The flight there

So I am in Seville now, and it is going OK except for my lingering illness.

The flight was uneventful, here are some phone photos I took on the way here...

Of course, I had to see something wierd on the trip already. At the baggage claim in Seville airport, there was a trolley with a strange mannequin head sitting in it. I did not quite understand what the point of that was... it was a little spooky looking.

Some more random items

I am very ill at the moment, so I am not terribly inspired to make a super post. Also, I think my high fever and massive antibiotics dose have made me a little delerious (well, not really)

The long and short of it is, here is a lazy post.

First up, here is a very very recent photo of me. Taken only seconds ago with my phone. This is for Dave, who said I do not appear on the blog often enough. Here I am in all my sweater wearing glory.
Next is a photo from a Liam adventure about a week ago. Before I was sick, I was spending almost every afternoon outside for a multi-hour bobby car journey with the tiny overlord. On one of these journeys, Liam found a cat he liked (like most cats) and decided to chase it around yelling MEIN CAT MEIN CAT. Then the cat escaped up a van and onto a window ledge.

Liam looked on in futility.
I am off to Seville next week for a work trip, so please all wish me a speedy recovery for monday at 11:40an when I must catch a plane.

Best Book Ever

Why oh why did I not buy this book? Even now as I think back on it, it was like finding buried treasure in the store. I can only imagine what the text would be like...

"Donde esta el Joker"

"Soy la maldición Batman del dios! "

I am sure it is a great thing for kids who want to learn Spanish, but it just seemed very funny to me. Perhaps I will pick up a german comic book and put some images up. I am sure that German Batman is equally fun.

more mall humiliation

I was in the mall last week to get a gift for Claudia, and I saw some more mall costumed folks. Presumably they were there for Valentines day promotions.

Sadly I did not manage to get a good photo of them with my phone, but here are some of them walking around the mall. I did not really see them do much but walk around, so I have no idea what store they worked for, what they advertised, or really what the point of them was.

At least the last mall costumes I saw (See Here) were clearly advertising something.

Time to go back to marketing school valentines people.

Happy Valentines day

Liam gives everyone a big kiss.

Sweeping frenzy

I believe that I have documented Liam's great love of sweeping in numerous posts in the past.

This has been elevated to a new level. We were out sweeping the other day when the neighbours two kids were also outside. They watched Liam sweep for a while and then they seemed to have some sort of epiphany that sweeping was an awesome way to spend a sunny day.

Then all of a sudden there were three little kids sweeping.

We will have the cleanest street in Germany.

Carnival Man

Last week was the end of Carnival season here, which is the period before lent for those not in the know (I needed it explained.) In Germany, this is when people dress up in funny costumes and go to parties and the like.

Liam's daycare of course did this and all the little people dressed up as various things. Claudia saw this as a great excuse to squeeze Liam back into his little sailor outfit that she likes so much. It was amazingly not to small for him, he must have not grown all that much in the last year...

My New Best Friend

Not much of a post today, I am super busy at work, but I know people hunger for information about my life.

While in California, I met my new best friend.

Playing with Photoshop Filters

I was experimenting with Photoshop yesterday and I decided to play around with filters. I particularly enjoyed the "cutout" filter, where you are changing an image to make it look as though it was created by cutting out different colours of paper and then laying them on one another. The effect is like a cartoon or rotoscoped looking image, very cool.

So here I tried a couple to see how much detail I could remove from the image and still have it immediately recognizable as the person.

I think they end up looking like cartoonish logos or something. There is probably some application for this, but I have not quite come up with it yet. Therefore I will share with the people reading my page here.

First I did a nice one of Claudia. This is cut down to 4 layers, pretty extreme, but it is still clearly her. The source for this one was the series where Claudia presented Hawaiian toast.
Then I did one of Doris. It was hard to find ideal images for the process in some cases. they needed to have a certain amount of contrast and certain angles present to survive the reduction process. This one came out quite good too.Interestingly enough, I think I could have done this with about any picture of Ryan. It seems like he has a face with details that work very well with this process. Particularly when he has his scruffy unshaved communist look goingOf course, I had to do one with Liam too... I think it could be an album cover for an avant-garde band, what do you think? Any budding rock bands can certainly afford me... One last one that I think is OK, but not ideal. This was Bernhard and his girlfriend last Christmas, I think it is a decent result, but look at how Mandy's nose kind of vanished...Well, I think that is enough of that for now. I will have to think of something interesting for my next project. It is always nice to find a new bit of fun with my computer.

The Beach at Del Mar

During our one free day on the California trip, my colleagues and I decided to take advantage of the very brief stop in the rain and drive over to the ocean. It is about 20 min from the office. We opted for an uncultivated stretch since we thought we would prefer a more natural looking beach.

Here is the spot where we first walked out. I think my new little camera made quite a nice photo, what do you think?
Here my colleagues are looking out at the Pacific and enjoying the brutally harsh winds. It was crazy windy.
We walked along the top of this ridge until we found a spot to climb down to the actual water.It was wet and slippery and windy, but we got down OK. Sybille was so happy to reach the bottom that she did a little victory dance. We all rejoiced.Here I am being blown around, standing on a rock with many waves. It was also pretty cold, around 10 degrees or so.
Then it started to rain and we had to scramble back up the hill and get back along to our car.
One last photo of Sybille and Magdalena for our trip book and then it was off back to the city for dinner. Incidentally, this was the day that I forced us to all go to In-n-Out Burger. I still remember that sweet yummy burger. mmmmmm.

Strange things I Saw in the Airport

The first leg of my USA trip contained a glorious 5 hour stopover in the Atlanta Airport.

As always when I travel to the USA, I like to keep my eyes open for unusual things that I would not really see so much in my day to day life over here. Usually these are commercially oriented things, designed to part consumers from their hard earned cash.

If nothing else, the US must lead the way for technology specifically created to make spending money as easy as possible.

First example... how often have you really needed a newspaper but not had the 50-75 cents for it? Clearly we needed to see paper boxes that take credit cards, like this one.
I won't even begin on my tirade about what a steaming bucket of suck USA Today is anyway, but all that aside, I think this credit card machine is really not that needed.

Next, I saw the other extreme... an iPod vending machine:

So in here, you could pop in your credit card and drop up to 500$ on a single device. I am not sure that I want to buy high-end consumer electronics like I buy my coke. I would be genuinely interested to know what kind of sales numbers these machines posts. How many people actually buy things here.. at the airport...

Finally, I saw a fast food restaurant that had these napkin dispensers:

I had no idea that there was a "World Hamburger Eating Championship" But having learned of its existence, I have to say I am not surprised that it is in the US, nor that there is a sponsorship in the napkin department.

The Burger Pilgrimage

Every time I am in California, I have to make a trip to In-N-Out Burger, my favorite burger place.

They are well known in CA and only exist there and Arizona. They have a limited menu of Hamburger, Cheeseburger, fries and drink (pop or shake.) They use no frozen ingredients, beef and potatoes are brought in daily and the lettuce and tomatoes are all prepared there. It is really good.

This trip, I was a little nervous since I had two colleagues with me. I convinced them to try the In-N-Out burger for dinner on Sunday though. Here is the closest one to the office.
Here is the order taking location, where I made my big choice...
and here is my yummy, yummy burger and drink, just moments before being enjoyed by yours truly. Mmmmm burgers.