It’s warm, the sun’s shining. I’m on the train from Pinneberg, where my sister lives¹, to Hamburg, where I live and later am meeting with some friends to have a nice evening². Today, I got back good results from a term paper, now I’m sitting here, listening to my favorite band and writing it down. Life’s sweet.

I sincerely hope you forgive me this one pathetic ‘Oh my god my life’s so awesome right now’-post. Have a great weekend.

1. We lawyered around a little, always a great exercise.
2. Read: And night, we might drink one or two beers

When I push an update to my git-repository or even just copy or delete a file via sudo cp or rm or write a rsync-script for backup purposes, speak: use the terminal, I always feel like the meanest h4xx0r on the planet. I mean, seriously: That’s me, typing letters in a 662*428 window and so making stuff happen. Even two years ago, I would never have believed that this could happen one day.
It really didn’t look like it: At first, some of the stuff I typed didn’t make anything happen at all. To be honest: It sometimes kept everything from happening, i.e. my system from finding its boot sector or even the whole hard drive. When that happened, it always ruined my day and made me kick all this hippie open source shit off of my hard drive and switch back to windows-only. I couldn’t play games on Ubuntu in the first place, so why bother?

Then, a few years and Ubuntu releases later, playing games became relatively unimportant to me, another thing I would never have believed either. Or, to put it differently: my play instinct focused from actual games on the whole system. The features of a unix system became more compelling to me, and windows’ drawbacks more and more unbearable. Why didn’t I consider OS X? Well, the lack of hardware wasn’t what made me check out Linux, and the possibility of hackintosh didn’t occur to me. Buying a Mac? Orrr. OS X would’ve cost money one way or another, while there was no barrier of financial kind switching to Linux. And time I had enough.

Now, I’m running a system that’s more elegant and fits my needs way better than any configuration involving windows ever could. And this is a long shot but I think through the whole process, I’m more open to ‘alternative’ solutions in general. It’s the best example there is for

What’s right for most people isn’t necessarily right for you, and guess what: Maybe what most people use isn’t right for them in the first place

But you have to have been on the ‘other side’ to recognize it. Still the best example: Imagine you’re sitting on an island, nothing but a nice, completely wiped Lenovo business laptop, a windows 7 DVD, a Ubuntu Live CD and an Internet connection. You probably couldn’t get the Internet working on windows because of lacking drivers. So it wouldn’t work at all, by today’s standards. Ubuntu would happily connect to the Internet during setup. Boom.¹ On unix systems, the OS reigns over all the drivers, unless you decide break the OS’s reign manually. Having some random .exe or .ini or .whatnot file speaking to my hardware without even asking the OS just sounds ridiculous to me now. The same applies for programs. Every single bit related to a program on your hard drive has its counterpart in the package manager, the OS knows what’s going on. With windows, it’s one big hairy mess. Anarchic hippie programs, sitting anywhere on the hard drive, at no point connected to the OS but messing up the registry.

That’s it, I probably went way out of my technological expertise with this one. But hey, point for unix there: You don’t even have to understand it entirely in order to use it on an advanced level.

1. To be honest: Windows 7 is the first iteration that recognized my LAN controller correctly on first boot, but I bet there are configurations out there which aren’t that lucky.

Custom 404 Page

Recently, I was inspired by a pic Mike Monteiro shared on twitter: the dribblle 404 page. I immediately wanted one of those! So I began, and some coding, texting and a flickr search on search.creativecommons.org later, there it was.

Now, how to ‘deploy’ your 404 page in a way that overrides the ugly standard apache-or-whatever-you’re-using-standard page?

• Git-hosted Jekyll
  • Generally, if you’re using Jekyll and host on github pages, just put a 404.html file in the root directory of your repository. They say that’s sufficient.
• Random host
  • When your site’s hosted with a more beefed up provider, you propably have access to a .htaccess file.
  • Basically, you need to put a .htaccess file in your site’s root directory,
  • put the line

    ErrorDocument 404 /nameofyourcustom404page.html

    in it

  • and of course: create the custom 404 page and upload it to your root directory.
• Hosteurope
  • My page’s hosted with hosteurope. Since querbeet-deluxe.com and its wordpress with all its sql databeses will be abandoned, I don’t really need all the feautures of the webpack I’m currently paying for. But I didn’t get to make the switch to github pages or S3 or whatever may be out there.
  • With hosteurope, there’s a guide for customizing your 404 page. I guess that’s because they don’t want to let you control the .htaccess file. Well, it works.

I always went to bed very late. I often played games till 1:30 or 2:30 am and never went to bed before 1 am. I loved that. I went to school back then, so it worked most of the time. When I became a student, my easy-going sleep cycle annoyed me more and more. I already wasn’t on top of the day, felt behind when I got up at 9:30 pm¹ and ate breakfast. I kept being late mentally which put me under pressure and didn’t feel good. I knew that I had to change that habit. Knowing that but not being able to do so frustrated me even more.
But I was in good company. Keeping up late is the ultimate cool, that was a fact, I myself always had been suspicious of people who went to bed before midnight. My love for coffee and its caffeine were the best excuse one could think of to keep up late, be late in the morning and brag about crazy sleep hours.

Myself, 4 months ago:

I couldn’t fall asleep one minute before 2 am, I tried!

Yeah, you do. Just regularly get up at 6am and see how you will love to go to bed at 11 pm, even earlier, or midnight, depending on your needs. We owe it to our brains to sleep, that’s a fact. Time measurement only has been around for a few hundred years, that’s another fact. We depended on dawn and dusk before. Just think about all these studies reporting of health problems caused by shift work.
We shouldn’t let time measurement go, of course. But I think being aware that it’s artificial should allow us to consider some changes to our sleep rhythm - or care about sleep in the first place. When I first realized that, I got a sleep mask, cause in cities like Hamburg it’s never completely dark.

Then, I came across Nicolas Alpi’s post on rising early. It was exactly what I needed.
#ProjectEarlyBird went live on February 1st 2011, just when I started to work on my first term paper. There was some serious synergy going on, because social life is reduced to a minimum during such workload. So, there was no distraction from

• getting up at 6 am
• (sometimes) running some 5 kilometers
• having breakfast/reading feeds/checking twitter/²
• having some free time/cleaning/dishes/collecting ‘next steps’ for the term paper
• arriving at the library at about 10 am
• having lunch at about 12:30 pm³
• continuing to work at about 1:30 pm
• going home at about 6 pm and feeling awkwardly good about it⁴
• going shopping/cooking
• watching a film or some episodes of a tv series and not feeling guilty about it
• going to bed at about 10:00 pm

I think that’s a good example of how I did it in the first weeks. Of course work doesn’t get done by itself,⁵ but getting up early gives you the best starting position there can possibly be. I sticked with 6 am, though the really hard part was to not letting go of the whole project when both of my term papers were finished and the next semester began. Sadly, I let go of the running part, so as you can see, rising early makes you no super human.
Want to try it? I started by moving the wake up time earlier in steps of half an hour per week from current wake up time - till my iPhone went crazy smashing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ every morning at 6 am. Even on the weekends, of course. In general, I followed Nicolas’ advise, his article’s really great. Also interesting: this piece by Leo Babauta. Kudos to Shawn Blanc for linking to both of these articles.

So, why 6 am?

I decided that 6 am works better for me than 4:30 or 5 am would. Just too often there’s an event or something else that doesn’t let me go to bed as early as I would like to, so 6 am is a good compromise between my needs and the social calendar. Though, I’m tempted to try 5:30 am. I began #ProjectEarlyBird in the Winter, so that it was dark and cold outside. Currently, dawn’s at about 5 am, and makes it even easier to get up that early.
It also takes more effort to make room for a night out, I like that. I had the tendency to always stretch that ‘one beer’ out very late and often was blaming myself for it the next day. Now I have to alter my sleep cycle very much for drinking some beers with friends, therefore plan very carefully for lesser, but more special occasions.
I love rising early.

</div>

1. When there was no lecture at 10:00 am which I attended, that was an early one. ↩
2. I just as much as never managed to eat breakfast at home before I left for the day. I didn’t have appetite in the morning, but my stomach hurt a little. Vicious circle. ↩
3. I really started to get hungry at about noon, exceptionally early for me! ↩
4. Instead of punishing myself for being late in the morning by keeping up late in the evening, despite being tired and the loss of focus ↩
5. At first, it really feels like it does</span> ↩

I always went to bed very late. I often played games till 1:30 or 2:30 am and never went to bed before 1 am. I loved that. I went to school back then, so it worked most of the time. When I became a student, my easy-going sleep cycle annoyed me more and more. I already wasn’t on top of the day, felt behind when I got up at 9:30 pm¹ and ate breakfast. I kept being late mentally which put me under pressure and didn’t feel good. I knew that I had to change that habit. Knowing that but not being able to do so frustrated me even more.
But I was in good company. Keeping up late is the ultimate cool, that was a fact, I myself always had been suspicious of people who went to bed before midnight. My love for coffee and its caffeine were the best excuse one could think of to keep up late, be late in the morning and brag about crazy sleep hours.

itunes die Sonne über Altona

Myself, 4 months ago:

I couldn’t fall asleep one minute before 2 am, I tried!

Yeah, you do. Just regularly get up at 6am and see how you will love to go to bed at 11 pm, even earlier, or midnight, depending on your needs. We owe it to our brains to sleep, that’s a fact. Time measurement only has been around for a few hundred years, that’s another fact. We depended on dawn and dusk before. Just think about all these studies reporting of health problems caused by shift work.
We shouldn’t let time measurement go, of course. But I think being aware that it’s artificial should allow us to consider some changes to our sleep rhythm - or care about sleep in the first place. When I first realized that, I got a sleep mask, cause in cities like Hamburg it’s never completely dark.

Then, I came across Nicolas Alpi’s post on rising early. It was exactly what I needed.
#ProjectEarlyBird went live on February 1st 2011, just when I started to work on my first term paper. There was some serious synergy going on, because social life is reduced to a minimum during such workload. So, there was no distraction from

• getting up at 6 am
• (sometimes) running some 5 kilometers
• having breakfast/reading feeds/checking twitter/²
• having some free time/cleaning/dishes/collecting ‘next steps’ for the term paper
• arriving at the library at about 10 am
• having lunch at about 12:30 pm³
• continuing to work at about 1:30 pm
• going home at about 6 pm and feeling awkwardly good about it⁴
• going shopping/cooking
• watching a film or some episodes of a tv series and not feeling guilty about it
• going to bed at about 10:00 pm

I think that’s a good example of how I did it in the first weeks. Of course work doesn’t get done by itself,⁵ but getting up early gives you the best starting position there can possibly be. I sticked with 6 am, though the really hard part was to not letting go of the whole project when both of my term papers were finished and the next semester began. Sadly, I let go of the running part, so as you can see, rising early makes you no super human.
Want to try it? I started by moving the wake up time earlier in steps of half an hour per week from current wake up time - till my iPhone went crazy smashing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ every morning at 6 am. Even on the weekends, of course. In general, I followed Nicolas’ advise, his article’s really great. Also interesting: this piece by Leo Babauta. Kudos to Shawn Blanc for linking to both of these articles.

So, why 6 am?

I decided that 6 am works better for me than 4:30 or 5 am would. Just too often there’s an event or something else that doesn’t let me go to bed as early as I would like to, so 6 am is a good compromise between my needs and the social calendar. Though, I’m tempted to try 5:30 am. I began #ProjectEarlyBird in the Winter, so that it was dark and cold outside. Currently, dawn’s at about 5 am, and makes it even easier to get up that early.
It also takes more effort to make room for a night out, I like that. I had the tendency to always stretch that ‘one beer’ out very late and often was blaming myself for it the next day. Now I have to alter my sleep cycle very much for drinking some beers with friends, therefore plan very carefully for lesser, but more special occasions.
I love rising early.

</div>

1. When there was no lecture at 10:00 am which I attended, that was an early one. ↩
2. I just as much as never managed to eat breakfast at home before I left for the day. I didn’t have appetite in the morning, but my stomach hurt a little. Vicious circle. ↩
3. I really started to get hungry at about noon, exceptionally early for me! ↩
4. Instead of punishing myself for being late in the morning by keeping up late in the evening, despite being tired and the loss of focus ↩
5. At first, it really feels like it does</span> ↩