MICHA.ELMUELLER

Last year a lot of stuff has happened for me. This will be a longer than average article, I am aware that you as a reader might lose interest while reading. However, I consider it as a braindump of stuff I don’t want to forget.

I had been living with four technology-enthusiastic hacker friends in a shared flat for 1-1.5 years. Quite sadly three of them went abroad. The Nerd-WG was an awesome time for me and I often miss the creative environment of the days back then.

In 2013 I eventually managed to finish my Bachelor of Science and start with the Master program. I totally underestimated the safe feeling of holding a finished academic degree. Whatever happens now, I will always have a science degree from a german university. This is very comforting to me.

Work
I worked in several jobs at university. Mostly taking care of practical exercises for lectures. A highlight for me was to be responsible for the entire practicals of a lecture on web technologies together with two friends: Falco and Philipp who also write on the IOException blog. I am quite satisfied with the practicals and think we did a good job on setting up the exercises. We lay a heavy focus on the introduction of up-to-date technologies (node.js amongst others). I also worked as an assistant in two research projects. One is still ongoing and the other one is finished.

Publishing
From one of the research projects I have been working at, the results have been very nice and we wrote a paper on the topic: “Broken Display = Broken Interface? The Impact of Display Damage on Smartphone Interaction.“. The paper got accepted at the CHI 2014, one of the major conferences in the human-computer-interaction field. For me this is a huge success and I learned a lot while working on the paper/project.

Another publication I was kind enough to receive was the publication of a summary of my bachelor thesis, which was published in the proceedings of the Informatiktage in Bonn (more info).

Creatively I also managed to get a short story published: “The Autograph” was published in The Sparrow Anthology Vol. 7, a poetry and prose collection from the University of Ulm. It’s a real publication, owning an ISBN and available in the german national library. To be honest, I am not that satisfied with the story, it was a very personal piece at a certain time in my life, and now that time has passed I view it differently. That’s why I won’t link it here.

Travelling
Been to a lot of cities and events. Köln, Berlin, Geneva, Mexico-City, etc.. The event I liked the most was the Humitec Barcamp in Berlin. The city I liked the most was probably Berlin. But I also loved traveling to Geneva to attend the Open Knowledge Conference. There were certain mornings, where I would get up early in the morning, go to a Café/Bakery, sit down and order a bain au chocolat and a coffee. I would then just watch the surroundings, write a bit from time time, read a bit. Watch people coming in, grabbing themselve a quick Espresso at the front counter while standing there. I love to watch a city waking up, just to sit there and feel the flow of the city.

Short movie
Two stuck with me: Momentos is an exceptional example of storytelling. Forget me not stuck because of the photographic composition and musical underlying.

This extreme POV movie of a guy climbing one of the Stalin skyscrapers left me speechless and stands out.

Articles
A friend of mine studied Computer Science in a very intense way, received his Diplom and continued to receive a Master degree. He’s for sure one of the most competent computer science people I have gotten to know. However, he decided not to pursue a university career, nor participating in the software business. In this article he gives some insights on why.

This article inspired me to question my view towards intuitive user interfaces in a major way.

Blog Post
“Build your own summary tool!” is a blog post on a naive implementation of a text summary algorithm. Since I always believed automatic text summary algorithms are highly complex and need a deep understanding of linguistics, it was quite surprising to see such an easy algorithm yielding surprisingly good results.

Quotes which stuck

Pragmatiker bringen die Welt nicht voran. Sie verbessern nur die Effizienz, nicht aber die Effektivitaet. Sie optimieren auf der gleichen Stufe, steigen aber nicht hinan. Idealisten sind es, die nach der naechsten Stufe streben. Sie denken nicht ans Jetzt sondern ans Morgen. Ihr Fortschritt aendert die Groessenordnung, nicht die Kommastellen, denn sie verfolgen Visionen. Sie stellen den Status Quo in Frage statt fuer ihn zu optimieren.

Sie aber zeigen nur auf das was sie wollen, neuerdings unterstuetzt durch Gesten. Ihre Kommunikation mit dem Computer beschraenkt sich auf die Moeglichkeiten eines Zweijaehrigen, unfaehig zu artikulieren was er meint.

In the end programming languages are basically user-interfaces. You will get much better results if you think of it as UI design.

Intellectual property” implies the belief that people can own and control thoughts. Phrasing it “Immaterial rights” is less wrong.

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.

The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.

Best purchase
I was lingering for an Ethnotek backpack for a while and in 2013 I finally got one. I am very satisfied and have taken the bag on many journeys to many different cities. It fits my needs very well.

Best music/song/album
The Gil Scott Heron album.
The Oblivion Score, by M83
The Foals have been a highlight as well.

Inspiring
I found Giorgo Morodor talking about his collaboration with Daft Punk quite inspiring:

When I came into the studio everything was ready and I had three microphones and I said “Are they afraid that one microphone would not work?”. So I asked the technician “Why are you using three microphones?”. He said “Okay, you see the one on the left is an old sound of the sixties, one of the seventies and this is today.” “Who would hear the difference?” “Nobody”. So I said “So why is Thomas doing it?”. “Oh he said, HE would hear the difference.”.

Best movie/series
I loved the first season of Elementary—an american adaption of the Sherlock Holmes story. However, things are different here. Sherlock is a tattooed, drug addicted, narcistic, brilliant analytic, working for the police. Dr. Watson is a women who lives with him as a “drug sitter”, in order to make sure he gets clean.

There were several movies which I really liked in 2013. Standing out most are “Rush”, “The Place beyond the Pines” and “Night Train to Lisbon”.

Website
reddit. I visit reddit a lot, not (only) for procrastinating, but rather as a news/information resource on topics which interest me. These are some subreddits which I have subscribed to: /r/Bitcoin, /r/Calligraphy, /r/dataisbeautiful, /r/minimalism, /r/openstreetmap, /r/sewing, /r/typography.

Traditions
There is a local cinema here in Ulm—the Mephisto—this year it was bought and quite sadly more commercialized. Before it was bought and renovated it was a very small, alternative cinema showing mainly art house movies. Each Monday there would be a sneak night where a lot of students would gather, pay their three euros and see some random movie, which would soon be released. I loved the non-strict atmosphere, nice people everywhere. Even the cashiers were students having a lot of fun. With a friend of mine, Mone, I went there basically each week for about 1.5 years. Met a lot of people there each time and had a very nice time. On Monday the cinema would be full with people, sometimes pillows would be brought in and people would be sitting on the stairs at the sides, because the cinema would be full of people. Even if the movie was shitty, people would have a lot of fun. The atmosphere was very comfortable and the staff would often do little quizzes before starting the movie, giving away little prizes. After the quiz they would throw sweets into the audience and show some funny or dramatic short movie before starting the actual sneak movie.

Best photo
Of a persona? This photo taken by John Mayer. Of infrastructure? This german refinery.

Best photo I shot

I think, I’ll go with this one. I can’t objectively rate the photo, it has a personal meaning to me and I am quite satisfied.

Projects I did
A lot of smaller stuff, some articles for the IOException blog, continued the interview series there. Did some talks, some lightning talks and stuff. I don’t want to list everything here, but my highlights are:

Visualizations
When do students submit their assignments?
Firstname distribution at the University of Ulm

Software
A Twitterwall, showing a stream of tweets on a topic.
An interactive map with open facilities in Ulm (using OpenStreetMap data): oeffnungszeiten.ulmapi.de.
differenziert.net: still didn’t get around to write an elaborate article on the platform, but will do so in the next weeks.

Five years ago I wrote a little website called myPresentIdea, the idea was to give people present-ideas based on a short characterization of the person they wanted to surprise. At that time I sat down and searched for presents, which in my opinion at that time would fit for a person with such a character. For most of the presents I would also display a link to an online-shop (when possible). For the presents linking to amazon I would present an affiliate link, meaning I would get a little monetary reward once somebody would buy the product via amazon. I sat the website up but never really continued working on it. Last year I checked the amazon account and realized there were about 20-25 euros in it. What a nice surprise! At one point I had even forgotten about the site.

I took this as an incentive to completely rewrite the site, it was originally created in PHP using the CakePHP framework and MySQL. The codebase was not that “sophisticated” (e.g. no human readable URIs). Of course it wasn’t sophisticated, I created that project even before studying. It took me about 5-6 hours in its entirety to rewrite the codebase in JavaScript (node.js) using the express and jade libraries.
Actually the whole process was on two train rides which I took on the same day. I went to another city in the morning (a three hour train ride away), spend some time there and took the train back in the evening. I also ditched MySQL and migrated to CouchDB. It was very nice to see how little time stuff like this takes if you are familiar with the technologies. The technology stack I have been working most with in 2013 is definitely node.js, express and CouchDB. Followed by Shell scripting.

Society
The general Open Data activities within the university group we founded here stand out. I finally managed to update the UlmAPI-website with pretty pictures of all the nice stuff we have done (like the OpenCityCamp 2013 and various hackathons which we organized).

Illustrations
I did some illustrations for posters, ads, etc.. A tee I designed for a competition earlier this year was printed as a collection. Together with some friends I drew a comic as a birthday present for another friend. One illustration which I am also very satisfied with is this poster (click to enlarge):

Rough plan for 2014
As each year (2012, 2011, 2010) here comes the outlook. I want to contribute code to a bigger (>1 person) software project. I want to get a scholarship. I want to publish more of my creative writings.

On the technological side: I really have to get rid of Ubuntu, this is way too much abstraction for me. I want to have a $ top output, which I actually understand. Arch is the next step. Also finally I want to gain a much deeper understanding of “the Shell”. I consider myself quite familiar with Unix, but in comparison to Phil or Meillo I am still in kids shoes. Also I want to finally get a Unix-style mailclient (mmh) and start learning troff.

January and February have been very productive. I am having a good run right now. My sewing skills are getting better: though I am still struggling with sewing exact linear lines, I can definitely see my own progress. So far I have sewed various things: pouches with zippers/clips, a camera lense bag, a shopping bag, a bag for lock-picking tools etc.. I needed about seven pouch iterations before I finally got it right. I actually think I made every possible mistake you can make, from making the pouch way to small to forgetting to insert the zipper, to sewing the wrong pieces together, etc.. Also I took part in a very basic course on sewing a T-Shirt. I am very satisfied with the result and also very shocked by the amount of work it takes to produce a tee (~7 hours in my case). Even if you factor in automizing a large part of the process and a very skilled sewer — how much wage is there possible for people producing a 5,99 € tee?

Further stuff I have done in the DIY direction include building terrariums. For terrariums the idea is very simple and you can find a lot of different tutorials and ideas online (here or here for example). Basically you take a glass, put some stones in them (you need those so the water does not collect and foul at the bottom). Then you put a small layer of active chalk on top of the stones. This layer is used to prevent fouling etc.. On top you put a layer of soil, then some plants, then more soil and then e.g. some moss. Et voilà!

In February matou and I spent another day at a school as part of the “Chaos macht Schule” program. We adapted our presentation to include more practical tips on how to use the so called “new medias” (who are not really new). It is quite astonishing that kids within the age 14-15 use the Internet/Smartphones/PCs practically every day but know very little about what they are actually using. As a consequence there is an extreme lack in competence of using those technologies in the way they intend to do. Each time we visit a school we are told about cyber-mobbing incidents were the bullies were basically completely unaware of the publicity of their posts. The teachers reported that when they explain this to the kids they often times regret their actions heavily.
On the technological site, the lacking technical education shows for example when we demonstrate how easy it is to fake a mail. We have done this several times by now and the effect is always the same: enormous surprise followed by questions. This was not at all what I had anticipated! I thought this demonstration was already old like 25 years ago! The same goes for showing the Google reverse image search or internet archives like e.g. the waybackmachine. Often times the pupils have heard the phrase “The Internet never forgets.”, but from my impression this is only a phrase until we demonstrate how easy it is to get the state of e.g. a public forum from two months ago, with all the “deleted” posts. Even though we are usually invited to speak on the media-competence/privacy topic, we try to not only warn about technologies but rather also motivate to use technologies in a creative way.

On another note, I have participated in some contests. I got the second place at a logo contest of an institute at university, as a prize I have been getting some money on my studentcard from which I have been feeding off for a week or so :-).

Also I have contributed to a local T-shirt contest by a clothing store. You can see my submission below. I was given the second place here as well, which in this case meant a nice package of clothing stuff. I love participating in contests and challenges. Most of the times I don’t really care about the prizes and am much rather interested in the challenge.

As every year, here comes my retrospect for the last year. I haven’t written much lately. This is mainly due to a big load of stuff I had to do, but also to a lack of enthusiasm that I have been experiencing since some months. Didn’t get around to get involved in as much stuff, as I normally do. I am still not back on track but really hope that this will come back. I think the reason for this is mainly the Bachelor thesis, which I wrote in the second half of this year. I normally work on lots of different things, but my bachelor thesis (which is finished by now) forced me to put all focus on it and discard everything else. I am really not made to force myself into doing something and thus the greatest challenge was not a technical, but mere a personal one. But as I learned from Dexter: it’s all about getting back to your routines if you lost track of yourself ;-).

The first half of the year though was absolutely amazing. I traveled a lot, got to know many many different people, started to get more spiritual and collected a lot of new experiences which have deeply influenced me.

Most interesting art project wich I discovered
youarelistening.to is a website that creates the “sound of a city” using ambient music and online available police and fire rescue radio streams. Together with a nice night photo of the city this makes an incredibly cool working environment. Especially when projected on a wall via a beamer. This reminds me of a quote from Cory Doctorow’s book “Makers”, that stuck with me: “[…] This thing wasn’t invented. All the parts necessary to make this go were just lying around. It was assembled.”. I think much more cool stuff can be built from the stuff that is already existing out there.

Blog post
The blog post I enjoyed reading most was “I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and xmonad. They’re DELIGHTED!“. A father has started to introduce his sons from an early age on to Unix. The whole series is worth reading, but in this entry he describes how he introduces a graphical environment. Since he has just told them the basic commandline stuff, they have never even seen a graphical environment up to this point, .

Video
If I had decide for one it would be Where is your Wilderness. Even though, I have a different view on religion, I still can relate to the passion of this filmmaker to create an awesome piece of art.

The music video I liked best was Audioslave – Doesn’t Remind Me, a true piece of art.

Best Experience
I was living in one of the dorms before I started moving in with friends. Once I quit my contract there I had one month to bridge between the two flats. Several people offered me to stay at their flat for the month, but I decided to take this as an opportunity and live one month without a flat. Jumping from couch to couch, sleeping around at different homes.

I ended up spending most of the nights at totally different places of various friends, at one point I literally lived within the university for some days. This works really well by the way — you have everything there, showers, breakfast, meals, sleeping possibilities, etc. :).
However, the best place I stayed at was at meillo’s. He lives in a rural region outside of Ulm. A relative of his owns a milk farm, which resulted in fresh milk each morning and nightly tractor rides. Nice memories.

Best Decisions
Starting to live together with friends. The last months living with them has been A+. I can’t imagine anything, that would make my living situation better. Everything is 100%.

Kate got me into attending a Creative Writing course at university. This has proven to be a very good decision and I have done a lot of creative writing in the past months, even compiled a small shortstory collection with friends. Though, I am not yet (mentally) ready to publish anything here.

Lessons learned
It got clear to me that at one point the question with which technologies I want to work, shifts from a technical to an ethical question. For me this resulted in replacing my work environment with mostly free software and discard the MacBook. Also I replaced DeviantArt with my own MediaGoblin instance and replaced last.fm with libre.fm.

Also I can not emphasize enough how important it is (at least for me) not to wait for other people. If you have a project idea or want to start something, just do it. Don’t constrain yourself with other people lack of time/motivation/flow.

From a technical point I learned that a dedicated root server is really worth it. Together with friends I rented a server. At first I was not sure, if I was going to take a lot of use from it, but now I connect to it daily. I use the server mainly to sync repositories on different machines, share files, for usenet stuff, to host a jabber server, to host web stuff and to have a machine which regularly performs maintenance tasks such as cleaning my mail.

Thing that stuck with me most

The definition of hell: the last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.

Best advice
Since I am always torn between decisions, Elena told me to just imagine myself in a month, a year or five years from now. What would I then (in retrospect) consider the best decision? I have found this to be quite helpful.

Book I enjoyed the most
I really enjoyed reading the “autobiograhpy” of Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson. Although I have a different view on the politics Apple represents today, I can definitely identify with the original goals of the company. Even though I have been very interested in the Apple history and a big enthusiast for the last years, the book still was very interesting and offered many insights which other biographies were missing.

Coolest project
When we moved in together I thought it might be cool to have something that encourages innovation, encourages people to constantly bring new cool stuff to the flat. So for this purpose I have built a prize, from wood and plastic. A cup actually: the golden pineapple!
Each week we consult on the best innovation for the last week and the respective person gets the golden pineapple for one week. The prize doesn’t necessarily have to be given to people living in the flat, but can also be given to external people (which it has been).

Even though we can’t keep up with giving the prize to a different person each week, the rate of innovation is still constant.

Best photo I shot
The photo I am most proud of is this shot of Kate which I took on a trip through Scotland. The lightning has not been altered, this was all “natural” light by the environment. Also I am really satisfied with the photos I took for various insititute websites at university (see here).

Interesting articles
From a technical point of view I liked the article “Looks Like It!“, a great explanation of perceptual hashes, a way to determine how similar two pictures are.

From an emotional point of view the anger in meillo’s article “der taegliche kampf” (german) on the “modern” university education system is something I can greatly identify with.

From a curious point of view I loved the article and video “Getting high on Krystle” from the Vice magazine.

Podcast
I love the Pentacast, most notably I liked the Responsible drug usage podcast (language: english). Also I like the Soziopod (language: german), most notably the one on Karl Popper.

Best learning resource
The VI manual offered quite some insights for me. I feel as if I have a much more basic understanding of the tool, now that I have read through it.

Project I donated most to
Torservers.net is an organization with the balls to run Tor exit nodes. Awesome!

Most helpful tool
youtube-dl is a python script to comfortably download stuff from youtube, vimeo, soundcloud, etc.. Pass an URI to the script, get a video/audio file.

Photo
I found this photo a while ago and the shere intensity blows me away everytime I look at it. It shows an explicit birth scene and should be considered NSFW: A star is born, http://www.flickr.com/photos/krisvdv/5894742041/.

Music
I have started to get into music from the sixties and seventies a lot. It is incredible how much creative work has been done in those two decades! I have started to heavily listen to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and The Alan Parsons Project. All bands that I have known for a long time, but the music just didn’t work for me — until now. For the first time I have found an access.

Another progressive rock band which is more up-to-date and which I have become to like over the course of this year is Tool. The self understanding of the band speaks to me: “[…] we are … your tool; use us as a catalyst in your process of finding out whatever it is you need to find out, or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.” (Keenan)

Other albums which stand out: Fever Ray. The hours I have listened to this album: countlesss. Also my bachelor thesis probably could not have been written without Eminem’s album Recovery. An electronic band that I have come to like very much is M83.

The score I liked most was the Blood Diamond Score by James Newton Howard.

And at least I just have to mention Prinz Pi, whose music I have come to adore very much.

From last year
I had planned to change my setup to a much more Unix-like setup. I can report, that I have succesfully achieved this :)! I now use a heavily commandline oriented workflow. Tools that I most often work with include tmux, ksh, nvi, mcabber, vimpc (as a mpd client) and git (which I want to replace with hg).

The rough plan for 2013
I plan to stay within Bachelor for one more semester, earn some money, already earn some credit points for the Master, maybe get a scholarship. In the later half I plan to start the Master’s program here in Ulm.

Creatively, I want to get into sewing and music. Already picked up a sewing machine and am starting out with the basics. My big goal is to sew a (very simple) jacket in 2013. For the music part my goal is to finally get something started. On the creative writing part I would like to write a bigger piece, a book, basically. Have some ideas, fictional and non-fictional, will see. Another thing that has been bothering me for a long time is that I really want need to write a decent music visualizer.

For three weeks in August I have been traveling through Scotland with five friends, though not all could stay until the end. For the first week we stayed in Edinburgh to visit the Fringe Festival — a broad cultural event where the whole city gets occupied by artists, bands and comedians. Every last room is used to run shows and you see awesome costumes on the street each day. The event was very nice and the city is quite awesome.

Universities: We have been to the university in Edinburgh quite a few times and we have spent some days in Glasgow. I really like the look of the universities in those two cities, they totally remind me of the Harry Potter movies (see for yourself). Also I found Eduroam to be quite a valuable technology! Opposed to Ulm, the university in Edinburgh is distributed over the whole city — which also means as a student you have internet access via Eduroam in a lot of places.

After the week in Edinburgh we rented a small car and went on a roadtrip through Scotland. This turned out to be a really good decision. We would never ever have seen such a large part of the country without a car. So for two weeks we traveled through Scotland, visiting different isles and distilleries, doing a lot of wild camping and sometimes staying at various hostels. As we have neatly evaluated the perfect score for driving through the highlands is the Game of Thrones Theme.

At one point we left the car, took our tents and stuff with us and wandered into the nature. The nature! Beautiful, stunning nature! The law in Scotland in case of wild camping differs very much from Germany, in general you are allowed to camp wherever you want as long as you leave no trash, disturb nobody, don’t stay for months and don’t camp directly near a house.

Whisky. I already liked Whisky before travelling Scotland, but man, after those three weeks I am _so_ into Whisky. For me the best Whisky this year was the Lagavulin, 16 year old, Single Malt from the beautiful Isle of Islay. During our Scotland trip we have been to different distilleries, Lagavulin and Laphroaig amongst others.

The three weeks are filled with nice memories and the photos above only give a small glimpse on this time.