If you don’t read my blog in your feed reader like I read yours, you probably have noticed that Here Be Subtlety’s outfit changed last night. I’m still working on all the loose ends with CSS and whatnot, but it should work fine, especially if you don’t use IE – which… why the hell would you do that voluntarily anyway?

I also realized that tweaking CSS stylesheets is a bit like playing Sims. It’s fixing this and then fixing that and… oh, let me just have a look at that and… I promise… only one more thing here and then it’s 1 am and you really should go to bed.

I finally managed to update this blog to WordPress 2.7 and damn, this looks pretty and sleek and well… up-to-date.

Now let me start to play with the layout. And don’t be confused when things look a bit odd around here. You just might have caught me tinkering.

As you all should know I’m a media geek, which means that I hardly ever get bored, because I have enough stuff waiting to be read, watched and listened to basically piling up around me and the only issue I have is that I have too little time. Unfortunately I’m not one of these people that can easily do with only a few hours of sleep as long as they have enough caffeine in their body.

This means that I’m trying to catch up on all the things and use every opportunity that I can to do this. Right now I’m listening to a podcast, which probably was a less than perfect decision, because while most of the times music helps me concentrate, spoken word usually does not.

It also means that I’m still finding out what goes good together and what does not. Ironing for example goes perfect with listening to music, audio plays or podcasts, though not that good with reading or watching TV shows. There are a few TV shows that I just watch on my computer while I’m browsing the internet or typing away or playing Spider Solitaire, while others I need to watch on the TV or my iPod. I also noticed that some shows I actually prefer to watch on my small iPod than on our large flatscreen TV. For some reason I can concentrate better on it while staring on a small screen with earplugs in and the quality (despite the small screen) is actually pretty good.

Today I realized that podcasts are perfect for driving in the car. Of course it’s only listening that you can do in the car anyway, and music is absolutely great for singing along to (picture me screaming away to Jason Mraz’s Geek in the Pink here), but when today I plugged in my iPod I noticed that I really listened closely to the podcast I was in the middle of and it was the perfect non-distracting distraction.

In the train, about everything works. I can also read and listen to music, but not read and listen to podcasts or spoken word. I also noticed that while I’m perfectly fine working or reading with music playing I sometimes have problems when the lyrics are in German. Apparently, though I understand English well enough to understand the lyrics, if I don’t want to I don’t need to pay attention to the lyrics, but German I just have to listen to the lyrics and they tend to distract me from what I’m trying to concentrate on.

Somehow I mostly listen to audio plays and sometimes podcasts when going shopping. Why? I don’t know. It’s just the way it is.

When I’m cooking and baking I can do about everything, but of course it depends on what exactly I’m preparing in the kitchen. For stuff that needs a lot of keeping an eye on, only audio works. If I have to wait around half of the time and just stir a bit from time to time, I can even read or watch videos on my iPod.

In the bathtub only reading is okay, mostly because I’m too scared that my iPod will fall in the tub, drown and die, so it’s more of a practical limitation there.

And yes, I will read during commercial breaks. I just told you, I need every damn minute of the day, so there’s no reason to waste time.

What it all boils down to is that lately I’ve changed back from my little handbag to my big one, so that not only can I carry my beloved iPod and earplugs in my pocket, I can also take two to three books (well, how should I know what I will feel like reading on my way home from work?) and my tiny JBL loudspeakers with me wherever I go. Probably a magazine, too. And yes, it is heavy, but that’s the burden you definitely have to carry when you’re a media geek.

Someone needs to come here right now and drag me to bed. Because I think I might be tired, but apparently I can’t go to bed. Anybody up for the job? I won’t fight you. I might pout a bit, but you should be able to live with that.

Or maybe I just need some more time to figure out whether I should just go to sleep or maybe read (and if so, what) or watch some videos on my iPod. I can’t decide.

Freaking WordPress killed my last elaborate post, so here’s the gist, because there’s no way I’m typing all of this again:

Me + Asian food = angry stomach = bed instead of dinner
Me likey Hong Kong better than Vietnam, but there’s a couple of reasons why that statement alone might be unfair to Ho Chi Minh, I’m just going into that again.

However, here’s some pics to go with it and maybe make up for the lack of written content:

I guess you hoped I was totally forgetting to do that, right? I know it’s cliché, but when Vietnam wakes you with a thousand scooters honking outside your hotel window, you just want to say good morning back. Really loud.

And turn on your iPod to listen to Arcade Fire’s Wake Up. Awake I am.

Right now I’m sitting in a chair at Charles de Gaulle airport in (or rather somewhere out of) Paris without WiFi access or one of the two books I wanted to get first thing off the plane and with about four hours to kill before our flight goes first to Bangkog and then to Ho-Chi-Minh City.

And it’s snowing.

The seat situation turned out to be no two seats next to each other and no window seats either, so Helen and I have to try to get someone to switch seats unless we want to make conversation literally back and forth. The backup plan is to make A LOT of conversation until someone gives up and begs us to switch seats.

At least we found power plugs.

The lights were just turned on at the airport. Not that it is now considerably darker outside than… say… an hour ago, but apparently someone took their time to realize that with all the clouds it indeed was kind of dark here in the waiting hall. The waiting hall itself, by the way, is really nice. Like, if you realky need to hang out at an airport for four freaking hours, see if you can do it at Paris. Although, then again, the Orangina is not exactly cheap.

(I just realized that I’m starting to get used to the iPods keyboard. Otherwise I wouldn’t really write as much as I just did.)

~~~

Interim: Flight Preparation Checklist
I have four books, two French cooking magazines, my iPod with a good selection of TV show episodes, my Nintendo DS, unfortunately with no new game and a laptop with, well, mostly work stuff, but still. So basically I’m confident that I will arrive in Vietnam alive rather than bored to death.

~~~

Two hours to go.

Just in case you actually need prove to believe that Stephen Fry is awesome.

I’ve registered with Twitter about two weeks or so ago as an experiment. To be honest, Twitter was one of the many Web phenomena that I thought I simply couldn’t care less about. I neglect my blogs enough as it is, I sometimes have to get over myself to load pictures onto Flickr and I may or may not ignore your Skype message. This is not because I don’t like all these things, but because they take time. At least, they take me time, because I like to feel comfortable with my blog entries and I like titles (or even descriptions) for my images, and I don’t want to start a Skype conversation when I just wanted to look up something quick on my computer.

So, yes, I’m a geek girl and I spend a lot of time doing things on my computer that I know aren’t relevant to anybody. The list of tools (and I use tools in the broadest sense here, so think blogs, flickr, librarything, Skype, last.fm, etc.) I actually use are maybe quite random. Or maybe they’re not, but I can’t really give you a good enough reason, why I use this and not that. Presumably there are quite a list of small reasons that add together and make me keep my account here and delete my account there after two weeks. It’s trial and error and all boils down to what proves to add at least a little value to my day to day life.

So, my reasons for not twittering until recently? I can’t really tell you… I just didn’t think it would be any interesting for me. Or I just didn’t care enough to wonder whether it would be of any interest to me. And I guess that’s about it.

However, there was an incident at work that made me wonder whether Twitter could actually be of some real value. I won’t go into any detail about the what and where and why, that’s just how it started.

I registered and wrote about four updates and then didn’t use it for about two weeks – and maybe I would have left it at that. Then I read about a colleague of mine starting to use it as an experiment and went back for a second try, and that second try had me going on until now. Admittedly that’s just a week, but it’s starting to actually be fun and I think I might keep going.

So, for the first part of the title of this post, that’s why I use Twitter. It started as an experiment and once I found people I actually know using it too, it started feeling kind of good. I’m now at five followers, who I all know personally (four are colleagues, one is a blog friend) and this actually is the perfect bridge to the second part of the title: why you probably can’t read my tweets.

The reason for that is quite simple. Twitter in my opinion is about writing about what I’m doing (again, using „doing“ in the broadest sense) at the moment. Part of what I’m doing is what of I’m doing at my job. It’s not a top secret job, I’m neither a secret agent nor a spy, don’t get the wrong impression here. And yes, I could choose not to write about anything job related, but I chose I’d rather restrict who can read my tweets than restrict what I feel I can write about. So, unless I know who you are and unless you belong to that group of people who I’d want to share my daily adventures with, I won’t allow you to follow my tweets.

I’d say this is nothing personal, but I realize it is exactly that. Only you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re not one of the chosen one, because I can tell you that the list of the not chosen ones is a lot, lot longer than that other list. And it’s not because I actively don’t like you, it’s because I just don’t know you well enough. Or not at all.