Yesterday. By mid-morning I was devastated, by mid-afternoon hopeless, by late evening fully restored.
I was invited – in my role as sub-editor at Weight Watchers Magazine Germany – to attend a press day at the new Spa in Bad Ems (bit like Bath Spa, with the hottest thermal springs in Germany, and you [...]
I’m going for another change in my life, and seeing that I haven’t updated this blog on the last change, here’s what’s been happening lately. With the various family illnesses I was dealing with taking up too my time I stopped doing a lot of the ‘visionary’, ‘community’ and basically ‘free’ work I had been [...]
Recently, on discussion on a forum for Germans in the UK I’m a member of. A thread about advice on where to go on a family holiday in October.
All the usual spots were mentioned and anecdotes were told. People’s concerns for personal safety and personal enjoyment were voiced. Egypt was voted against because of [...]
tl;dr version: It celebrates balls, bullshit, blagging and brashness over substance and skills.
Long, boring version: I don’t know if I have much of a German perspective anymore, seeing that I haven’t really lived there in a long time. But I did go through an educational system where apprenticeships were a part of the landscape [...]
J just walked me through what Youtube is like since their housecleaning a few months ago.
For that he had to log out of his account so his subscriptions wouldn’t show. He then showed me how the various channels only showed popular videos, even if that meant that they were ancient. Even the popular video [...]
Another thing J and I talked about.
J really doesn’t like the idea of paying for access to social networks (app.net). When I gave him the usual ‘if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product’ he came out with this:
Email works across all platforms and systems, yet nobody profits from this. [...]
Yesterday my son (I’ll call him J, as that’s the first letter of his name) told me about something he is concerned about: Some Minecraft player had gotten himself a name as a great redstone engineer and was now influencing Mojang policy, while J considered this person’s actual skills to be ‘mediocre at best’ (his [...]
I love reading. Spent my childhood going to the library, getting 3 to 5 books out every couple of weeks. Dumas and Jules Verne and Lem and Merle and Asimov and loads more.
And, again and again, a series of books which will be completely unknown to anyone who doesn’t read German – two series [...]
I’m a child of the 80s, and Nik Kershaw has been one of the musicians I’ve followed through the years.
Nik’s new record is out and I’m watching the marketing campaign around it.
As much as I love Nik, the whole thing leaves me stone cold, so clearly I need to write a post about [...]
I can be a very critical person. I try not to be, I know it’s not a nice quality, and I want to apologise for being it. But there are situations where you care and you’re right. Yes you could keep quiet to not create friction. But you care enough to speak out. This is [...]
