Taking the five fingers for a walk
The autumn and winter is approaching in Europe. I was walking most of the days barefoot in summer. It would be cool to still walk barefoot even when the weather becomes colder. It looks like there is a chance of doing this: vibram five fingers.
Theuni started with the five fingers. I ordered myself a pair of five fingers classic from barefoot.com with the size of 46; tried them and recognized, that they not fit. barefoot.com didn’t had a bigger size in stock, found one pair at globetrotter.de and ordered a 47. The five fingers homepage has a good introduction on how you measure the size you should order.
So, my key points are:
- is it really different to walk in those shoes from walking barefoot?
- can you still wear those shoes in autumn, maybe in winter?
Difference between walking barefoot
So to summarize from the first walk: it is different. I wouldn’t believed it. You still have to adopt on wearing those shoes.
You can sense the ground under your feet. You feel that the ground is cold. Your feet feel kind of numb. For example, if you walk barefoot through gravel it feels really uncomfortable (depending on the gravel). If you use the shoes, it’s much easier because of the vibram sole catches most of the stones. But you still sense that you’re walking through gravel. If you’re walking through grass, you sense that the grass is cold and soft, but you can’t feel the grass on your feet.
Wearing five fingers during cold times
It was 9.0 ℃ when I took a walk today. I sensed the cold ground under my feet (especially when walking through grass). Though I was wearing thick clothes to keep the body warm and it turned out to be working. After 5 Minutes the feet were getting warmer and were well temperatured. I will continue doing this even when the temperatures drop. I really want to know when it is to cold to not take a walk “barefoot”.
General
In general I like to wear them. It’s a great alternative in times where it’s not possible to walk barefoot. I’d like to test the five fingers sprint. I can imagine to take them for running.
GAH – The stupid online postage stamp
I ordered a paket of shoes from an online shop. Now I want to send them back and the online shop uses an automatic postage stamp provided by DHL.
The yellow fields in the top right corner are buttons which trigger a
You can download a PDF, which can only be opened by Adobe Acrobat or any PDF reader who understands Javascript. What you don’t expect, are Javascript buttons in the upper right corner, which actually start a print job. I mean, you’re looking at a document with a reader, not an application to start print jobs. That’s why the ‘print’ button of the reader application is for. Isn’t it?
So, all of a sudden, I clicked randomly in the PDF to get rid of the stupid ‘Muster’ letters, which make it difficult to see the actual postage stamp. After I closed the reader, I noticed that there happened something. The printer was already printing like hell and the terminal showed me the following debug output:
Auftrags-ID ist milhouse-107 (1 Dateien)
Auftrags-ID ist milhouse-108 (1 Dateien)
Auftrags-ID ist milhouse-109 (1 Dateien)
Auftrags-ID ist milhouse-110 (1 Dateien)
Auftrags-ID ist milhouse-111 (1 Dateien)
One stupid S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ending …
Wish granter in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl
I wasted a bit of my free time to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I was fighting myself through hordes of bandits, mercenaries, soldiers, monsters until I reached the sarcophagus totally wasted (small amount of ammunition and armor). The ending I picked, was to sneak into the sarcophagus of the collapsed power plant of Chernobyl and find the wish granter; a mysterious monolith granting you one free wish.
I found it. The ending is a video and the charactarer you’re playing wishes…. “I want to be rich!”. The ending video shows him, rich of screws falling from the sarcophagus hull for a couple of seconds until he dies.
What a stupid moron? Such a stupid wish for all this work fighting through all the masses of evil? BRRRRRRR…
Update: I actually found a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. guide which lists all the possible endings of the game. So, it’s not the ending of the wish granter, but there are more endings determined by how you play.
Don’t mess with an express train …
I literally run into all the shit you probably can run into on a Friday when taking the train home.
I had to travel from Saarbrücken to Köthen (Anhalt) via Mannheim and Braunschweig. It’s an unwritten law, that the trains are mostly overcrowded on Fridays (because everyone wants to get home). I was lucky and my company already made seat reservations.
Crowded (Photo by Manfred Yeung)
Instead of changing the train in Mannheim, I catched up with the train in Frankfurt (Main). What I didn’t realized, was the point that it had cost my seat reservation. The train was totally overcrowded – as expected – and another man was sitting on my seat. All of a sudden, he booked via internet and had the same seat reserved as I. The conductor said to me, that you only reserve a seat from the starting station and if you don’t take it, the reservation is void after 20 minutes.
Well, found a seat after a lot of people got out of the train the next station (Hanau) I enjoyed my ride till Braunschweig. The train had a delay of two minutes. The connecting train scheduled on the same platform 5 minutes later. It just happened to me, that I thought, that I had my tickets left in the compartment. I instantly jumped back in, checked the compartment, ran out and – bang – the door just closed. I tried to open it, ran to the conductor, but the only thing he did, was to tell the driver a ‘Go!’. “We can’t wait 30mins on every station, man!”, he sarcastically said. I would have loved to punish him at least 30 minutes from this station on, because this ment, that I had to pick the local trains connecting Wolfsburg with Magdeburg and Magdeburg with Köthen.
I had to wait one hour in Wolfsburg. Nice city – same as Köthen: nothing there than a small station hall. But it came even better. I hopped in the train to Magdeburg and two right wing extremists with me. Of course they didn’t had a ticket. I was surprised: the conductor didn’t raised a train fee of 40 EURs, he just mentioned that they need to buy a ticket at the automat. Try to do that during the week and you’ll have a hell of a trouble. After they started to play rassistic music, I moved to the other end of the train. No one seemed to care anyways – the conductor was never seen again till Magdeburg main station.
I took it like a man, when the train conductor just mentioned that there is a rail replacement bus service on part of the track and arrived home after 9 hours instead of 6.
