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 :[

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 :]

First of all, and because I realized how unspectacular the sand hill picture montage looked like… and because Mr.T (a colleague of mine) provided me with this wonderful “other side of the hill” picture! Here’s how it looked like from… the other side of the hill (warning: this post is sponsored by “Whining&Co” and “SelfCentric AG”). This hill came right after the second muddy-pond, which came right after the aid-station.

This now said, you can understand how I looked like when I finally set foot on some finally-flat ground after climbing the above-described hill… and how I looked like jogging down from it! At those times, the only thing I thought of was my running form, stance and the way I landed my feet on the gravely road in order to clear my head of the negative-thoughts.

Another place where MrT. got a shot at me was at the aid station in the middle of the 5km loop. Looking at the clown face picture and the one where I’m busy thinking “fuck this shit, what am I doing here” you can imagine those were taken at 2.5 and 7.5km… but no. In fact those were taken at a few moments interval… and the clown face is obviously the fake one!!!

After that, it was just running, thinking only about the next obstacle and my running stance. But just for the scenery of it, here’s my arrival at the end of the race, climbing up the very last hill toward the finish line… too absorbed by making-just-another-step too realize that it’s almost over :]

All in all, did I say the race was great? And it made me break the 10km limit for the first time since almost 3 years (but that’s another story to come). I’ll be there next year… if not earlier ;]