Hillside Meditations

No, I am (hopefully) not turning Hillside Mediatations into a blog on pumpkins. But from my last postings you might already have guessed that indeed those vegetables (fruit?) fascinate me a lot. I like their forms and colors, their diversity, their links to this colorful season.

This year - for the first time - I decided to try as many different kinds of pumpkins as possible. And here is my little collection in my pantry:



All these are going to be processed in the weeks to come - and I intend to blog about it . There will be photos of the undamaged pumpkins, with their names and what I can find out about their special traits and chracteristics, perhaps photos of the process of preparing them and reports about the “recipes” I used (only simple ones, no doubt) and how I liked the results.
Could become a bit boring, I admin, but please allow me that little craziness, will you?

pumpkin, sqash, gourd, Kürbis, recipe, cooking, autumn, fall

• ttaglist: pumpkin sqash gourd Kürbis recipe cooking autumn fall

A lonely chapel
shrouded by merciful mist.
Would the moment stayed.

haiku, chapel, mist, fog, autumn, fall

• ttaglist: haiku chapel mist fog autumn fall

Via The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns I just took this interesting test to assess my basic political thoughts again …(you will have to ignore the test site´s advertisments for decency - please take my apologies for the link, the ads are not my fault)

You are a Social Conservative (33% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (65% permissive) You are best described as a: Republican You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness. loc: (-63, 56) modscore: (39, 20) raw: (3624) Link: The Politics Test

I just looked it up on http://www.jsd.k12.ca.us/te/NicksWeb4/howto.html :

• “A haiku is a three line poem. Each line has a certain number of syllables. The poem is usually about nature.” “1st line= 5 syllables. 2nd line= 7 syllables. 3rd line= 5 syllables.”
• “A haiku often has a seasonal word called “kigo”(kee-go) in Japanese. This word tells you what season it is without saying what season it is.”
• “Good haiku has good imagery. It is important to write what you see and know. “
• “Haiku has emotion. Try to write with emotion and write what is emotional.”
• “”Haiku is what is happening in this moment, this time, this place.” The best haiku is from a memory that you have of a picture of in your head. “
• “Haiku is awake to the word and has a surprise. “

and from http://www.toyomasu.com/haiku/”


• ” The cutting divides the Haiku into two parts, with a certain imaginative distance between the two sections, but the two sections must remain, to a degree, independent of each other. Both sections must enrich the understanding of the other. To make this cutting in english, either the first or the second line ends normally with a colon, long dash or ellipsis.”

I am going to try and write a haiku right now… ( This is not one, according to the above rules.):

We saw our shadows
cast by the departing sun.
They vanished with us.

What about this? Not too good, isn´t it? But at least I kept to the rules…

This is a nice Phyton-programmer´s haiku

haiku, howto

• ttaglist: haiku howto

My neighboring blog Wuseldusel has a new theme, it seems.

Looks quite nice - check it out!

Was it Plato who said that all we see and experience is just shadows?



Today we made these shadows - where and what are we going to be tomorrow? This thought scares and frightens me and makes me sad. Weeping again, eh?

We cannot win our struggles for life, can we?

Sometimes I think my life has two parts with the second part beginning around my leaving school where I first remember that impression that we are doomed and lost no matter what we do. Insects, feeble, weak, vulnerable, helpless, lost, about to be crushed by fate and destiny.
Am I being a bit depressive - I don´t know. Anxious, frightened, pessimistic, yes. Afraid of what will happen. Sometimes too scared to move on with my life, just stiff and frozen. A little timid boy entrenched in a man´s body building as much Wagenburg around me as possible, hoping to escape the unavoidable.

Sorry - I did have a good day and yet I am feeling so very gloomy, my head aches, my back has been hurting for weeks, whatever…

shadows, doom, destiny, future+no, no+future, fear, scared, frightened, depression, Wagenburg

• ttaglist: shadows doom destiny future+no no+future fear scared frightened depression Wagenburg

love, poem, lost, labor

• ttaglist: love poem lost labor, love poem lost labor

More of my Autumn Photos …

photos, fall, autumn, digicam, pumpkin, Kürbis, pumpkin+patch, autumn, october,

• ttaglist: photos fall autumn digicam pumpkin Kürbis pumpkin+patch autumn october

Today my parents and I visited an exhibition about the expressionist painter Franz Marc in Munich.



The exhibition is shown partly in the Lenbach Haus , partly in the Kunstbau (”Building for Art”), an unusual, about 120 m long underground hall which originally was an unused part of Munich´s subway system and has been made into a museum area that is reached via a subway escalator.



Like most people I had seen photos of blue horses painted by Marc, but it was an exciting and wonderful experience and a treat to see so many original Marc paintings in one place.

I am not sure whether it was really allowed but I stealthily took the following two photos (don´t sneak on me, will you?).





The exhibition not only shows Franz Marc´s works, but puts them in the historical, biographical and artistic context by showing important works by many of Marc´s colleagues and friends from the Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) groups of expressionist Munich artists, to me most notably among them Wassily Kandinsky whom I always name when asked for my favorite painters.

Especially the paitings showing animals like horses, gazelles , roes, cattle, dogs, cats, wolves and even bisons, are just wonderful; Marc had a lot of knowledge on animal anatomy and could cover his animal´s essence with effective, elegant, energetic strokes of his brush.
Whatever their original meaning, to me those colorful, elegant paintings conveyed happy, upbeat feelings - Franz Marc was killed in World War I. near Verdun in 1916 - he could never transcribe the horrors he certainly met in the two years of war and would have met in the decades to follow into his paintings.

This exhibition is definitely worth visiting, so if you are somewhere near Munich just go and enjoy!

Franz+Marc, exhibition, Lenbach, Munich, München, Ausstellung, Blue+Rider, Blaue+Reiter, Marc

• ttaglist: Franz+Marc exhibition Lenbach Munich München Ausstellung Blue+Rider Blaue+Reiter Marc

As for my workstation computer (Josua), I have made up my mind to switch from SuSE Linux to another distribution.
I have never used another Linux brand but SuSE, starting with a late 4.X version in 1996, but I was never really happy with it: many programs are very badly configurated and integrated into the distribution, SuSE support has alway been arrogant at best (and very limited), upgrading from one version of the distribution to the next has always been an adventure of the special kind, with lots of problems, and did not work for me ever since version 9.1. SuSE has been taken over by Novell and if I needed any further arguments for the switch the SuSE Linux portal would provide it - in my view it is very unstructured and unhelpful and seems to confirm that Novell/SuSE is no longer really interested in the simple user / enthusiast, but only in corporate customers with bucks to spare. Well, this my view and my impression, it need not be objectively true for anybody else.

So, although I have the SuSE 10.0 package here at my desk, I am going to switch - the decision has been made.
What remains a bit undecided, though, is which “brand” of Linux I am going to turn to - my choice is going to be between Ubuntu (which Bernhard was so kind to give me a CD version of the April 2005 release), Kubuntu (Ubunti woth KDE instead of Gnome) and Debian .

Initially I tended to choose Debian, because it seems to be the more “grown-up”, serious, “advanced” distribution - but then Ubuntu is based (though not exactly all-compatible with) on Debian, has Debian´s excellent packet managing system, but also offers frequent new and up-to-date releases with “bleeding-edge” software rather than Debian´s tested-and-reliable-but-way-behind-actual-state-of-the-art approach (or so it seems to me). And I know that I get unhappy if I think my software is not really up-to-date .

Jacob seems to be quite happy with his migration from Debian to Ubuntu, and if I understand Nat correctly, he is, as well…

I am going to read some more on Debian/Ubuntu and make my decision by the end of October (with the next Ubuntu release out! .
My gravest worry: will I be able to make a smooth transition with my /home-partition. I want to keep it as it is and hope this will not generate problems.

Ubuntu, SuSE, Linux, Kubuntu, Debian, choice+of+distribution

• ttaglist: Ubuntu SuSE Linux Kubuntu Debian choice+of+distribution