This afternoon it wasn’t raining for a change, so I brought out the motorbike for a quick ride around the block. That proved to be so much fun that I went for a rather larger tour – which meant that I had all the wrong clothes, since it was several degrees centigrade below zero. When I came back home I was frozen blue, but it was worth it.
Brandenburg is not the best country to ride a motorbike – it can largely be described by the words “flat” (the country) and “straight” (the streets) and sometimes I find I miss the hills and small curved streets of southern Germany. But autumn in Brandenburg has it’s own kind of beauty, what whith the scarce landscape and the trees that extend their leaveless branches to the sky. And the autumn sun is fair and golden, even if it doesn’t warm you.
I suppose fun motorbiking is somewhat evil – I contribute to global warming and I do not even have the excuse that I urgently need to go somewhere. But man, do I feel alive now.
… but not by much, at the weekend I ploughed the meadows with my motorcycle after a bee got caught in my helmet and I proceeded straight where the street made a turn. However this is not among the reasons for a lack of updates in the last week.
The main reason is simply that I’m quite busy with paid work – good for me since it keeps the money rolling in, but I don’t have that much time for fun things.
Another reason is that this was supposed to be largely a site about Joomla programming and as of late I got a little disenchanted with Joomla. My labor of love for these past three years – the holocaust ressource site shoa.de – runs on Joomla, or rather most of the time it doesn’t run. Joomla causes an inexplicably high load on the server (which in turn regularly collapses), user login regularly fails and a structure that allows only for sections and categories has proven to be unsuitable for our purposes, we need subcategories. And don’t even get me started on the trouble the 3rd Party-Components give us. Pretty soon I will have to rebuild the site and this time I will use another software, which inevitably means that my focus will shift away from Joomla – shoa.de has, after all, been the main reason I got involved with Joomla in the first place.
However I will continue to support and (even though it doesn’t look like it at the moment) to develop the content item module, since it seems by now a lot of people depend on it. I generally don’t let people down if I can possibly avoid it.
Riding my motorbike on a nice day through a nice landscape often sets my mind into a contemplative mood – after I while I start to contemplate questions like “from thousands of possible hobbies, why did I choose the one that makes my lower backside hurt like hell?”. But it has been fun of course.
Over the weekend I was away for the 30th summer camp of the motorbike club Kuhle Wampe – an association of bike clubs from all over Germany and like the name suggests a somewhat left-leaning outfit (apart from lobbying for motorbike related interets like safer streets or better fuel effiency for bikes they do for example anti-racist work). But I heard little talk about politics – instead we were discussing motobikes, riding out, drinking beer and generally doing what a (female) friend of mine insists on refering to as “doing boys stuff”. (more…)
