Danke!
Ulrich Mühe on Wikipedia
At the age of 16 I taught myself a little guitar. Ever since then, I played – sometimes more, sometimes less, but at a certain point all autodidactic efforts came to a stop. For my last birthday, friends and family gave me some money to get professional guitar lessons. And in about 30 minutes I have my first. Uh-oh… stay tuned.
These have been eventful weeks. I have been traveling a lot, been visiting a dealer and one of his customers in Austria, and I spent several days at a tradeshow in Rome. There, however, my already tattered knee got worse, and I had to take rather strong medication and keep it absolutely calm in order to avoid surgery. Upon my return in the office preparations for the next tradeshow in Berlin were in full swing, so I dived right back into work. One of the downsides of this completely unnecessary knee issue is that I didn’t get a ticket for Berlin myself. Since I do not only love to plan and manage tradeshows, but also love to go there, this was quite a disappointment. But knee surgery is not what I want to experience either.
Myself to Sean when he took photos of the Eiffel tower at night:
Michael: What resolution does your phone have?
Sean: 3 Megapixels
This is not Bill Gates. It’s me, ca. 1980, at the age of 13, maybe 14.
Among the Christmas presents by my mother was a CD with digitized slides (Wikipedia article on photographic slides for the younger readers) she found during a recent home improvement cleanup. The CD contained various undated images, the oldest one showing me with my baby-cousin at the age of ~7. The slides have already suffered from chemical deterioration, so the scans are pretty bad. Nevertheless they are quite valuable to me.
There were two subdirectories with images from the “Jugend forscht – Schüler experimentieren” science fair from 1982 and 1983. I participated about 5 years in a row, mostly with Biology topics, but also with IT projects.
Already at my first event I won a First Prize, and was elegible to participate at the next stage, the State competition. This competition was sponsored by IBM, and it was there that I had my first experiences with the then brand-new IBM PC. This was probably the most important milestone for my carreer path, since until then I planned to pursue an education path in biology.
The image above shows me exhausted after the award ceremony. The title of my exhibits reads “The effects of different types of water available at my hometown on germination and growth of garden cress”. We had a small creek running behind the house, plus a couple of springs and wells and of course tap water. Back in the 1980ies, the farmers were quite careless with fertilizers so the water from the creek was quite full with phosphate. Unsurprisingly, the cress watered with the creek water outgrew all the other samples, but then the plant actually got burned by the fertilizer.
I participated with two follow-up projects the next two years, and met both acclaim and criticism by locals and press. A few of the farmers did not quite like what I did, but the overall reception was good. In retrospect I have to say that fertilizer use became quite a hot topic several years later. Not that I claim credit for this though.
Hello, I’m a Mac. Not voluntarily though. From my point of view, compared to other PC’s Mac’s are overprized and appeal mostly to design considerations. However to facilitate certain tests for one of our products in the office we needed a Mac. We have a 4-year-old iMac, which we abused to run OS X a while ago, but it turned out to be way too slow for the current task. I tried to rent a Mac for a few weeks, but for rates around 120€/day it was much cheaper to simply buy a Mac Mini for 590€. I was pretty surprised that Apple manages to keep the prices at a constant level. The lowest offer I found was for 572€, but it was from a mail order store which a) would have taken too long and b) looked not very reliable. Even used Mac Minis were not significantly cheaper, with all the risks coming from used equipment at large and eBay auctions in detail.
We have a Gravis store in our town, so I checked availability via the web and since stock was low I used Gravis’ central ordering service to reserve a machine. The telephone rep was quite helpful and when I asked when the machine could be picked up, she said that once she closes the database entry the shop gets notification, and that the machine will be reserved for 48 hours. Pleased at the speed and competence – it was a call-center after all – I prepared to go immediately and was in front of the Gravis store some 30 minutes later.
When I got there, the door was blocked by a Gravis employee in vivid conversation with what must have been a friend of his. Reluctantly, they let me pass so that I could enter the store. It was held mostly in white and light wood textures and must have had some 100/120sqm. Apart from me there was only one other customer, standing at the service counter complaining about some issues with her iPod. Since I had an order number, I went to the service counter too and waited politely. And waited. Politely. Waited. The employee did not send the slightest signal of acknowledging me being here. Meanwhile, the other employee still stood in the stores entrance and talked to his friend. I looked around, bored. I spent some time watching the funny Windows error messages which were projected to a wall. Not only was the projection pretty bad, the error messages came mostly from Windows 95 or 98, one even from Windows 3.x. I thought Apple was all about style and cool superiority? This display seemed rather childish to me. Finally – still being ignored by both employees – I spotted a third employee behind the checkout. I didn’t noticed her at first because she was dressed mostly in white, and because she stood almost still, laboriously wet-cleaning the keyboard of her PC Mac. I went to her, showed her my order number, and – I have to grant her that – she immediately went to the back of the store where she rumbled around a bit until she found employee #4 (#1 was still talking at the door and #2 still sorting out the iPod issue) to process my request.
When I was at the checkout 5 minutes later, Miss Keyboard Cleaning was still performing her task, reluctantly putting it aside to take my money. However the task seemed rather difficult to her (after all it was not only the Mac Mini but also a keyboard and a mouse), so she got Mister iPod Issues to help her. He, in turn, expressed his opinion that Mister Door Conversation could use some practice with cashing and hustled him over. Now that was a surprise, because it seemed that this guy had training in cross selling. And while he tried in a rather pushy tone to sell me a 3-year-maintenance pack, Miss Keyboard Cleaning continued to clean a keyboard. Having made my point that I didn’t needed a maintenance pack, I asked her if the store was a bit more crowded on Saturdays? She admitted that it was a bit more crowded, but that in general they were pretty much bored in here. As if that admission and everything that happened before was not enough unprofessional behavior, they started to make jokes about how bored they were. Slightly shaking my head I left the shop. The whole event took half an hour.
OK, I know that lifestyle is important for the “Apple system”. That’s probably why these employees were really young. Most likely thy were Mac enthusiast (at least the guys – I don’t know if the girl is enthusiastic about anything else than her outfit, her nails, her hairdo and the cleanliness of keyboards), and probably they thought they were working in a cutting edge bastion against mediocrity. But I know that Apple is pretty much about making money too. And if Steve Jobs would have witnessed this “performance”, I’m pretty sure that four twens, and probably their manager too, would have to pursue a career in serving or taxi driving by the end of the day. The only reason I endured all this was because I needed that Mac Mini fast.
So, I’m interested in feedback. Did I choose a bad day, when the B-crew was in? Or is this a little piece fitting into the huge mosaic? What about other countries? Does lifestyle and coolness justify bad service? Maybe I didn’t look “hip” enough, or maybe it was wrong the chose the cheapest Mac available? What are your experiences?
It’s starting again…
Since nobody from my online life seems to have noticed – I celebrated my birthday yesterday. There were a few automated mails from several forums of course. The nicest one coming from the Friends of Laphroaig, who sent me a nice postcard and a 10% discount in their online shop. Unfortunately the discount was only valid that very day – too late when I checked mail this morning.
I got a little bit of blues these days. I intended to invite some friends but I made up my mind too late, so almost all of them declined. But an old and dear friend I only see 1-2 times a year made the 3 hour travel, and faithful Uli came along with his girlfriend too. It turned out to be a harmonic weekend nevertheless, and life feels good for the moment.
There are a few sites who managed to sneak around Firefox’ popup blocker. While checking out Yahoo Mail the other day, I got this popup:
I’m reluctant to admit that I have no clue. I heard of Shakira, but as far as I know she’s a Latina and the woman on the pic doesn’t look like one (let’s put aside Michael Jackson for deceiving looks on that matter..). Mariah is most likely Mariah Carey, but who is Britaney? Or is it a typo and they meant Britney? Not that I would recognize her any better – I always mistake her for that Hilton girl. And isn’t Mariah Carey something for older people like – erm – me? I guess if I would show this pic to my intern, she would immediately know who the woman is. And I was soooo looking forward to that free ringtone 
Thanks to Xeni of BoingBoing I spent a wonderful weekend walking down memory lane. On two recent postst Xeni told about her first time viewing of Raumpatrouille Orion episodes:
This is so awesome. I grew up the child of a trekkie, and have a genetically-ingrained fondness for scifi teevee of this era — but I’d never heard of “Raumpatroille” before this week.
Xeni was kind enough to publish two comments by myself to her articles. Inspired by the topic, I shuffled through those old VHS tapes and found one titled “Orion”. During this chokingly hot weekend this gave me a couple of hours of sweet memory entertainment. I’m supposed to have the vinyl disc with the soundtrack somewhere. Guess I need to make a trip to the attic.
Thanks, Xeni!