MICHA.ELMUELLER

This is just a personal note to me on stuff I have been thinking about for the past months. I always want myself to remember this. My life for the past few semesters has been on an amazing high. I haven’t been this lucky at any other point in my life. Everything is so good at the moment, that I don’t want to think about how it could get any better. I feel, as if I have constantly made the right choices for the past years. I feel, as if I have met the exact right people at the exact right time.

Most of this partly relates to having a social peak for the past semesters. Haven’t had relations to that many people at any other point in my life. In conjunction with the rather small university this makes a perfect social atmosphere for me at this point in my life.

I feel as if I am, maybe for the first time, doing with my life what I really want to do. I am very happy and I love each day.

A lot. A real lot of stuff. So much stuff that I didn’t get around to post much, but in the next weeks I want to catch up. First I had the last weeks to do with writing exams. For 8-10 weeks I have checked off several exams to complete my bachelor degree. Now I got only two exams and my bachelor thesis left. Oh man… the exams… too less time, too much stuff to get into the head. It is quite normal for the exam time to get stressy. But this time it was just too much. Not having time to come clear on things, not having time to process stuff that has happened. I really don’t want to go through this again. So for the last days I have been going easy to come clear.

Besides exams I participated in _a lot_ of projects. A lot is probably a heavy understatement. I am having so many ideas right now and I am actually realizing most of the stuff. Most of this stuff just needs a writeup or some days to finish. There will be a lot more posts in the next weeks.

Some notes on the last semester: I have been occupied as a student assistant for the lecture “Web Engineering” last semester. This was quite an interesting task. We thought it would be cool to have students work on a bit larger project. For this task we chose to develop a “Whistleblower platform” called UlmLeaks over the course of several assignments. Quite funny to look at student submissions. Somebody e.g. submitted a sneak preview list for a local cinema 🙂 .

I also took part in the RTMI seminar. There were certain things I have taken from the seminar. Most of all how to give good presentations: I have been ZENified. As I told Florian later I will never be able to give a normal presentation again 🙂 . I have deprecated the LaTeX beamer class for presentations and started using html5slides about half a year ago. Benjamin deserves credit for this, since I was quite skeptical at the beginning and had some discussions with him. But now, that I have spent the entire last semester using them, I am very much satisfied.

I also completed one bigger, paid project. Some people got notice of me because of the time lapse. However, I have decided not to get into such projects here. I don’t want to mess this stuff up with my personal views and opinions. Which takes me straight to the next point:

I have put some thoughts into how I see this blog. For me the purpose is to build kind of a timeline of things that are going on in my life or stuff that I want to publish. This is why some of the entries won’t probably make that much sense to you, but they do to me. For me it is quite interesting to look back on the entries and see how different things have affected and changed my life.
I also thought about what I want to publish and I decided to put more stuff on this blog. I think that if you are interested in changing something in society or on a technical note, you must give others the opportunity to access your ideas and take part.
I also think if you are really serious about an opinion, you should not be afraid to state it.

On another notice I got selected for the Nokia Hackcamp here in Ulm. Together with Juliane and Benjamin I developed an app called “OpenUlmApp” for the Nokia feature phone series within a week. The source code is freely available via GitHub.

Another side note: I’ve won a little photo competition by a local chair company. The challenge was to take a photo on a local trail which the company had built. Along the trail there are some chairs, cut out of wood. It seems like I was the only one who build a snowman on one of the chairs and took a photo of it :-). So, I have a pretty exclusive chair now. This is honestly the best chair I have sat on so far — love it!

So this ist just a quick update on stuff. More to follow!

Think for yourself.
Question authority.

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities – the political, the religious, the educational authorities – who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing – forming in our minds – their view of reality.

To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

—Timothy Leary

direct link to youtube

These are some impressions of the Anti-Acta protests that took place all over europa a week ago. The “surveillance”-camera which you can see on the right picture was set up by Simon (@taxilof). Besides the labelled cardboard he took his smartphone, attached it to a long pole and set up a live stream.

I just love this idea! It reminds me of how far we have come with technology. So far that almost anybody with a modern smartphone can easily set up a real-time video stream of some event. The internet really is changing things and most people still haven’t noticed.

Over 1.000 people attended the protest and I have the impression that this is mainly due to the facebook event someone created. The number of anticipated protestors heavily grew after people started to invite other people to the event: from 50 to far over 1.000.

I also tried to do some voice recordings. Got myself a Zoom H4n lately. Still learning how to use it properly though.

soundcloud direct link