FarCry

It is a bit surreal when you walk into a room where, just a few seconds ago, trigents and mercenaries were fighting each other and now everything is silent but instead of dead bodies lying around, they are walking, not moving. It is like as time has been frozen, and everybody has to do the same move over and over again but you can walk around freely. It feels like they could come back to life every instant and attack you. Surreal.

Turmbunker

If you take the S-Bahn in Hamburg from Holstenstraße to Hasselbrook you can see three of those bunkers which have sparked my interest.

Lostplaces: Luftschutztürme - Bauarten und -typen:

In Hamburg beispielsweise hält wahrscheinlich ein Großteil der jüngeren Bevölkerung die Zombeck-Türme für historische Wasserspeicher, in anderen Städten dürfte dies wahrscheinlich kaum anders sein.

If you know what they are you can spot them easily because round towers are an unusual sight and they all look the same. The bunkers are “verklinkert” and thus do not look as dull & scary as the “normal” grey bunker does.

Dogville

I saw Dogville on friday and must say it is a horrible movie, not horribly bad but what happens in he movie is cruel.

Lars von Trier managed to shoot an very intense movie, starring the ever so beautiful Nicole Kidman, using very few stage props and just one location. It is not a movie to be enjoyed but thought provoking, showing the dark side of man. Not easy to digest but I definitely recommend it.

Finding a good digital camera

For ~300€ incl. 128MB was not easy for me. I have now ordered two cameras from amazon, a Fuji Finepix S5000 and a Canon PowerShot A70. I do not need two cameras and the Fuji has a serious flaw so I'm going to return it.

Looking at the specs it seems nice, especially the 10x optical zoom, however once I found out that you can not change the image compression which results in (imho) low grade images.

After the disaster with the low image quality of the Fuji I searched specifically for a camera with good image quality. The Canon PowerShot A70 already has two successors, the A75 and the A80, which could have been my choice, if it had not been for the price difference of 40/110 €. It is a 3.2 megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom and uses CF cards, so it fullfills three criteria of at least 3 megapixels, optical zoom and cheap storage. Other than that there is not much to say as I am not able to use it yet.

GNU TAGS

I somwhat find the xemacs code for etags better, amongs other things you can specify a list where to search for TAGS files. While this macro isn't that sophisticated it covers my needs 99% of the time.

(defadvice find-tag (before c-tag-file activate)
 "Automatically search for tags in higher directories."
 (let ((file1  (concat default-directory "TAGS"))
       (file2  (concat default-directory "../TAGS"))
       (file3  (concat default-directory "../../TAGS")))
   (let ((tag-file
          (cond ((file-exists-p file1) file1)
                ((file-exists-p file2) file2)
                ((file-exists-p file3) file3)
                (t nil))))
     (when tag-file
       (visit-tags-table tag-file)))))