As some of you might know, I installed the WPTouch plugin to make the site easier to read on mobile phones. While this is awesome enough to praise it, it now has a very cool feature that allows people to send me free live messages to my phone directly from my site 😎 So if you happen to be reading this from a mobile phone, you can click on the “Message” button at the top to get to a form for sending me instant messages:
Yesterday, some colleagues from work and me went to the Hirschgarten and enjoyed way too much food along with the soccer game Chile – Spain. There we also found out that a lighter can be 85% child resistant (look closely):
After the game was over (and it started getting cold, already) we moved to the city and finally ended up in that Australian Bar – the one which always gives me a hard time remembering its name – and found out that you have to be ‘croc-wise’ in croc country (sorry for the crappy pic but that’s the best I managed to take with the iPhone cam):
As mentioned in an older post (back from the time when I was in Japan and still writing in German), the weather in Japan is really humid and hot during the summer. Back then, I was complaining a little bit about it. However, at the end of my stay there I realized I actually started liking this kind of weather. And when I think about how the summer here in Germany was so far this year… yeah, I have to admit that more sunshine, higher temperatures and all that stuff would be nice 🙂
… I want to be in Barcelona. Or Tokyo. Or maybe in Reykjavík – anywhere else is warmer than Munich these days, seriously:
Yaay! After months years of waiting, the highslide-integration plugin I’m using here finally got a major update. The new unobtrusive way the JavaScript magic is now done rocks!
The old version hooked into the image uploading dialog of the post creation page to apply the “highslide” CSS class and the JavaScript onclick event to all thumbnails in content. That automatically lead to the unattractive situation that this purely technical, not-content-related class=”highslide” onclick=”hs.expand(this); return false;” got saved to the database instead of applying the class dynamically via jQery when the document loaded in the browser. That had the big drawback that this information would stay inside the content – even if I decided to exchange the plugin or maybe the JavaScript library itself! Another issue was that this hook only worked for single images but not for galleries because they are generated from a magic tag… I worked around this by writing my own small hack that actually used jQuery and Marc’s header-include plugin to attach the stuff from above to each image in the generated gallery. Back then, I contacted Christoph, the creator of the highslide-integration plugin, and proposed my way of doing it as a completely new approach for the whole plugin and that he could get rid of all that hooking into the actual blogging / content thing. He reacted really cool and friendly and thanked me for this idea. Unfortunately, he seems to be busy as hell, too, so the release of the new version with the new way of doing it was nowhere to be seen. 😉
However, since highslide.js has cool gallery features, I always wanted to improve or re-write my hack so that the viewer can navigate through all images of a given post at once (and also preloading speeds up the experience!!) I knew all along that it might not be a big deal, frankly, but I just never found the damn time to actually DO IT. Anyways, the new plugin is now out and all’s well, finally 😀 But still I had to customize it, again, mostly because I’m a dumb fuck that enjoys coding more than sleeping… 
http://yourworldoftext.com/defaude
You can type anywhere you like on this endless canvas. To move around in space, you can simply click and drag to move the whole canvas. I know it serves absolutely no purpose and is completely pointless, but I think it’s really funny to toy around with 😎
When I saw that video for the first time I was just left speechless. First, I could not find the words to say because I was simply stunned and overwhelmed. I’ve been thinking about all the feelings it ignited in me and want to state this: It reminds me of so much, touches something deep inside of me. However, this video barely even scratches the surface of the sheer beauty and all the nasty things I’ve seen during my stay in Tokyo! All the good and all the bad memories I have from that time have changed the way I think, no, the way I am in a very profound way and everyone who knows me knew that the original plan was to return to Japan for a few years – maybe even for good. Well, things turned out a little different and I admit that I was being resentful for not getting what I wanted most for quite some time…
However: I know my constant babbling about Japan annoys many people – especially those around me who would have missed me if I had left Germany. And I’m sorry about that, seriously. I don’t want to point out that living in Germany (or especially in Munich) sucks – not at all! Germany is great, Munich is even greater and I enjoy being here to the fullest.
I do, however, want to embrace this moment to point out that I’m really grateful for all the things I have here: Living in a city that’s (in my opinion) the best place to be in whole Germany (aside from Hamburg, maybe). Having a great job where I can actually do the stuff I enjoy doing while decently getting paid for it. Tons of good friends who’ve been with me through all my ups and downs and who still stick with me even though I sometimes step on their toes by taking them for a little too granted and by not acknowledging their friendship in a more appropriate way. And most importantly: my family is here, my roots are here, the very essence that I came from is here. Even though I sometimes enjoy pointing out how not-German or how not-Bavarian I am, I still am and ever will be!
As much as I’m thankful for my time in Japan, I’m even more thankful for the time here! And that’s because of all of you crazy people in my life
Always keep in mind that no one ever ends up where he or she expected to end up – it’s all about what we make of the chances that are given to us and how we overcome all difficulties and how we deal with all the setbacks that life throws at us.
