Sidenote on Motor TV: Sabine Schmitz on Top Gear

My favourite german race driver actually starts to co-host my favourite british motor television show. And she keeps on dominating the main host. Around 10 years ago jeremy clarkson (old host) did a 9:59 in an Jaguar S-Type on her home turf (Nordschleife) and she was caught on camera saying “I could do this time in a van”. Long story short: She did a 10:08 in a ford transit, no modifications and on a public driving day on the track.  Look it up on youtube, fun to see a white panelvan overtaking fancy racecars and even motorcycles.

While filming the new season the new host Chris Evans jumped out of the car to vomit after a couple of minutes with her in an Audi R8 on a closed track. The new season might be fun…

I’ll still miss Clarkson, Hammond and May…

Oh joy!

If you're committed enough, you can make any story work.
I once told a woman I was Kevin Costner, 
and it worked because I believed it. -- Saul Goodman

“Better call Saul” aires in November starring Bob Odenkirk & Jonathan Banks. I’m really looking forward for Mikes Story! Chances are this will become the best spin off ever!

Internet and Tacos

Odo: mostly the same
Location: Hildesheim / Germany

I really enjoy places and projects who mix up different kinds of crowds by a common interest. It’s much more fun to have some political, artsy, whatever folks working on something together then just hanging out with tech folks. So when I read about a new project for digital culture and network policy (internet & tacos) in Hildesheim I was quite interested. When they asked for coaches for a HTML workshop on the mailing list of the local hackerspace I had a look at their program for the weekend and a plan emerged: Go there on Saturday to see some presentations and discussions and do coaching on Sunday. Hildesheim is actually a town of itself but being part of the Hannover metro area it’s merely a half hour drive from my place.

I’m working as a “web developer” for more than ten years by now but I never was skilled as a web designer and sticked to programming and using ready made widgets in the last years. So I actually learned quite some stuff about doing bare bones HTML & CSS while teaching it. Sounds weird but it was actually quite some fun and effective as well. Instead of preparing a lengthy presentation and some exercises the other coaches decided to just give a very short presentation of what HTML is and then split up into small groups and take it from there because we had no clue what kind of folks would show up.

My group turned out to be fast learning so their problems soon became to difficult to solve for me without doing research. So I switched from teaching them HTML & CSS to teaching them how to learn that stuff by their selves. Shortly after the switch they started dissecting their own works and other pages with firebug and were sifting through different tutorials to find explanations of the features they needed. It was a really nice day for me and judging by theirs works my group did learn quite some stuff.

I guess I will return there next weekend. Since they are only open for three weeks (up to the end of the month), returning there “sometime in the feature” is not exactly an option. And I’m looking forward to see some presentations about net art as well!

 

A day of marvel(s)…

Today I caught up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and after that decided to finally watch the pretext movies I haven’t seen yet. I was really hesitant to watch Ironman 3 because I loved the first two movies. And yeah, the third sucks big time, just as expected. Logic is no part at all of the plot, it’s amazing. Sitting on tons of totally awesome equipment Tony gets his arse beaten up badly and is only allowed to use a prototype and some makeshift stuff. And nobody knows why but the authors…I don’t want to get into any details to not spoil you the experience of being horrified by a bad movie…

On the upside, there is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I definitely liked Josh Whedon stuff before but I never developed that flaming love of a fangirl growing up with Buffy. I guess this still won’t happen but he really did an awesome job on the show. Every single episode is more fun than the whole Ironman 3 movie. No kidding.

Today I also tried maxdome.de the first time. 5€ for Ironman 3 in HD. On the upside it was available in English. On the downside, it’s not working under linux, the quality is questionable and THEY DO NOT OFFER SURROUND SOUND! Dafuq? Paying a fiver for the right to watch a 9gb drm movie for 48 hours is one thing but getting it in stereo is weird as hell. So please Marvel: Clone some Whedons to get your shit together and give the world a possibility to watch your stuff online without having to resort to piracy…