Sometimes perfection has to take a holiday

An evil beast paid us a visit just before the turn of the New Year.

not warm&sunny sea anyways

Waves at Ikumi Beach

Choosing between sorting pictures and writing invoices… The pictures won, but only so-so.

So here, some Japanese autumn kitsch, and not-me falling into the water (Marcialku, my camera is not waterproof, so I didn’t take it with me for falling into the water :D).

So after almost more than one year, I’ve decided to try and update this blog again…

Not that anything is happening here, but at least elsewhere (in Japan!). I’ll upload some pictures as soon as I manage to find my camera in all this bordel (painters are coming today) and, obviously, find the time (and the right cable, too).

(…with an interactive comment section.)

I ran out of Big Bang Theory to watch :( – anyone got any more?

So now, I’m sitting in Leipzig with nothing to do (fortunately, I ran out of work to do, too), the snow seems to be melting away, so I can’t even take out my new cross country ski for a ride, or whatever it is you do with ski…

I’ve made some interesting (and completely pointless) experiments with my not-so-new-anymore camera, and found out that one of my cats is rather shy, whereas the other one is a born model (and sorry about the picture quality – wordpress resizing is not what it used to be :D):

Kurtjak:

Sandokan:

I took some great pictures in Italy. But, as I get older, I sometimes get the feeling I tend to like kitsch, and have no way of seeing the difference between kitsch and beauty anymore. So see for yourself. I uploaded some on flickr, and this is my favourite, though also the one where I think kitschkitschkitschkitsch…

As you can see, I’m still fighting with the D90′s metering system, and admittedly I’m too lazy to spend more than 5 minutes per picture on the computer (bad combination, I guess, especially because I’m even lazier to install some real photo processing software).

(Never mind the double bug, there’s an ongoing fight between me and wordpress.)

On another note, I will be in Leipzig for some time in October and November, so if you are interested in meeting up there, let me know (I’ll be there Monday to Friday, weekends it’ll be catsitting in Prague).

After an eventfull early summer, I’ll be gone for the rest of August on yet another vacation.

To put it in a nutshell:

- I bought myself a new camera (a Nikon D90 with a zoom lens that I forgot, but something like 18-108 mm)

- We’ll go to Italy tomorrow. By train (22 hours, yay!), to Lago Maggiore, or rather some village about 10 km from the lakeshore, in the Alps, with no bus connection and no supermarket, but hopefully a lot of beautiful countryside.

- Last weekend, we were at the Wacken Open Air, and – looking back – it was not bad at all.

- Some time before that, we went to the With Full Force festival, which had the better music (compared toWacken), but who cares about music anyway :D

More hopefully after Italy.

Oh so many wonderful things are happening here. Unfortunately, one of these things is called “f***ing lots of work”, so just a short overview (which probably will be longer than anything I’d write if I tried to write a long post):

• I had a birthday picknick. It was rather successful and yummy, there were no accidents and during the preparation I screamed only at a very few (handpicked) people. Some pictures you can see here.
• I got one thing for my birthday which I always wanted and never dared buy (it being so beautiful and so expensive) – a cubistic sugar box, designed by Pavel Janák.
• I spent the aftermath of my birthday with reading one the book sets I got (I won’t say which, because even I have to admit that it is really big – but very entertaining and relaxing – crap). But still, nine books in one week is not too bad.
• I spent another few days with my favorite co-workers at my favorite software testing site.
• I – acutally quite involuntarily – installed Windows 7 yesterday (you click the wrong button once, and there you go…)
• I bought some nice flowers for the balcony, and got some nice flowers for free for the windows facing West in our flat from the Prague City Council (some program to make Prague more beautiful, I suppose, but why only the windows facing the street, not the ones facing the rail tracks, I have no idea).
• Currently, I’m translating a very interesting project – subtitles for a movie. The interesting part of this is the fact that the movie is Russian, the “original subtitles” (that I’m translating into German) are Czech, and there is a rumor that they have been translated from the English subtitles for the movie. Unfortunately, those English subtitles have gone missing, so I am watching the movie in Russian, with the Czech subtitles (that are not timed and therefore cannot be used in the player) in a Word document, and guessing what belongs where. Not to mention that the movie is awfully depressing (I wonder if there are Russian comedies?), as is the weather here.
• My knee (I don’t know if I mentioned this here, but I had a little skiing accident back in March) is getting better, but it’s still not 100% fit :(
• I found a very useful little program/website which makes installing new systems so much easier (with the downloading issues I’m trying to fix, I wouldn’t call it faster, but you don’t have to sit in front of your computer for the installation, which is a good thing): www.ninite.com