Alexander's

Or: Why I just know that Aperture was programmed by a man

The new version of Aperture — my photo organizing software — is out for some time now and it brought a slew of new features such as facial recognition or geo-tagging.¹

The first time you start up the face recognition it takes ages to scan through all the photos, but after more than 10 hours all my faces on the photos were found and I just had to give them names.

The result was amazing and well worth the wait! Not only did it catch (most) of the persons in the photos, no it also managed to identify the important features and only highlight them.

This effect can be seen in the photo above.² Give me the face of the girl on the left and I probably have a hard time remembering her name, but from the shot of the breast — of course I know her!

Just to clarify the full photo actually contains the face of the girl as well, but Aperture thinks the most important part to recognize her are the breasts and therefore only highlights them.

This is why I love Apple products. They are not only innovative, no they go the extra mile to please the customers.³

As you surely have noticed by now the new blog is up and running.

Yes I decided to switch again! This being my fourth blog engine in 5 years or so, I don’t make any promises to stay with Habari any longer than any engine before.

Why did I decide to switch to Habari?

• Very clean code
• Nice database layout
• Easy and powerful way to create themes¹
• lightweight and fast

Drupal is great — if you want to start the next facebook — but I have a handful of readers, I’m the only one posting here and my brothers are not interested in starting their own blogs, so it clearly was overkill.

I’ve deleted all the old users — people didn’t log in half the time anyway and there really is no need to do so to just leave a comment. The old posts are imported² but the conversion script for special characters, links and pictures was hacked together by myself, so I fully expect many things to be broken. If you find something not working please write me a mail.

I hope you enjoy the new blog as much as I do. I’ll try to post a bit more often from now on.

Just before I left Japan a friend of mine grabbed me and said:

Alex, now that you have a really cute girlfriend you are not allowed to gain any weight back home! I don’t want to see you with a belly like a grandfather when you come back!¹

After coming back some of my friends commented on my newfound slimness — a BMI of 19 apparently is quite nice to have as a guy— others noticed this too, but preferred to call my great looks scrawny. Anyway I was quite satisfied with my looks, at least for the the first one or two weeks in Austria.

Here Ali here take a cookie.

Eva — my brother Georg’s girlfriend — is always looking out for me. So sweet, she is even bringing me chocolate covered Lebkuchen² with some delicious filling — really tasty!

I eat one, but then remember the warning of my friend and I know I already gained weight in the few weeks I’m back. Better cut back a bit.

Five minutes later Georg stands in my room, grasping my belly and exclaiming:

Ali you’ve grown fat! I guess now you can eat all the cookies you want, it won’t matter anyway.

Sure there now is a tiny bit more of me where before no unnecessary layer was hindering the view of my belly muscle. But honestly who cares I never had any muscle to speak of anyway, so nothing lost and a insulation-layer gained!

Sadly I do care. I start to wonder how much weight I really gained since coming back. There is a scale in our bathroom, but I dare not to mount it. No I have a much better idea. I’ll just shoot a photo and forget all about my belly and the associated problems.

5 minutes later I have an acceptable photo and a heap of chocolate covered cookie lying on my bed, but then I notice I can’t really put back in the box. Who want’s to eat a cookie that was already touched by someone else?

Oh well at least do not to worry about the cookies in the photo — I assure you they have all been liberated after their participation in the photo shoot. I’d never throw away perfectly fine food.

After living for one year in a japanese student home it seems like any room that can contain more than a bed and a table feels huge to me. With that in the back of my mind the hotel room I have here is still big. I live on the twenty first floor, one entire wall is a huge window and the bathroom wall facing the room is also made of glass. I can very well understand why this hotel has ratings describing it as perfect for lovers. I mean here I could lie on my bed and watch the sunset on my right or a beautiful girl shower to my left — at the same time — how cool is this?

The huge flat screen TV, the provided computer and the broadband internet¹ connection are a nice bonus. I guess just in case the stunning girl you share the room with is not enough, or you missed the sunset and are getting bored.

One problem for me is, that currently there is no beautiful girl in my room that I could admire while she takes a shower and the beauty of the sunset is slightly dampened by the air pollution, that makes the sun vanish, before it can reach the horizon. Luckily if there is a problem as serve as this there will almost always be a solution near by.

For example yesterday, while enjoying my time on Skype I got a phone call — at 23:00 local time. I’m not really supposed to get phone calls here in Beijing on my hotel number. Only very few people know which hotel I stay at and I told nobody the room number. Maybe they have a problem with my credit card — it would not be the first time here in Asia — so I go and pick up the phone.

Yes
Ah … Hello English?
Yes how can I help you?
Massagi?

It’s the middle of the night and someone calls me to ask if I want a massage? Nice service from the hotel.

Oh wait it’s the middle of the night, I get a call on my hotel phone and a girl asks me if I want a massage — no thanks. I guess it would be kind of hard to explain to the girl I’m skyping with.

Well such is life — full of suboptimally timed events.

So today I get home from a shopping spree² at 16:00. Tired from walking around all day and not finding nice cheap shoes in my size I just want to take a relaxing hot shower and rest for an hour or two, but my keycard for the room does not work. I roll my eyes, take the elevator down again, they repair my card, but just in case send someone up with me to check everything is alright.

She rings the doorbell to make sure she will not be intruding, opens the door for me and

Where do you come from?
Austria — Europe Austria
Want a massage?

As some of you might already know I’m currently traveling around in China. The food is great the air is very polluted and the Internet is … shall we say not as wide and unlimited as I remember it. Especially the part where Flickr,¹ the photo site I use for all my travel shots, resides seems to have fallen of the map (right along with Facebook and YouTube)

Since the webspace on this server is by far not large enough to accommodate my photos and I don’t feel like searching for a photo site that is acceptable in China, there will be no new shots of my last days in Japan or from my travels in China until I return home. Also no Facebook updates and I gave up on Twitter when my time was rapidly vanishing in the last few months in Japan.