A perfect weekend

After a stressfull week, there´s nothing better than relaxing and hanging around with friends at the weekend. This weekend was pretty much perfect.

On friday I had the obligatory poker league game. Our furnishing was extended by a fridge and a microwave this time.

The big surprise was, that I actually ended first place. That´s pretty unusual for me. To commemorate this, I took a photo of my winning hand:

On Saturday, a friend gave a party to celebrate his birthday. It was interesting and funny. What bugs me, though, is that we seem to adopt the behaviour of our parents. After finishing dinner, the men separated from the women. We told old army stories and let the women have their talk about whatever women talk about when they are among themselves. I have never noticed this to happen before. A sign of old age probably? I´ll have to keep an eye on it on further occasions.

On Sunday morning we went to the shooting range. It´s perfect for clearing your thoughts and just live for the moment. Besides, I love the smell of gunpowder in the morning....

All in all, a perfect weekend.

The unmentioned risks of Youtube

Today I was a member of a board that conducted the final examination of some trainees. As you could imagine it was a highly official setting and the trainees were quite a bit nervous. My part was simply to remain silent, to take notes and afterwards discuss the given answers with the other boardmembers and decide upon the grades we would give.

Unfortunately, I have been watching so many Youtube videos lately, that some really silly joke stuck in my memory. So when one of the examinees gave an answer like "in this case size doesn´t matter" I had to work pretty hard to repress the urge of replying "That´s what she said!". I´m glad that I couldn´t watch my face at this, because I think I must have looked pretty stupid.

Only later did it occur to me that this reply would not only have ruined the examination; it would have been a joke on my cost as well...

Exaggeration and overkill

I love it how some simple things can evolve quite far when you have some creative and borderline silly guys around...

So this all started when some friends of mine got into poker (Texas Holdem of course).
At first, we only played occasionally. Then we decided (being german) that we have to have a club, no , a league, and play every other week. So the league of the extraordinarily ordinary gentlemen was founded.

Another few months later, we decided that it was absolutely necessary to have an own poker room. Fortunately the father-in-law of one of us owns a farm with some unused old buildings we could renovate. Some workdays later, after groundworks (quite some cubic metres of sand and concrete, a new floor, some paint etc. the room was ready.
Piece by piece the furnishing came in as well. A poker table, chairs, cupboards, lamps, an old couch, a radio, a computer, a TV-Set, a game console, some electric heaters etc.

All the stuff you can´t do without when you play poker every other week, right?

The funniest thing was when lately somebody brought along an old oven to heat frozen pizzas. This was the time the fuse blew. We are now considering upgrading the wires...

Moods

Isn´t it interesting how moods have the power to change the view on the world and thus, for all practical reasons, the world itself?
Heideggers writes on this, that a bad mood let a Dasein (person/sentient being) feel the burden of his being in the world, while a good mood relieves from this feelings. A bad mood will veil the world and oneself to a Dasein. Why anyone has one specific mood at one specific time, nobody can tell.

And that´s exactly how I feel sometimes. I find myself to be in a bad mood and I can´t say why. When I think about it, I recall being in a good mood just some hours ago and there wasn´t any specific occurrence I could name as the reason for my mood to change. And what consequences this change has!
If it´s really bad, I will be pissed off by the most insignificant things I come across. I won´t get done anything right because I will make the most stupid mistakes out of negligence. If anything bad happens it seems logical, that´s exactly what I expected to happen. If anything good happens I don´t really care, because there´s always a downside to be found to it.

It´s amazing how such a simple thing as a mood can change everything that used to be setup beforehand by character, philosophy/worldview and intelligent thinking in general.

Of course this doesn´t apply only to bad moods; the exact opposite of the above is true if I happen to be really high-spirited, though that doesn´t happen that much.

The hardest thing for me is trying to actively change a mood I´m in. It really takes effort and isn´t always successful. Up to this point, I found out the best thing to do is to remind myself of a goal I have, something really sweet I´m going to do/have in the future. So the point for me is to never run out of goals and to actively aim for them.

Copyright

Recently there´s been much ado about copyright violations on Youtube as well as a new law that´s in the making in New Zealand. For informations on the latter, click http://creativefreedom.org.nz/

I find most of the stuff that is initiated by the big media- (mostly music-) companies quite excessive. I mean, I can understand that they don´t want to lose money to pirated songs/films etc., but how many of the copyright infringements do actually hurt them ?

On Youtube many songs are used as soundtracks to videos made by Youtubers. Does that mean there´s even one copy of the song less bought because of that? No way! In my opinion it´s rather a chance to bring one song to the attention of many people who may haven´t known it before. They get interested in the song or the band and may actually buy songs/CD´s they would not without watching the video. At least that´s the way it worked for me.

Then there are parts of TV-programs on YT you haven´t the chance of seeing ever again on TV or not in a long long time. Does that hurt anybody? No, because you can´t buy these anyway.

Of course there are also whole music clips on Youtube. You can save money if you watch them there instead of buying the song. But what person that likes a song, would want to listen to it only on the computer? If you like it, you buy it. No harm done. If you don´t have the money to buy it, there´s also no harm done, because you wouldn´t have bought it anyway.

So what is the result of the measures taken against copyright infringements? The media companies just antagonise their (potential) customers. Not a wise thing to do in my opinion. Their lobbying in the rewriting of copyright laws all around the world, of which the New Zealand case is just the most recent and most excessive attempt, should lead to public outrage and I´m curious how this will work out.

To make it clear: I´m all against professional pirates who want to make money out of the work of others. But when no money is involved, the existing principle of fair use should be extended to cover the examples given above.