Life, Music & The Rest

I am so proud of myself. I just went running, for the first time in a long time.

I haven’t done any serious exercise in about a year and a half. In 2011 I worked hard to lose weight, and I lost about 15 kilos. Then our move from Celle got in the way, and my stepper broke. Now I got about ten of those back, and I have been thinking for quite a while now that I have to get back in shape. The other day I was on the phone and I had to get downstairs (one floor down) to check something, all the while talking. When I came back up I was panting as if I’d been running a marathon. So, I really have to get moving again.

This morning I woke up at 20 after 5. I started to think about exercising again, and then I was thinking, I should start shopping for a new stepper, and then I was thinking about the money, and then I thought, well, I don’t absolutely have to spend money on equipment, I just could go running. Maybe I’ll start that. And, then, quite unexpectedly, I found myself getting up at 5:30 thinking, what’s wrong with now? I realized I have been making excuses for not exercising for a really long time.

This is what it looks like where I started to run… Good thing it was still dark.

Now I just need to hope I can keep it up. I changed my alarm from 6 a.m. to 5 a.m., so tomorrow is gonna be the real test.

A few days ago, somebody in my circles on Google+ posted a link to this article by a female blogger I had not heard of before. She tells the story of how she and her friend attended an Open Source event and were harassed because of the way they dressed and how they were hurting the Geek Feminist movement. It’s well worth a read, go ahead.

While this attitude is probably stronger in geek culture and IT than it is anywhere else, the story she tells is also symptomatic for a larger problem in every kind of feminism. The only way any feminist movement can be a success is if you win the majority of women to the cause. But what these people are doing is counterproductive. If you tell women they can’t enjoy being female, let alone show they enjoy being female, you will not win the majority. On the contrary. You will put most women off. If you, the feminists, tell me that in order to get true equality we have to try and be more like men, then I say that’s the kind of equality you can keep, thank you very much.

After messing around with MyPaint for a bit I finally had the first real success, something that I’m actually proud to show off

That was based on a photograph of my grandparents’ old dog, that my parents later took over, when my grandparents became to old to handle him. It’s not perfectly true to the original, but I’m not sure it should be.

I’m actually quite proud of the result, because, as I already pointed out, I haven’t done any serious artwork in about 15 years. Even back then I hardly ever did anything in color; mostly I did pencil drawings.

This one is… well, unfortunately only about 99 percent MyPaint. I did some touching up in Gimp, because it was a little bit too light. But hey. Nothing’s perfect. And I don’t really see this as cheating, since the work was already done on the computer anyway

Here’s a song that Alan Graham wrote for his daughter and recorded for her birthday. This makes me wanna cry… great tune!

As promised, here are some videos with my old guitar and the new strings, the 13s that I put on yesterday. Sounds great…

The first one was even without the finger picks. Unbelievable how loud it suddenly is. Also, I tuned it down half a step; it’s now in E flat, so I’m actually in F sharp on this song since I didn’t put the capo on. That gives the guitar even more power. Of course, it also means I will have to play a lot of songs with the capo on the first fret now, but for this song it actually fits. It’s way more relaxed, the way this song should be sung.

“The Last Thing On My Mind” by Tom Paxton

Here’s another one, country strumming this time, also without a pick.

“You Are My Sunshine”

Trying out some new strings on my Washburn. I changed them in hope that I would finally like my guitar again. I thought I would after I put the Silk & Steel strings on, but that didn’t last; first of all, I couldn’t really play it with a pick or my metal finger picks anymore, and second of all, the fret noise I had been complaining about for a while was still there. Now that seems gone, and it also sounds great.

Other guitar players will probably hate me though… they’re 13s 8) .
Which, of course, is the reason I wanted to try them in the first place. I wanted to know if that would solve the noise problem, and it did. Before I changed them I played Alan‘s Martin with the 13s for a bit to make sure I can actually play them, and I didn’t notice anything. I mean, of course I did, but it didn’t really make it more difficult. He thought it was a good idea, too; he said, it makes it a much better guitar. I think he’s right; it has a lot more power this way.

As an added bonus, no one else will want to play it now . (Well, except for Alan, of course; he’s been using that size forever on his Martin.)

I’ll post a video as soon as I have time to make one.

I just installed the Beta1 of Ubuntu 12.04 in a virtual machine because I’m soooooo curious. Also, I spent about an hour on the internet trying to find out how to configure the buttons on my Wacom Intous3 tablet. And yes, there is a connection between those two seemingly unrelated statements

Since I just started to work with MyPaint, I’m using the tablet a lot more than I used to since I closed my business. I thought it would be nice to have those buttons (and the strips) available, so googled… and found nothing, at least nothing that worked with the 3.x kernel. Then I noticed that there is a “Wacom tablets” entry in the Gnome control center. Unfortunately, no tablet button configuration options are available:

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So, out of curiosity I activated the tablet in my virtual machine with Ubuntu 12.04, and behold! there’s an option to “Map Buttons”…

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Sadly, though…

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There isn’t anything to configure there, the button list, which I’m assuming should be there, is empty No right click options to add them, either, and I couldn’t figure out yet what the problem could be. Whatever it is, I hope this will get fixed by the time 12.04 gets released. It’s going to be really useful.

It’s been bugging me from the start that for my blog, at www.lazyteddy.com, I had to settle for either English or German. I chose German because I know a lot of people who would have trouble reading it otherwise, including my parents. Sometimes though I find myself not writing a post because, when I had the idea, I started to mentally compose it in English and it just wouldn’t translate. Now I finally decided on a solution for the problem… I’m simply starting a second blog

I really felt like doing some web designing again anyway; it’s been a while since I started something from scratch. I mean, a WordPress theme from scratch. I don’t do static websites anymore

There will still be a few tweaks and fixes to apply to the theme, I will do that as I find them. All in all, I’m quite happy with it. I didn’t test it in IE though… Oh well. If you’re reading this from an old IE and the design sucks, get a better browser . I’m tired of writing fixes to standards compliant HTML and CSS just because there are still people out there who don’t know updating your browser is a good idea.
As a matter of fact, I’m already contemplating a way to lock out IE6 users entirely… maybe by showing them a page that contains nothing but a link to abetterbrowser.org?

I also still have a couple of pages to write, so if you run into a link that shows an empty page I probably just haven’t gotten around to writing the contents

Anyway, bear with me while I’m beginning to get some interesting stuff together