even more hilarious. Also very frightening. It’s like standing right beside yourself without the possibility to actually reach yourself.

Basically it comes out of nowhere. A phase of deep sadness and loss of self-confidence. Like I said before, I don’t give much about those things and I also find people using therapy for mental illnesses simply waste money of our health care system. This loss of control about my emotional circumstances confuse me.

I’ve got several presumptions about this whole thing. One’s a job-wise one and the other one is a location-wise one. I also presume that the massive loss of spare time could be one reason, too. Another thing, I’m always tired and exhausted each and every time. I’ve got this weird lack of concentration and attention and I personally think that I failed on almost everything during the last few month.

My overall condition is far from good at the moment, but I’m aware of that and I personally do not think that this the reason for this melancholy driven sadness that affects me here and then. To be honest, I don’t have one sodding, important reason to be sad or depressed, but it affects me everyday and mostly in the worsts moments one can imagine.

Of RipJaws and Eden

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Previously, I’ve told you guys about my GeForce upgrade on my media centre. The performance boost was, well, kind of okay, but at last I felt it was time for an overall upgrade on the system. I’ ve got this AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition in my PC that I usually use for some work on photos and on the other hand it’s simply a machine I use to manage my mails, websites and these kind of things.

It finally turns out that the processor plugged into this machine gets a little bored so I’ll do an exchange and my AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition moves from my media centre to this working machine. Both system still run on the AMD 7xx chipset and the media centre will now get the upgrade to the AMD 990FX chipset in form of an Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 board.

I’ll put 16GB DDR3 12800 G.Skill RipJaw modules on this system, so that I finally do not have to suffer on a memory bottleneck. I personally think that this is a good foundation for my EVGA GeForce GTX 560ti 448 Cores Classified. I was able to get a performance increase on games like “Batman Arkham City” but the overall system performance became pretty bad during the last year and a half so it’s time to make an upgrade and most importantly get a fresh and new installment of Windows 7.

 ...

I’ve exchanged graphics and sound card drivers a lot in the past and I also had to struggle with several hardware and software issues that also caused new bugs, if you know what I’m saying.

Anyhow, I don’t expect a performance boost of 200 per cent but I’m certain that the overall system performance and feel of smoothness will increase and a lot of crashes and bugs will get fixed with this new setup.

In preparation for this did I also give the new XBMC version (called “Eden”) a try, which is currently out as a beta release. I was a little disappointed. I did a fresh installment and imported my old library to get everything as clean as I could. The movie library did not work as expected. I was missing movie posters. I wasn’t able to get movie information. The new skin itself is not a thing I’m going to be friend with because all the items are drawn much smaller and it looks like as if there’s something missing on the GUI.

I also tried several video add-ons and most of them did not work properly as well. To summarize, this is still a beta version and it does not represent the final product, but I will wait for a long time until I’ll finally do the update from “Dharma” to “Eden”. I’m fine and comfortable with my current media centre software. So why changing a good and running system?

I hope I can get everything done within the next 5-7 days and I’ll keep you informed.

I ain’t superstitious

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A lot of people totally freak out these days, because a new year is just around the corner and lots of people start making new year’s resolutions. You might expect what’s my opinion about these things; yes – it’s complete bullshit.

Let’s take it logically and without all these emotional influences some people are affected to use with events like New Year’s Eve. It’s just some digits on the calendar that change and nothing else. And here’s the thing. So many people waste their time on reviewing the last twelve month, start predicting what’s to come next and how wonderful everything was the years before.

Some just sit and complain how fast everything goes and ask themselves where time has gone to. Actually, I personally do not care about it. Time is fixed and does not run fast or slow. It’s also without any sodding meaning what has been in the past, because it has no essential influence on the current moment, except there was an event with certain aftermaths.

It’s pathetic how some people turn New Year’s Eve into such an occult event. What is this, medieval age? The dawning of the of the superstitious idiots?

I don’t have a problem to have a nice time in company with some friends, but what I hate is this backslapping at midnight, like you’ve been friends for eras without even knowing who the hell this guy is in front of you. There have been several New Year’s Eves that I also used to stay on my own and doing something useful (like overclocking my graphics card). Best thing about it, I was able to get to bed early without having a terrible hangover.

I’ve spoken to a friend this very morning and he’s got the same opinion about this whole thing. Why not just hanging around with each other like every other common day, without these ridiculous rituals or whatever people do to still the hunger of their superstition?

Steamworks’ waiting line

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I wouldn’t say, that I’m a completely busy person, but to some degree, my spare time is limited and I hate wasting it. As some of you might know, Steam’s making the holiday sales these days and one can find a lot of great deals to get some excellent games. Like I did…

…but the bad, not to say the worst thing about it, is the terrible overload Steam servers have to suffer. I’ve recently bought “Test Drive Unlimited 2” and it took almost two days to download the game. Actually, this is not totally correct, to download the game that I’m able to start it. After hitting the start button, the game itself started an update procedure with a 1998-like speed of 14KB/s.

patience

Almost every larger game I’ve bought suffers and struggles on the correct usage of bandwidth. I “only” got a 16MBit/s connection, but I rarely hit a download peak of 200KB/s on average. This is totally exhausting, especially when you want to play a game on Steam while you also want to download. Each download gets suspended or paused after starting a game, which can be reversed, but you always have to do it manually.

I had the same problem during last year’s holiday sales even with a 100MB/s connection. Steam is one of the leading platforms, not to THE leading platform in digital game distribution. Why the sodding hell are they so way behind to provide proper bandwidth? It wouldn’t cost that much to and it also will save a lot of my rare free time.

Laudanum

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It’s been for a very long time now that I’m carrying some kind of “emotional baggage” with me. Actually I’m not sure if that’s the correct term for the current circumstances, but for some reasons do I feel depressed and exhausted for a very, very long time now. There’s nothing that can give this whole thing a change. Time passes by and its speed is permanently increasing. I’m not satisfied with anything.

I’ve been this moody during summer time and the time period before and I refuse to say that this is just a meteorosensitive phase. I seriously have no sodding idea where those moods are coming from or what causes them. Even in a moment of pure happiness I feel totally depressed and down.

Laudanum

One reason for all this may be the unavailability to capture the current moment. This sounds a lot like phantasm, but I always feel like, I can’t grab what’s there right now, I’m always on the chase for something that’ll be in the future. When I reach that very point I was chasing, it instantly turns out meaningless. I was thinking about this for a long time and I still haven’t found a true solution for this issue.

Fulfillment is what I’m missing and I don’t know where I lost the ability to capture the now and then. I’m like stuck to dates and schedules set fix in the future. On the other hand I also lost a lot of my patience. Not that I get instantly mad and furious, it’s more a lack of concentration and patience while doing things. It even affects my work. My head’s fulfilled with future plans and multiple paths to walk on and kinds of totally different projects that nothing is getting done in the end.

I really long for a journey offside all these things and by that I don’t mean three weeks of vacation. I seriously feel like I should change something for real. But, for Christ’s sake… I dunno

Back in the 19th century people went to a club where they could buy some Opium and fell deep into their minds and review their thoughts and feeling. Sodding hell, get me some Opium!