Auswanderer Quatsch

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…

The color leaves can take is simply magical. This weekend, we went for a walk/hike in the Frankische Schweiz (actually it might be already the Oberpfalz… but that does not really matter) to admire the splendid colors of the countryside in this season. As you can see we were not successful at all :]

About 40 min driving from home, we finally parked in the middle of nowhere, in search for the beginning of the trail. After successfully not finding it, we decided to head straight into the tree line and head for another section of the trail that should be higher up and easier to find. After crossing some fields and electrified fences, we finally reached the woods where the early sun peaking through the trees  made a plain magical atmosphere…

The leaves cracking under our shoes, the silence of winter, no car passing by, no other hiker (there is a lake nearby so all the people tend to gather there and avoid the surrounding hills). Just plain nature. What a blast.

The hike was maybe 2 hour long ; barely more ; but going up and down, over gravel roads and pathways, wood trails and fields… a variety of landscapes bathed in red tones.

This weekend marked also the first signs of frost and this morning we woke up to a nice and cozy -5°C. During the hike, all the shadowy places still hidden from the sun were still frosty and the zones warming up were displaying a very light fog that created some sort of surrealistic ambiance.

The last part of the hike, we decided to head directly into the woods and avoid a part of the trail that would be following a road. In this last wonderful part of the hike, we crossed ways with 5 deers… probably also enjoying a Sunday hike.

Some seasonal details…

I’m looking forward to next weekend :]

When I created my profile on runkeeper and ran my first steps with my iPhone strapped on my arm (in April 2010), my profile goal said “I want to run a half marathon again”. 110 (recorded) running sessions in 18 months later (one third of which in the last 2.5 months) I finally did it. I successfully ran the  23.5km back from work last Friday afternoon!

Now my RunKeeper profile says “I want to ramp up to a marathon… and beyond”. We’ll see how that turns out :]

I just learned that the upcoming electric car lineup of Audi will be called “E-Tron”. For the non-french speakers, “étron” (pronounced exactly the way germans say “e-tron”) means “crap” in french… I wish a lot of fun to the French-Audi-marketing teams :]

This tweet appeared today in my timeline and made me think a lot about the words we use day-in day-out without really having thought of their true meaning and the effect of their usage on our subconscious.

I like this idea of openly stating that the “mistakes” are the responsibility of the programmers, not some kind of insect, misfortune or destiny.

In many a company, “bugs” are called differently ; “defects” for instance. This is not better as it signifies something not right in the product ; no programmer involved in here. “Issue”? Not better… No, I really like the sound of “mistake” (I could settle on “screw-ups” if you insist)!!!

Now what about “Technical debt” which is in fact pure garbage that we intentionnaly leave aside, like a pile of dirty dishes that we know we should wash but we don’t. Naming it “debt” simply says that it will have to be paid back later (and potentially at a higher price) but it does not make it obvious that we conscientiously left it rot. Any idea how we could name it to make it obvious? Any other word that we should tackle?