online deprivation

Last weekend the "sound" system of my macbook broke down again, so I finally had to turn it in for repairs - thank god for the warranty! :-) I figured, I´d trun it in on Monday, since I won´t be home anyways and have it back on Tuesday. Well, in my dreams! I couln´t believe it, when the "apple guy" told me, that it´ll take minimum 12 days to get it fixed! Expect it to take longer!! Where are they sending it to? China? Ouagadougou? And there I was thinking, they could repair it in their "back office" overnight! What a great Monday morning! I suppose, I ran around like something really bad happened all day long. During the day I realized what I really "lost" with my laptop gone. They said, it´s just your laptop gone! Like I haven´t realized that, yet. I started to wonder, why do I get soo upset, after all it´s a little white machine that is missing. When my TV receiver broke down ... I never shed a tear! But what do they know? I am apparently one of the few that does stuff online. I am like the odd one out! ;-) To them it´s still more like a mystery! At least we have mail and online access - also a very limited one - at work! Welcome to the web 2.0. But this is written on a different page.

Am I really that depened on my online activities? After all I do almost everything online. Researching, listening to music, social networking, blogging, skyping with friends and most important emailing. It´s that one of my communication channels completely broke away. At work we are not allowed to mail or use the internet privately, so keeping up with my friends is happening when I get home. So, excpet for texting, there is not much getting in touch with anybody besides my colleagues.

But am I really that dependend on email or IM? I hope not. I think, I am more unhappy with my laptop missing, becuase it´s like my whole life is IN it. All my photos, music and things ... everything is stored there and online. That´s the worst of it. Strange thing, that last Sunday itunes asked for a complete library back up... I already heard the system destroy itself, after hitting the "later"-button.

So, after one week "offline" and without my mac, I went straight to the apple store and asked for a lease laptop. I was obviously to "shocked" to have asked for that straigt away. Lucky me, caught the last one available there. And it got the new Tiger X installed.... LOVE it. It´s scary, but I think I can rather live without radio or TV than my mac. Scary but true. Except for vacation time, well, at least when I am relaxing on some beach and not traveling through some end of the world place, like New Zealand. But wouldn´t all just have missed my blogging from there?!

That made my weekend! :-)

alster abend - beautiful hamburg

This is why I really love living here in Hamburg. The water! Me being a mountain girl, having grown up in Southern Germany, I am soo used to hils and mountains, that living so close to the sea, a city with a huge harbour, ships and a big lake in the city center, is really great and totally different.

Friday evening we went to the Alster for an after work BBQ. It was really fun, unfortunately it wasn´t that warm and we didn´t bring any torches. But we have been pretty organised this time, everyone brought something to eat, blankets and we even had speakers for our ipods. Talk about spontaneous actions - we really learned from two weeks ago. ;-) We had so much food we could have fed the whole picnic area. But the others were also pretty packed with food.

This is the coolest thing about Hamburg, you can have a BBQ like almost everywhere. It´s not really clear if it´s legal, but everyone does it and nobody says anything. So you see like smoke rising from every green area around the Alster, along the Elbe and of course in the the Stadtpark. Somtimes it gets quite annoying, while trying to jog by... you feel like you just ran through BBQ-grill afterwards.