Auswanderer Quatsch

One year, 365 pictures and a whole baggage of experiences added on my back later, I’m back, proud to have finally closed this important project that flew me across that strange year 2011. The year was incredible for a lot of personal reasons, top of which stands of course MlleV. becoming MrsV. All in all, I’m happy to have this year summarized in 365 pictures.

This project was really interesting. I started out bluntly, still a bit dozed from the new-years-eve party, maybe not fully realizing what I was putting myself into. But retrospectively, what I really wanted to do with this 365 was to try and get rid of the “opportunist-photographer” in me, the one that takes pretty landscape pictures and frame nice monuments and instead start improvising with less funky subjects, start being creative.

Somebody once told me something like An amateur photographer can take marvelous pictures, sometimes way better than a professional but mostly out of sheer luck. A professional will know how to create such an image and his pictures will be at least constantly good. This is exactly what – I think – the 365 is doing to its photographer: put him in a state of mind where he doesn’t know anymore what he should or could take ; where every object around him has been taken once and he doesn’t see his next move anymore. Then he will start considering new angles, make new things out of old and start being creative, not just opportunist.

The first wording I used for my intro was “… this important project I decided to inflict on myself”. While this sentence was too harsh – and that’s why I removed it - I wanted to use “inflict” because it was not fun everyday. Some days I had ideas, some days I went to bed to suddenly get up again realizing in a flash that I did not have my picture yet. And sometimes I went to bed to realize it’s past-midnight already ; so I posted a picture taken a couple days before or one I took the next day.

On the other hand, at many occasions I reached this state of mind I was looking for, a real lust to look around through those photographer eyes and see the world as a succession of potential pictures. When this happened, I surfed on this wave for as long as I could and gathered as many images as possible. But more often than not, it was the multiple reminders I set for myself that were the ones to push this state of mind on me. I wish I had created a little permanent studio in our flat to be able to play with light on a subject I have always at hand (myself) like a lot of 365-ers do.

This 365 made me realize some things about my cameras as well. I barely took the reflex out “just not convenient enough”. I used the Lx3 quite a lot, but not as much as my iPhone. This is really something that stuck me hard: mobile photography has helped me express myself throughout the whole day, take pictures of irrelevant day-to-day-things and try to make something out of it. On the other hand, I used a lot of filters from Camera+, not always for the best (huhu what did I have in mind taking such a pic?). I guess the camera will be a very important part of the decision-making process for my next phone after all (for the french readers, lense.fr published a very nice article going in this direction called “Photophonie, les 5 lecons à en tirer“).

Well, that wraps it up for 2011 ; you can have a look at all the pictures on flickr. Obviously I didn’t start a 365 for 2012, but I’ll be sure to plan a PADC with Ghusse this year. Thanks for watching, thanks for commenting, thanks for reading and happy photo-crafting in 2012!

I recently resigned from my position at Siemens and yesterday way my last day on the job. In order for my former colleagues to keep in touch with me, I updated my about.me page to sum up my profiles and contact information.

It sure feels weird to leave all those colleagues and friends behind. But I’m really looking forward to my new job as I’ll be joining a small – human size – company beginning of February, coming back to the core of my business, creating software solutions full time myself.

To all my former RO colleagues still working on our Radiotherapy solutions, I wish good luck and a strong back wind for the time being. The world is damn small, we’ll sure see each other again!

After reading so much about the current economical crisis in the news and in great posts like this one (in french) from Franck about the original purpose of companies and their relation to the stock market, I finally decided to take this book (Vingt Propositions pour Réformer le Capitalisme) – that was gathering dust on my shelf since 2009 – with us on our trip to the Caribeans and read it cover to cover in a blink.

This book takes a very interesting approach of summarizing the state of the financial world, try to explain why it evolved this way and suggest 20 ideas that could solve as many weak points of the system. Written at the end of the first subprimes crisis in 2008, I found particularly interesting to read it now, 3 years later, as we are still stuggling with the aftermaths of this major crisis.

Beside learning tons about the stock market itself and discovering a world that makes way more sense than I ever thought (don’t misunderstand me, I still think – like Frank – that the stock market is answering the wrong question and endangering the system as a whole in the process but still), it gave me some confirmation on the fact that without ethics, nothing will change. Most of the ideas proposed make sense but would be very hard to put into place.

Some are almost impossible to put in place without a “world governing institution” like for instance the interdiction of trading insurances for products that you don’t own or (and this is one of their methaphores) “create new floors (insurances) on a building in order to make it safer when the base (the products insured) is still completely shaky (subprimes)”.

Another example could be the idea of creating a very stable market enforced with hard rules where the risk and the return on investment would be low to oppose to the wild-wild-rest. This sure sounds very nice, but that would be assuming that the investors would accept to forget about their double digit growth rates and understand the ethics behind such a preventive approach and not try to bend it as soon as the authorities would turn their back.

Another very interesting point of the book was to make parallels between the different bubbles we had and try to make out some patterns of the history. I was astonished to hear that the 1929 and the subprimes crises had very similar triggers: buying actions/houses with only very little (~10%) personal income and relying on the marketgrowth to cover for the rest. And bytheway, I wonder how this was not flagged as a Ponzi-like scheme from the begining…

I also really liked the construction of the book, going from very precise financial points to market dynamics, global organization and finally to ethics. The book has a very good lexicon to which you can refer every other page to get the meaning of those awkward financial terms.

All in all, this was a very interesting reading, so interesting that I noted a few points I need to investigate back home. I also would be very interested in hearing about the impressions of 2011 crisis by the same authors as some of their proposals were already partially implemented and some that they did not dare wish started to move as well (at EU level for instance). And least but not last, I might now be able to understand what my friend Joe is doing :] and what he means when he “computes the VaR of his energy package at maturity based on a risk-gaussian distribution in order to smurf his smurf in the smurf” (I know, this sentence does not make any sense).

Decisive point anyway, this is a french book so… nothing for my non-french-speaking readers :[

I have rarely seen a population so happy to party. Music come out of every window (sometimes very loud music even). People parc litterally meters away from the sea, open their doors and let the radio scream whatever zouk, reggae or mix of both currently runs on it (which leads to obvious music contests).Today was the national day on StLucia. At 6:00 am, a truck loaded with loud speakers parked at one end of the town and turned the music ON (and damn loud), only to turn it OFF late in the afternoon.

Whatever the time of the day, people are sitting in the streets, listening to the music, singing along while smoking (including marijuana), drinking ; simply having fun. Of course they will not miss any opportunity to whistle when you walk by and engage the conversation ; either to inquire how your trip is doing and if you need anything… or to offer to sell you the “best ganja in the world that if you don’t smoke any, that simply means you don’t like life because ganja is what will unite all nations someday”… Somehow – to make a parallel with my previous post – I dreaded those encounters at first… but soon realized there is nothing to be afraid of ; those big muscular guys really just want to talk :] and love to tell you all about their Rasta way of life.

At night, beside the dozens of people packing up the streets, enjoying the BBQs set up at every corner, you need to add up the cars cruising around. Cars are obviously a social status symbol. They are completely cleaned up, nicely polished, with shiny tires, often have smoked windows and in place of the rear bank you’ll find a wall of loudspeakers (again playinf music LOUD). Those monsters (oh I forgot to mention that those cars are either 4×4 SUVs or Toyota busses) are so present that at some point we wondered if people were walking around at all or only driving from A to B.

Tonight (every wednesday) is a special BBQ evening planned in town. Fish and scampi are on the menu… I’m looking forward to it, while at the same time wondering how it could be any different than all the BBQs we’ve seen sofar.

That said, off we go to the marketplace!

72 hours after landing in Fort-de-France (Martinique) and taking a boat to St Lucia where we currently are, I’m slowly getting used to the heat and already astonished at how much I learned about myself.

If Martinique looks a lot like “France in the Caribeans” (same stores, same roadsigns, same apparent way of life), StLucia is another planet. Gros-Islet (the town we stay in) is built as a melting pot of “full accomodations houses”, barracks and slams-like-tents all looking like they reached their breaking point half a century ago already. And to be honest, I had not pictured it this way. 

I already mentioned it when writing about my trip to Ohrid in Macedonia, I have not been in many countries where the level of life is so different from ours in Western Europe. So it is with my “beware”, “stay alert” and “WTF does this guy want” mindsets that I approached the people here.

As I said, the city does not look like much. But the patchwork of people that live there really make up for it. I must admit I have rarely seen so many people just happy to say “hello” or simply wishing to know where you’re from and how you find the island. With my initial mindsets on, I had the tendency to try to avoid any conversation… which was really sad now that I came to realize all this.

This said, I am now talking to people… and that’s truely the best part…