MICHA.ELMUELLER

As in the last years here comes my recap for 2017. Older flashbacks can be found for 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.

Best Decisions
Taking a couple months off to travel. I am very happy that I managed to write a series of posts whilst travelling. This was the first time that I blogged whilst travelling and it was a different experience; whilst writing the texts the memories were still fresh and the feelings present.

Going Analogue. Haven’t had my digital camera in the hands since I got a professional analogue one. It’s a very nice experience to have this moment when you unwrap the developed photos, already having forgotten half of the motives. I enjoy this a lot.

Stopped reading news sites. I think this is a natural path following from the “I moved away from Twitter, etc.”. I feel that it does me better to not follow daily news. I also stopped reading newspapers a while ago (though “Der Freitag” was an excellent subscription newspaper, which I enjoyed for a long time).

New Interests
Good bakeries are few and sparse in Berlin. This is in stark contrast to the south of Germany where there are typically a couple dozen good bakeries in a small town like Ulm — each with a vast selection of breads and some which still bake bread in-house. I miss this and that’s why I have started baking bread. Overall, I think I must have baked ~20 breads in the last months.

In the past I was reluctant to bake bread at home, due to the worse DIY bread I have been served in the past. This DIY bread was mostly bad because it was made in an oven which wasn’t capable of generating enough heat to have a real, “proper” crust. It is possible though, if you get yourself a dutch oven (which I have). It’s actually quite easy and astonishing how little ingredients are necessary to make a nice bread. You can go a long way with just flour, salt, water and yeast.

University Life
My university life is finished now. Whilst I had the most amazing time of my life during my B.Sc., I couldn’t follow that up in my M.Sc. and the last semesters were more frustrating than fulfilling. Nevertheless my academic career shed out two further publications this year: My master’s thesis has been properly published, it has a DOI now and is published by the University Ulm (publication page, pdf). Furthermore, another project was published: Circular Selection — I made its code freely available on GitHub (repository).

Job
In the past I did a lot of freelance work besides university (some web development stuff, some software development and some media stuff) and worked in many different roles at university (mostly as a research assistant). This year I got my first proper, professional full day job though. It’s quite a different experience, but I enjoy that I now finally have a time where I can go home and don’t still have to do work. The same goes for weekends, this now really is my free time. At university this was very different and I think for my entire time there I never had any period where I had the feeling that there is nothing I must work on. There was always something to be done, handed in, read about, etc..

Books
I wrote a separate blog post on that topic again.

A short story which really stuck with me was “Trolls Head” by Christopher Fielden, it is sadly not available online though.

Best Photo I shot
I really like the photos I took in India earlier in 2016. I am also very satisfied with some portraits I took of people close to me.

IT & tools
There is no certain “new shiny” tool that I discovered and use now all the time, but lots of small improvements. I am very comfortable with my digital home. I still use Arch Linux and a version of dwm which I modified in some ways which suit me. I still have a heavy focus on the shell and my main tools are tmux, git, vi, ksh, and mmh.

At work I regularly do devops on linux servers and recently out of fun set up my own virtual server to play around a bit. I have kept it and use it for some stuff now.

Article
A theme which has resonated with me throughout this and the last year surrounds Artificial Intelligence, Singularity and the border of human consciousness/machine intelligence. The article “Why Digital Computers Can’t Have Consciousness” postulates an interesting perspective on why conscious machines may not be achievable with current technologies. Though I don’t agree with everything in the article, it provides an interesting perspective. This article provides an opposed point of view.

Outstanding Video/Trailer/Commercial
Valerie showed me Lillies of the Valley and told me about Pina Bausch. The video is really nice and shines some light on the excellence of this choreographer.

I think the Deus Ex — The Mechanical Apartheid trailer is done extremely well and paints an interesting vision of a not so far future. In terms of commercials I enjoyed the visual style and cyberpunkish vibe of the Yamaha – The Dark Side of Japan commercials. This reinforced my interest of visiting Tokyo in the near future.

Movie/Series
I haven’t watched that many movies or series throughout the year. This is something that really changed in the last three years or so. I still occasionally go to art-house cinemas, but quite seldom. In late 2016 I finally got myself to watch the last few episodes of Dexter, a series that I liked a lot in the past. I was very disappointed by the ending though (as a lot of other people were).

Two series which I on the other hand enjoyed a lot just in the last two months were the clever reboot of Westworld and the reality-based Narcos. I also liked the BBC adaption of the War and Peace series (it’s six parts). The score of the series is outstanding.

Valerie got me interested in Woody Allen and I watched some of his movies with her. I like them actually, they don’t take themselves too serious and often show an idealistic world and depict themes surrounding love. “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” was my favorite so far, I enjoyed that movie a lot.

Music
What stands out this year is White Buffalo, whom I discovered in Buenos Aires, and the electronic music group LORN. Both hit the right vibe at the right time and I listened to much of them.

Technologies I discovered
Stefan deserves credit for getting me hooked on the Aeropress and Chemex. Something I enjoy daily.

Honorable mentions
I discovered (by chance) that a visualization I produced is used for the title picture in a Wikipedia article. That was nice. Also some of my GitHub projects have gathered a number of stars (one even has a couple hundred); that’s also nice to see.

Projects
Finally set up a website/blog for Valerie: http://www.valerie-kast.de.

Got some older projects to work again. Among them is findsgut.de, a platform I created as a hobby project with some friends 2-3 years ago.

Set up a Unix diary: http://micha.elmueller.net/unix-diary. I haven’t announced this here properly, but I added it to the sidebar now.

Looking forward to 2017
What will 2017 hold? I don’t know, but hopefully more satisfaction.

My new year resolutions are:

1. Buy maximum 5 clothing items.
   I already did that two years ago and found it quite easing to not have the option of buying a lot of stuff.
2. Cook a new meal each week.
   This is also a repeater with a positive record.
3. Learn more Spanish and don’t lose all the stuff learned in South America.
4. Finish up some old, half-finished projects.
5. Phone more with friends.
6. Donate more.
7. Make one publication.
8. Get rid of more stuff, keep striving for minimalism.

As in the last years here comes my recap on the books which I have read. The last recaps can be found here: 2015, 2014. This time there is some redundant content with the posts on South America, since I already mentioned some of the books there.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell — Cracking the Coding Interview
I have used this book as a preparation for job interviews. The book does a very good job therefore and is quite extensive. I think it is also a relevant read if you’re not preparing for job interviews, since it attends to many problems relevant in computer science and software development (problem solving, software design, algorithmic design, …). There is a video presentation by the author on youtube which has some of the books content in it. It’s well worth worth watching. The only thing I regret about the book is that I bought the hardcover instead of the ebook (the hardcover is quite heavy).

Becoming Steve Jobs
Why another Steve Jobs biography? I thought the same once I stumbled upon the book, but got quickly interested after reading the foreword. The authors basically describe, that they have the impression that Jobs is often portrayed wrong in media. As longtime friends they felt it was necessary to correct this image. They write, that the war on how history will see Jobs has begun and that they feel they need to contribute their version.

I found the book very good. There is a lot of new information which is not covered in the Walter Isaacson biography, nor in other biographies. If you are interested in the person of Steve Jobs, the book will provide an interesting new angle with a lot of stories and information that are not mentioned elsewhere.

Benjamin Stuckrad-Barre — Panikherz
This is Stuckrad-Barre’s autobiography “Panikherz”, it was an interesting read and I think I have read it at a fitting time in my life. It also urged me to read more about Udo Lindenberg, Harald Schmidt, and Stuckrad-Barre himself. The book is quite long though and I think the overall work would be better if some stuff would have just been left out. On the other hand, Stuckrad-Barre leaves out anything related to women in his life. I see how one can argue for this decision (though he never explains why), but I still feel that the book would have benefited from at least some information or explanations, since this leaves some empty spots and yields unanswered questions.

Ian M. Banks — Consider Phlebas
This is the first book from his Culture Series. Hardcore science-fiction, artificial intelligence, interstellar wars, and space ships. I got interested in reading the books after having read that Elon Musk named various SpaceX facilities after things from the books. I liked the book a lot, though I was a bit disappointed by the ending. But overall it is very well written and thrilling. It reminded me of the Ender Series, though the universe and the characters differ in a lot of ways. I am eager to read more of the Culture Series; from what I hear the first book is sometimes considered the weakest.

Christopher Fielden — How to write a Short Story
Whilst travelling I went through some creative writing material of mine that dates back some years. I was surprised by the quality of it and decided to hand it in to some competitions. Whilst researching, I stumbled upon the aforementioned book and read it. It contains a number of writing tips and insights into the short story/flash fiction scene. This has encouraged me to actually submit two stories to competitions. Besides that there were still things which I couldn’t identify with in the book. My most critical point is that the author suggests to do market research when writing stories and adapt the story material based on that. This is a different approach than I have to writing stories. For me, the trigger to write something is never a competition, it is always a personal experience or an idea that I aim to put into the best story I can write. Doing market research and adapting a story for a certain audiences contradicts my attitude. Nevertheless, the book was a worthwile read. It was quite entertaining and funny, especially since the author includes his own short stories and details the work he put into them and how he adapted them based on the feedback of competition judges.

Rusty Young — Marching Powder
I got to know about this book after skipping through an old “Rough Guide to Peru” which lay around at a place where we stayed. The book mentioned the infamous San Pedro prison tours and after some research online I found this blog post. This was more than enough to get me interested in reading the book. The book tells the autobiographical story of Thomas McFadden who got imprisoned in La Paz (in the San Pedro prison) for international drug trafficking. Read the above mentioned blog post if you are interested in more details about this very unusual and infamous prison. The book is for sure my most favorite book since quite a while. It grabbed my full attention after I had started reading the first page and I am still flashed after having read it. Very thrilling. Reading the book was an experience as I imagine reading “The Beach” whilst staying in Thailand on Koh Phangan must be. I knew all of the cities, had been to most of them by now. Though, opposed to The Beach this book is a biography and not a work of fiction. I could relate to culture specific things he wrote and was totally stunned that all of this had happened here where I was, just a brief time ago.

Eric Clapton — The Autobiography
In my opinion the book could have been a lot better, since he plays his achievements a bit down and often not even mentions them (similar to Stephen King in his autobiography). Nevertheless it is a very honest autobiography and he mentions a lot of incidents which take a lot of courage to admit. After having read the book I started listening back to some of his songs. He describes how they came to be and I could relate to a lot of his creative process and motivations. In my opinion, Wonderful Tonight, My Fathers Eyes, Layla, and Tears in Heaven are songs in a totally different league than an average hit song. This is timeless music which is going to stay. The book also made it clear to me, once more, that at some point in the future I need to look more deeply into The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Grateful Dead.

Bret Easton Ellis — American Psycho
Valerie got me interested in reading this infamous classic, she had it on her reading list since quite some time and read it in South America (I guess the book is even more interesting to psychologists). During that time she always mentioned stuff from the book to me. I had seen the movie some years back and liked it a lot, so this got me interested in reading the book as well. The book was a very tough read though. Some chapters are quite disgusting and very violent and it sometimes was hard for me to read on. But I guess this is the overall literal genius behind the book: creating emotions such as arousal, disgust, and empathy in the same chapter. I am looking forward to rewatch the movie and found it interesting to read up on literary analysis and interpretation after having finished the book.

Philip Ackermann — Professionell entwickeln mit JavaScript
I read the book to get up to date with the latest developments surrounding JavaScript/ECMAScript. The book did a very good job and I worked through it in a short time.

Lutz Geißler — Brot backen in Perfektion
A book with minimalistic bread recipes and an easy technique. I use these guidelines for baking bread. Just a couple days ago I noticed that there is a CRE podcast on bread by the author (in German though).

Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, and Trent Hein — Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook
I took notice of this book after discovering a nice youtube channel (this one) on linux system administration and system tools. The book is really extensive and wide scoped, I have read maybe 60% of it — I see it more as a reference book.

Isaac Asimov — Foundation (Book 1)
Wanted to read something of the Foundation series for a while now. After talking to Oskar about Asimov he lent me his copy. Hmm. I have to admit that I didn’t get really warm with the book. I think this is due to the fact that it was brought to life in the 1940s/1950s and thus is a kind of “historical science fiction”. It seems somehow weird to me to read about a distant future where people still use microfilms and have the idea to create a giant encyclopedia of human knowledge (which due to its enormous size is only available on one planet). I can’t really relate to this kind of — from a today’s perspective — surreal science fiction.

Nizami — Layla and Majnun
I took notice of this book because of Eric Clapton’s autobiography. He explains that besides his love for a certain lady, this book was a heavy inspiration behind the song Layla and the album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs”. The book is very much a dreamy fairy tale, it describes for example how two separated, distant lovers communicate via poems which are recited in the population and each of the lovers recognize it as a poem of the other lover once they hear it. It was sometimes a bit too much fairy tale for me, but it contains some nice verses. Overall though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, if it wasn’t for the context of Clapton’s works.

I see her eyes in yours, darker than night;
Yet mere likeness cannot restore her to my sight.
For what I have lost no one can return,
And all that is left are the memories that burn…

—Layla and Majnun, Chapter 22

 
To summarize: Throughout the year I read 13 books, three of them in German (because German was the original language in those cases), the rest in English. Overall my most favorite book this year was “Marching Powder”, this one really captured me.

This is an article which I wrote somewhen in 2015 (or 2014, I don’t really remember), but was never sure about how publish-worthy it is. I decided it’s better to publish it now than to leave it lying around.

Valerie reacts allergic to nuts since her early childhood. By chance we found out that she can eat macadamia nuts a couple of months ago. There were other inconsistencies as well: one time she ate a cake and afterwards was told that it contained Milka chocolate — which contains a large amount of hazelnut paste. She didn’t get an allergic reaction from the cake though. But on all other occasions there was a strong allergic reaction when she ate something containing nuts — even if she was unaware of nuts being in the food. This goes so far that when buying ice cream from an ice cream stand, she gets an allergic reaction if the spoon used to take out the ice was in contact with a nutty ice cream.

Then one day a friend told us that she thought she was allergic against peanuts for a very long time, but then found out that she isn’t at all. The background was that her dad reacts allergic on peanuts and when she had an allergic reaction as a child he derived that she had to be too. For years she shared that assumption, until she ate some food unaware of the peanuts inside without any problems whatsoever.

So the small inconsistencies with Valerie’s nut allergy spawned an idea inspired by our university experiences in study methodology and experiment design: why not execute a double-blind self experiment in order to determine if she is really allergic against nuts?

We thus decided to do this. With Leo’s help we baked two types of cookies: one type with chopped almonds and one type with chopped hazelnuts. The idea was for Valerie to eat them and to determine if she had an allergic reaction. We used chopped almonds in order to make the two types of cookies indistinguishable.
In order to further mask the color and taste of the two types we put a large amount of chocolate and cacao into the dough. Right before we baked the cookies we splitted the dough in two parts and added the hazelnuts/almonds. Thus we could exclude a previous nut contamination of the “control group” dough.

A trusted third party (Leo) chose three pieces of each type from the resulting cookies whilst we were in another room. Leo then wrapped each cookie in aluminium foil and wrote a number on the foil. He noted the classification of number+cookie in a sealed letter and put the cookies in a box.

For the next three days we repeated the testing procedure each morning and evening: Valerie would receive a blindfold, I would then pick a random wrapped cookie from the box and feed some pieces to her. Whenever she started to experience an allergic reaction we stopped (and I ate the rest of the cookie). We didn’t want to risk a heavy allergic reaction.

We noted all her guesses and after the three days opened the envelope and checked against the true numbers. As it turns out she really reacts allergic to nuts :/. She guessed all of the probes right, except one were she wasn’t entirely sure, since she had to try it on short notice, stressfully, in between the door after having overslept and being too late for an appointment.

Went to the old american field station on the Devil’s Mountain in Berlin and took some black/white analogue photos.