Back in germany

So I’m in the thalys. Going back to Münster for a few Days. I spend all my holidays in Paris, mostly with my parents and my sister.

Seeing for a long time gave us the opportunity to talk a bit about politics which was really interresting. I met my cousin Jeanne yesterday and had a great discussion with her too. She is working a lot for a burkenese(is that right?) association, and it was really great to get more of the African perspective. Everytime I talk to her I realize I should spend some time there. It is also funny to see how her studies -philosophy, anthropology and sociology- shapes the way she talks but also how she considers things.

Discussing with all of them, as well as recent books I started to read and the events that are taking places since September have made me realize, in a much stronger and clearer way then ever before that the actual avatar of capitalism, the so called “financial capitalism” is really our main enemy in tge pursuit of better life and just society. Somehow we need to get rid of it if we want the situation to get any better, be it in africa, china or at home in France or Germany.

I will close with a citation by Rawls which I find a very interresting thought:

If the responsability of keeping care of an object is not given to an agent, the object tend to deteriorate.

The citation is approximate. It is introduced as moral justification of property. Somehow it would be interesting to see what would happen if stock holder (and CEO’s to a lesser extend) were accountable to society (or/and there employee’s) for the well being of the company they possess (or are in charge of). That would be the price to pay to take profits out of it.

me meme has followers!

some good soul sent me this:

You can guess who it is … 😉

Don’t forget the rules:

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. (should be super-easy with Photobooth)
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture

me meme

I was trying to finish my unread feeds and relax a bit before going to bed…

via Eric

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. (should be super-easy with Photobooth)
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture

Redesign

Partially motivated by the last entry, which i agree is probably gruesome, this blog is entering in a longer phase of redesign….

As you can notice i finally found a theme that doesn’t have a fixed width. I believe that longer article are easier to read if they aren’t presented in a very tiny column. The next step will be to learn enough css to change a few think in the design. I’d like to switch back to a blue color for the title, somehow the red feels too aggressive to me.

Another good think about have more width is that i will probably be able to go back to larger pictures(like the one above). I’m still not completely satisfied with how i deal with picture. The best would be to have the flickr caption also displayed here. I’d like to reduce the amount of duplicate data i have, that is pictures are dealt with flickr, and everything that deal with it has to be taken from there. That way, every change is reflected everywhere without me changing every single occurrence.

To be honest, i had no clue how long the last article was until Philipp pointed out that it wasn’t possible to read it. I wrote the entire article on my iPhone, the first part two weeks ago in the train for Berlin. The second part last Wednesday in the train from Münster to Bielefeld. In a sense i am glad for the iPhone, because i would hhave never written such a text on my laptop, being to distracted with other things. But in the train, i felt like i had nothing else to do…

Well anyway i had fun writing it, so i will probably continue. Two entries i am currently thinking about are, on one side my personal pet peeve: copyright/intellectual property and another one on democracy, more focused on what i feel is going wrong in our democracy’s and why the label “democracy” might not be the best solution to those kind of problems.

Anyway if one of my hypothetical readers (i somehow hallucinate that i still have some after the last few posts) has some major (or even minor) problems with the new design, please let me know.

Pictures are back up…

P3160074

Originally uploaded by skl8em

Well i’m still not really happy, the presentation isn’t really great. But still, you can see most of the picture i put on the original post again. Main difference being that they link to flickr, and thus don’t take (valuable) space on my wordpress account. I’m not happy with the size of them, and i would like them to be centered, among other things… well it’s to late, maybe i will do it this week-end. Tomorrow i hope i can finally write about my last berlin trip, or finish another text i started a long time ago (thinking about splitting ot up in order to make it easier to write and to read). Here’s the link to the three posts:
Amsterdam, Hamburg and Berlin.

Test

As almost everybody probably already noticed, I haven’t been posting here for quite a while.

There are different reason for it. First I didn’t have the time for it, or at least I didn’t want to take it. Against popular belief, writing an entry takes a long time, qualitatively speaking roughly an evening for me. Second I couldn’t write when the time was convenient for me (you need a laptop and an Internet acces). Third faster and more mobile micro bloging tool became more interesting to me, especialy since you could “link” them to facebook and thus reach far more people without hassle. For those of you who aren’t in facebook, you can see what I am up to here:
http://www.twitter.com/skl8em

But maybe times are changing… I am writing this post with my iPhone and the wordpress app. It feel quite easy till now, I still have to check how easy adding pictures are, but this could be a new beginning for this blog. I am surprised by how much I already wrote, it’s really kind of fun 🙂

Here a few pics, an iPhone screenshot and two pics from my office I just took.

Back in Germany

Hey all!

It’s done, after an event less flight, i ended up in Muenster, the rainiest town in Germany. Anyway since i’m back and it will be easier to stay in touch with my family, i decided to change the orientation of this blog a bit and to write in English, maybe some of my SF friends or elsewhere will find it fun/interesting to read, or they might just be bored to death -shoo you! how can it be in SF ;)-

Catastrophe

Mon ordi vient de se casser, hiers soir. Je ne pourrait donc plus faire de post. (et sans doute non plus repondre au e-mail avant uin petit bout de temps. Le pire est que m,a presentyation pour demain est la dedans…

Déménagement

Je vient de partir définitivement de Berkeley, je me sent tout bizzare…

Je vais rester chez Peter et Emmanuel avant de partir pour New York. Ca sent la fin… 😦

twitter

Du à un bug bizzare, j’ai reposté cette entrée, heureusement quand la première est arrivé elle à été sauvegardé sur google reader, mon service pour lire les flux rss.

Une petite entrée pour vous encouragez a donner une chance à ce service:

http://www.twitter.com