MICHA.ELMUELLER

All Colors Are Beautiful installation at the SIGINT. Cologne.

For five or six weeks in May/June I have been visiting several people and various events around the country. I have been travelling quite a lot. Earlier this year I wrote in a blog post “Damn, I really want to travel more“. Well it seems that I am getting into traveling more and more. If I would not be writing a bachelor thesis at the moment I would probably be in Berlin all the time right now. There is just too much interesting stuff happening in the world right now.

In late May I spent some days in Cologne, mainly because of the SIGINT. Amazing city, I really like the fact that you can easily walk anywhere. The SIGINT was interesting, the event has a bigger focus on the political aspects of hacker culture, than on the technical side. The sessions I liked the most were “Feminismus für Nerds” and “Geeks und Depressionen”. The recordings are not yet available. As Denis noted in the comments the recordings are available here.

Ehrenhof at the KIT. Karslruhe.

In the beginning of June I went to the GPN in Karlsruhe. A much more technical focus than the SIGINT. Spent some days at a friends place, whom I got to know at the SIGINT. Visited the university there and took the chance to meet some people in person with whom I just had contact by mail so far. Interesting talks here where “Hacking Heterosexismus”. I also met up with meillo in Karlsruhe. He spent two days there and finally gave a talk on his Masterthesis and Mailproject mmh, a mail client following the Unix philosophy.

I really enjoyed his talk. A large part consisted of just showing how things are done on the Shell. This is why I go to such hardcore techy events! To see stuff like this! Stuff that you normally won’t encounter at a regular Barcamp for example! I have missed the technical stuff at the SIGINT a bit. What I am also missing in the hacker scene in Germany today is controversy, the missing spirit of revolution, of changing society big way. Where are all the Cypherpunks?! There are extremely interesting projects, like Bitcoin or Flattr, with a potential of changing things big time happening right now! But instead I haven’t attended a single talk which raised controversies! In my opinion, the scene currently is a little bit too “well-behaved”.

After Karlsruhe I went to Friedrichshafen at the lake of Constance (Bodensee). Benjamin has been talking enthusiastically about this Barcamp and how we should definitely attend it since quite a while. Well we did and it turned out to be quite good! From all the Barcamps I have been to, I liked this one probably the most, since it gave me exactly what I want from a Barcamp: inspiration and getting to know interesting people and projects.

There was Michael for example, a fellow who introduced his silent.li project: in the early morning he gets up, gets out and places a microphone in free nature. He then records the sound of a day in free nature. Animals waking up, etc.. The sounds are then streamed as an online radio program. Interestingly the average duration of people listening in was at about 15 hours, if I remember correctly!

I was at a session where we discussed “Digital Legacy”. What happens to your digital identity once you die? One guy proposed to delete all online content once one dies. I told him he should consider how interesting it could be for his grand-children to discover his blog in several decades. Just imagine how cool it would be to discover a blog which your grandmother/grandfather wrote in between 1930-1960! We discussed the topic for an hour and many interesting aspects came up. Just imagine what happens if your inheritance some day will be in a digital currency :).

Then there was Wischi from Munich. In the late evening I talked to his girlfriend about how I would like to try teaching live coding of music visuals to kids. He got interested in live coding and we decided to install (fluxus) on his laptop, attach it to a beamer and I made a walkthrough of some basic examples with him. He didn’t have that much experience with programming itself but became pretty comfortable with the syntax surprisingly fast. He asked if I would like to do a session on live coding the next day and offered his laptop. I eventually did the session. Hmm live coding is just too much fun, I would love to do more in this direction. But I have to cut stuff short at the moment to concentrate on the thesis. Damn, it is really hard for me to keep back from all those interesting things out there.

However, I just couldn’t keep back from some stuff. With matou I filmed a flashmob by the local Amnensty group. The video is online here. I also stayed in Tübingen for two days. Some friends, who are apprentices at the SWR, were shooting a short film there. Quite interesting to see such a project. Took two lessons from this: 1) Get an external LCD for the 5D as soon as possible. 2) A good storyboard is incredibly helpful. They had a detailed storyboard with the duration of each scene, camera angles, field of view, etc.. This made things *a lot* easier. We also did some filming in the university of Tübingen and used the studios there to dub the voices. Damn, the dubbing really gives the whole thing a much more professional touch. Once you see the difference afterwards, you realize that the audio of a film is at least as important as the images themselves.

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