Well, this is a wordy headline. But if you are running into this problem – like I did – you might search exactly for this and this is called effective seo or something. Here is the premise: You are using Vagrant, like any self-respecting developer would do and you also have soft spot for JetBrains products, i.e. PhpStorm, then you might want to start and stop vagrant directly from your beloved IDE. As you should! You paid good money to be spared from entering commands into a terminal.
Continue reading
Author: Daniel Röhrig
German eBook – Auf dem Zahnfleisch durch Europa
In 2008, my girlfriend of that time (coincidentally my wife at the moment) and I decided to go on a little adventure of our own. We bought two Interrail tickets and vowed to see as much of Europe as humanly possible within the next four weeks. It was a disaster. The good kind. A disaster I will tell my children about, like “In 2008 I almost killed your mother by accident, by trying to catch a train. And then again by catching a wave with my body board! Oh, fun times…”
Continue reading
Mokamentary Icon Theme
I am an elementary OS fanboy. There. I admit it. Sure, it is always a bit behind most of the other Ubuntu derivatives, as it is built upon the last lts-release, but what it lacks in shiny new features, it makes up for in pure beauty and elegant design. That is, except for the application icons.
Continue reading
A Hasty Retreat
You might have noticed the lack of new content here (all three of you). It is not the usual loss of interest that comes so often after the initial rush of writing your own blog has faded. It’s because I had to leave the US of A on a pretty short notice. Like a four-day-notice. Contradictory to popular belief I wasn’t kicked out by the authorities after they have found about my “secret hobby”*. I got sick, my condition worsened and I wanted to get home to receive the treatment I needed, in the environment that I felt comfortable in. Besides that, as I mentioned here, I didn’t want to single-handedly bring down my insurance company with outrageous bills. It’s been a couple of very rough months, not only for me but also for the people around me. Some folks claim it’s because of Saturn being in the house of Ariel the Mermaid or something but I don’t believe in that sort of stuff. Also, Nasa has declined my wish to nuke that f*cker. So there is that.
Continue reading
Fried Oreos, Green Nuclear Energy and the Visa Card Health System
It’s time to dwell into what I consider to be two of the most (de)pressing issues of the American system: Health care and food. Let’s start with the latter. Food plays a big role in the American way of life, that turns rapidly into the American waddle of life when staple foods shift from wheat and water to burger and soda. With the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners and fat-free products the portion of the population in the US that is overweight or obese has spiked (here is a good talk about that). Since I’m not a nutrition expert, I don’t want to go too deep into that, but I may have some ideas that I would like to propose.
Continue reading
Monster Drag
I don’t know how he did it, but my advisor Daniel somehow tricked me into going to a real night club in the San Francisco Mission District. I haven’t been clubbing in ages which primarily has something to do with my age, but also with my somewhat twisted taste in music (see my playlists). Still, he got me to pay $20 for admission, which I found vastly overpriced until I realized that we had stumbled into the “Monster Drag Show” and a two meter tall queen was just about to sodomize a leather slave while singing “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus. I cried tears of joy. Daniel cried too, but that was because he spent another $20 on two (!) cups of beer. But after the first sips of tear flavored beer we were both dancing to what I assume was a mash-up of Michael Jackson and Katy Perry, thoroughly enjoying ourselves. As the evening progressed I remembered why I didn’t go clubbing as often as I did when I was younger.
Continue reading
Buy now, think later
I think the US exhibits capitalism in a very troubling form. For instance, competitive marketing has become the only kind of advertisement there is. It’s like watching children arguing about whose father is the strongest, while you already know both fathers haven’t seen the inside of a gym for a very long time. Maybe the comparison between children and advertisements is not ideal. Advertisements are more like politicians. They will go to great lengths to not tell you the true cost of what they are trying to sell you. The car is only $399 a month (if you pay $5999 in advance, by purchasing the in-house insurance and excluding tax). For example, T-Mobile made their pay-as-you-go model ridiculously hard to understand.
Continue reading
An SUV called Suburban, a girl called Miracle
There may be something wrong in a society where an SUV — a vehicle to conquer almost any kind of terrain for the cost of many gallons of gas — is the predominant car in the suburbs. Sure, there are some hills here. But none of them justify a four-wheel drive and man-sized tires. The names speak volumes themselves: If it’s not “suburban” it’s “patriot”. And if you are a patriot in the suburban, you’d better own both of them.
Continue reading
A new Techie in the Frisco!
That headline should have got me some attention. And some hatred. Not only do San Franciscians cringe when they hear the name “Frisco” but they also loathe the tech industry which they blame for rising rents and the loss of the original vibe of their beloved city. There is some controversy about how much can really be attributed to the rise of the tech industry in SF and how much is just inevitable in an attractive city that refuses to grow vertically and cannot grow horizontally. But I am neither a worker for the tech industry nor am I moving to SF. I am a visiting student researcher living in Berkeley and I apologize for the misleading headline.
Continue reading
In Defense of the Wallet Chain
Almost my entire life it seems like I have been committing a crime against good taste without even knowing it. I was — and I still am — wearing a wallet chain. It first dawned on me when I was visiting the “Porn Film Festival” (because that passes as art in Berlin) and saw a short film about the importance of wallet chains in the lesbian culture. I never considered myself a lesbian, but then again, I didn’t consider myself a picture of masculinity either. Besides me and apparently lesbians, who else was still pulling off the good old wallet chain? Well, stoner. And skater but there is a considerable overlap between these groups anyway. And thirtysomethings that hang around in clubs being all cool and edgy because they listen to “Nu Metal”. Yeah, that nineties Nu Metal.
Continue reading