Regensblog

Good evening from Iasi! After dinner tonight, I took the camera out with the Gorillapod for some night shots. You can click on them to make them bigger.

Now I’m tired, so I’m going to bed. Big day tomorrow and the rest of the week, actually. You might not hear (see?) from me again here until after I get home on Saturday.

Prior to my trip to Romania tomorrow, I wanted to get a haircut. I’d been having very good luck at C&M on the corner of Am Römling and Ludwigstraße and their 11 € haircuts. Two quick, thorough, and very professional haircuts in a row done by the pleasant, if weird-looking Matthias, had me convinced I’d found a new favorite barber.

Third time wasn’t a charm, however. Matthias was busy with other clients (and I don’t know how to ask for a particular friseur — or whether they even do that, since this place works on the take-a-number FIFO format). I got a pleasant young-looking woman. I asked for a trim down to my usual 6mm and I thought all was well until suddenly another stylist came over to exlain that we had a problem. It seems the original one had cut a swath shorter than 6mm into the back of my head down by the neck and the only way to fix it was to cut that section of my hair down to 3mm or so and fade it longer up into the 6mm on the rest of my head. All staff members were apologetic and immediately offered to do this cut on the house due to their mistake.

But that looked dumb. So I had them do the whole head (barring the top) down to 3mm. OK, I like it short. But that made my beard look dumb. Once I got home, I tried trimming my beard so that it was shorter than the hair on my head, but that also looked less than optimal. So I trimmed the whole beard off (see below). I am kind of sad to see it go and return to the daily or nearly daily shaving regimen.

So, two points to ponder for the future:

1. Should I go back there again next time? The first two haircuts were brilliant. The third one less so, but they did do their best to make up for it.
2. Can you believe I wrote three whole paragraphs about my own personal grooming?

This is the reason we tell everyone to come visit in May.

I took both of these shots from the outdoor section at the Kona cafe on Sankt-Kassians-Platz. I’m already in full-on t-shirt, shorts, and sandals mode, but as you can see, not everyone else is.

Last night Sarah and I kicked off the Biergarten season with ol’ work buddy Tim from Troy (he was in town on a trip). Traditionally Sarah and I like to get the spring started with the Alte Linde, since it has such a nice view of the city from across the river and the food is good and the atmosphere is nice — even during the World Cup in 2006 (see here). Editor’s note: if you’re lucky, you’ll get the middle-aged waiter dude with an earring. He’s a good sport. If you’re not, you’ll get the elderly shrew. She’s not.

Today, having the day off, we went out grocery shopping together and I smelled and spotted these flowers (couldn’t miss them really) on the way towards the train station:

These are some pretty cool computers. This is Matthias and me, checking out the PhotoBooth functionality at our local authorized Apple reseller.

Careful, this is going to get geeky.  I’ll try to do something less so toward the end to round it out.

Been a long time since I sat down here to post. Works been beatin’ me up pretty hard. But I had a short chat with the new Bossmann today (don’t get those very often) and it was inspiring.

If anything can motivate me to post on my blog, however, it’s something geeky. Like ScribeFire. I was perusing Kimsal’s brother’s blog after coming home this evening from watching “Unsere Erde” at Cinemax this evening with Sarah & Tammy & Matthias.  I noticed a little “powered by ScribeFire” thingie in his post and was immediately intrigued.

So much so that I’m using ScribeFire to write this very post.  It appears to be a built-into-your-browser WYSIWYG (and plain text for those of us who do their own HTML) editor offering compatibility with different popular blog formats (WordPress, Blogger, etc.) through your blog’s API.  It’s got lots of integration with other web services out there, such as del.icio.us bookmarks and technorati tagging and neat stuff like that.  I don’t use those things too terribly much (but maybe I should).  I suppose its biggest perk is offering a standardized — and yet usable — GUI for me the writer, no matter how many different blogging services I use.  It’s true; I only have one, but I have hope that I’ll discover that this nifty Firefox add-on will let me skirt the awful comments form on Blogger-hosted blogs.  Those things are so awful.  I thought Google tried not to be evil — seems like they missed the boat there.

And now for the less geeky part…here’s one of the pro photos from my sister’s wedding in December.  I’m really looking forward to seeing the rest of them.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I was going to surprise Sarah at the airport, but I blew it. Either way, I’m taking Thursday off, and it will be well-deserved.

The rosiness of in the face here is indicative of the windchill at…I dunno, 30km/h or so on my bike at home at night.

Dudswise: I’d say I’m coming into my own here. Went naturel on the hair today due to the helmet wearings. Probably won’t tomorrow as it’s kind of an important day with a pretty big presentation in front of a critical audience - I’ll need the extra hair goop again. Fortunately, I keep a stash at work right next to my emergency deodorant.

Got several compliments on this outfit today.

Of course, I was posing like this all day too, so that may have influenced it.

…but I think even I can admit that I need to downsize my shirts a little. Also these pants are at least a size too big, but I don’t have any other black ones.

Some colleagues and I traveled to Ingolstadt today and on average, we were pretty over-dressed. Felt actually kind of nice to be in that position for once.

Oh, and pardon the hair. I put too much goop in it this morning in a bit of a rush and it actually looked OK most of the day. Just a little goofy by the time I got home this evening.

The blurriness here was an unintended touch of authenticity after a particularly long day.

G’nite.