Oh. You here.

Das hier ist das Archiv des Oh. You Here. Blog von Joram. 10 Jahre Quatsch sind zu schade zum löschen, aber es braucht auch Platz für was neues. Deswegen hier einmal alles in statisch und fix für die, die auf Origin-Stories stehen.

Zur Technik: Suche und alle interaktiven Dinge gehen nicht mehr, aber klicken und lesen und sowas geht noch. Viel Spass.

I love speaking in public, mostly because I am a damn narcissist who finds nothing more enjoyable than hearing himself talk (out of all my qualities, this is the one that defines me most as male, I guess). So naturally, whenever I have the chance, I hop on that soap box and share my wisdom with anyone who accidentally stumbles across my corner of the internet.

This year, however, brought an opportunity to test even my narcissistic nerves. Every year, the Chaos Communication Congress brings together a large number of hackers and nerds to talk about computers, science, tech and society and every year I am in awe because of the amazing stuff the volunteer organisers pull off. There are usually talks and many of them are of great quality and hundreds or thousands of people watch live and later the recorded talks online.

Because of, well, everything, the congress did not happen this winter. It was transformed into a remote event, like so many other events in 2020, and while I was sad af about not walking through the halls of blinking LEDs, the online event gave me the confidence to do something I never did before: I submitted an abstract for a talk.

I chose the topic of scientific literacy, because it is very important for society to understand science and it is also the only thing I have some sort of expertise in. I read a lot of papers, I talk a lot about science and academia, so I thought why not feed my inner narcissist by spreading my wisdom?

I guess I was lucky that this year was strenuous for many people and the call for papers was not as frequented as the years before. I once had insights into the selection process in past years and there were dozens of talks submitted to the science track and the chances of getting through were small. This year, I imagined much less competition, which would explain why they picked me.

Well, I had my doubts when I received the email. I quickly got my questions answered, though, and was quite confident that yes indeed, they wanted me to talk. Yay!

Together with confirmation came a deadline for submitting pre-recorded talks – that was only three days away. And that in the week before Christmas, with no child care and a hard (well, German-kinda hard, so not really hard) lockdown in place. So I wrote the script, recorded my audio and animated my talk mostly at night, which was fun but also made it necessary to really check for typos afterwards. I got a pretty rough cut ready for the deadline and could polish it a bit in the following days.

While it was really stressful to get my talk ready in just three days, I was also happy that I could pre-record it. I don’t like giving talks in front of my screen and, what’s worse, with the approaching day of my presentation, I got more and more nervous – despite having done 90% of the work already. All that was left to do was to do a quick Q&A session afterwards.

Still, I was getting more jittery by the day. What if they didn’t care for my talk? What if I got stuff really wrong? In the short amount of time I couldn’t really test my talk with anyone but Tegan, who had some great feedback, but she is also my friend, so what if she was just nice when she said it was good? I really didn’t want to look like a fool in front of the hundreds of nerds that potentially might tune in on my talk, at lunch time on day 2.

What I came to realise was that this was the first time where I really cared about the opinion of the people watching me. In scientific contexts, where I did most of my talks before, I rarely spoke to audiences whose opinions about me mattered a lot, and I was also quite sure about the stuff I was saying. I had showed the experiments that I had done and explained why they didn’t work and that was it. This time, at rC3, the audience would know my social media, they’d know my voice and face, it would be recorded for all eternity and many would have their own opinionated views on the scientific system. If I’d fail here, I’d fail hard.

So the big day came. I was connected to the broadcasting team, heard the voice of my moderator but couldn’t see them (thanks to years of podcast training that wasn’t a big problem and I anyway tend to just look at myself whenever there are a bunch of squares with faces on my screen (I’m like a weird bird fascinated by my own reflection)) and then my pre-recorded talk was broadcasted and the Q&A happened. Luckily, there were questions, and nice ones, so my moderator didn’t have to come up with stuff on the fly and then it was over.

It was great. It went great. People liked it (so they told me on twitter) and so far, no one has debunked any of the points I made yet. Yay!

Which made this talk a late highlight of my year 2020, that wasn’t a lot of fun, otherwise. rC3 itself was a bit of a mixed bag of experiences but the talk was a lot of fun. Would recommend.

If you’re curious now about the talk, you can watch the recording here. My sources and more info is on this site.

I wish you all a happy new year 2021. Let’s hope that congress in 2021 can be in person again.

For years, I wanted a cargo bike. Cargo bikes, however, are big, expensive and therefore quite the investment. 

The thing is, I don’t have a driver’s license. I live in Berlin, and the city has a fantastic public transport system. I’m not gonna lie, though, the main reason I never got my license was first money and then time. During late high school, when all parents bought their children driver licenses, my parents just couldn’t afford dropping a massive amount of money on me learning to direct a motorised vehicle through traffic. 

Later, when I earned my own money, I just didn’t want to spend the time to attend a driving school, spend hours next to a guy who smells of stale coffee and cold cigarettes in a car and learn about the road sign for cattle crossing in 550 meters. Instead, I used my hard earned cash on second hand analogue cameras, which objectively is just a better investment.

It’s not that I lived without cars in my vicinity. My wife knows how to drive and drove me already all around Berlin and Iceland. I also enjoy being a passenger in many of my friends’ cars. Turns out, cars are really good at going places fast and transport things as well. I just never wanted to sit behind the steering wheel of one. 

(On a side note: I recently had the opportunity to play realistic driving games at friend’s place, complete with stick shift, driving wheel with forceful feedback and adjustable racing seat. It was sort of fun to pretend-drive across rally tracks, but also the sort of fun that doesn’t invite itself back into your life anytime soon.)

No car for me meant relying on public transport and bikes. Public transport is great most of the time and the rising “sharing economy”, which is a just a short-time renting economy, of bikes and scooters provided enough mobility for most of my daily travels. I lugged bags of groceries on foot from the shop to the subway and from the station home. I rode the train to Kreuzberg and scootered my way to my destination.

It was only when I discovered the fLotte that my life found a new purpose. fLotte is a non-commercial free service of renting cargo bikes in Berlin. I booked the bikes online a couple of days in advance and then used the heavy duty bikes to transport stuff. And I transported a lot of stuff. Garbage to the collection site, groceries, DIY supplies, and much more other stuff. 

Every single time, the excitement of riding a 2,5 m long pedal powered vehicle through traffic was met with the sadness of returning the rented bike to its real home in front of an organic grocery shop. I got separation anxiety. I didn’t want to let go.

I was briefly distracted from my obsession when my kid was born. For a few months I had other things on my mind – until I realised that I now had another thing to transport, and this thing is much more fragile than the egg cartons I acquired by the dozen. I wanted, no, needed a cargo bike. With a seat, a bench even, safety straps, rain cover and enough space to put a kid next to all the eggs I’m buying. 

After spending way too much time researching the best cargo bikes, we picked the second best and ordered it (for the best one I would have had to sell my first born and then I wouldn’t need the bike anymore, would I). Having never bought a car, I never experienced the joy of adding optional luxuries to the order of my vehicle. Instead of self-aware AC and leather covered passenger lights, I got the retro package with white tires and a two-tone bell – and an electric motor. 

Suddenly, I was propelled through space not only by the power of my ham strings and calves but also by an autonomously shifting electric motor. Is this what driving feels like? So fast, so quick, so effortless? Is this why people control cars? Should I learn how to do it as well? 

Nah. I prefer the open air and the potential to become fit if I ever turned off the eager electrical engine. Being propelled by electrons rushing from minus to plus brings its own problems. I call it being electro conscious. Us cyclists, we’re a people united by our struggle against the motorised vehicles and their constant demand for public space. But when I stand next to another cyclist at a red light, I feel the sweat dripping down my forehead. Of course, this is not due to my exhaustion from cycling, as I have an electric motor. I feel anxious because when the light turns green, I’ll zoom away, in my oversized, 28 kg bicycle, filled to the brim with eggs and beer, while the other cyclist, on their regular people bike, struggles to get going. 

“I’M SORRY!”, I want to yell, “THIS BIKE IS ELECTRIC, DON’T FEEL BAD ABOUT LAGGING BEHIND, I’M NOT DOING ANYTHING MYSELF, IT’S ALL IN THE MOTOR! LOOK, I’M NOT EVEN PEDALLING PROPERLY! I’M NO DIFFERENT FROM YOU!”

I never do that, though. I just feel bad for showing other cyclists that they can’t even keep up with a fat guy on a cargo bike.

Hey.

This is new. Well. Kinda.

It’s an old site with fresh(ish) new looks to it.

It’s been bothering me for a while that I have this site that I used to write kinda a lot on, diary stuff, travel stories, the occasional recipe, and then, with much less of a boom and more of a fizzle, I stopped. I have one (1) baby now and if you want to know more about my daily life please just pick any random dad blogger, because it is all the same for everyone. For realsies.

So, I decided that I won’t join the daddy blogger scene and retell the story of how important organisation is and how everything changes every other month. At least for now.

Back to my hitherto abandoned little web log project.

I don’t like leaving things hanging with no proper finish, so I always had this thing here on the back of my mind. A few days ago, I needed to do some backend modernisation so that my email still works (mostly to attract spam, but still) so I also touched the frontend. And boy did I not enjoy this.

From all the information technology (InTe for people who want to use wrong acronyms) fields, frontend development has to be my most despised area. Making servers work, writing bioinformatic code or just creating the code for an amazing app is fun and games (sometimes quite literally).

But! HTML and CSS are the Microsoft Office of coding languages for they are ambiguous, full of ancient traditions and mostly used by people who don’t really know how to the thing professionally (i.e. me). They exist for a reason, and it would be a loss to not have them, but using them is eternal agony. And both HTML/CSS and Microsoft Office have their devout fan community telling you that „it’s not that bad“ and „if you spend a lot of time with it you can do things!“ Well, they’re wrong, I spent time with both and look at me, not doing things.

I tried to remove the author section from the metadata field in the php files. I literally deleted all occurrences of any line of code that was linked to the author metadata. And voilà! It still says on every post that it is written by me. I don’t know where Mr. WordPress draws that information from. He must have a hidden stack of code that I can’t find (to delete random parts) and so I did what all sane people do at this point. I gave up. I hope you’re happy with the knowledge that the posts on this website that only I have access to are actually written by me, as indicated by the little author metadata blob.

So yeah, screw frontend stuff.

k. bye.