2005 revisited
the past year was, in fact, the year of the multiple online communities for me. after an enjoyable month of disassembling the firmware of my then camera to-be, with less results than efforts (later on, I even acquired a water-damaged model to dismantle and post the findings, or rather images, to the interested parties; not that there were many (findings; the gallery still produces hits after having been linked by various forums))
in 2005, I also made heavy use of eBay, which is arguably not only a selling
platform but also a community, though the closest
I came to using that was the report about a fraudulous "2nd
chance offer" (if I say fraudulous, I mean just that: in my
book it would have been ok for the seller to contact me out of eBay,
shame on me if I took the chance and lost the money, but the person
involved was a different one pretending to be the seller ...).
after selling some junk and buying lots of cheap, old, fun manual lenses
almost unusable on digital bodies and enjoying the cheap fun of transferring cash across
the atlantic I gave up that not-all-cheap pastime and went
on.
the next step was, quite logically, the one from measurebator and equipment-fiddler to a person consciously trying to take great pictures (or at least some). the people on photosig are a really nice bunch, in particular they are always eager to find the flaws in a fellow's images, which helps improving.
a short while later, I discovered the german board game site BrettSpielWelt.de, where a number of board games are implemented on a server and can be played with a portable java client (the installer is linux/windows/mac-specific, but the .jar worked fine on powerpc Debian GNU/Linux). after rising to level 11 (also available in english) and writing a proxy to translate the binary protocol to standard IRC messages, I became bored with the whole idea of online board games (no rhyme intended).
writing the proxy had brought me across the border between having a relationship and losing it (quite independently ... nothing lasts forever), so I (re)registered with some online dating agencies I had not visited in four years for lack of dating needs. the usual scenario of the lonely geek seeking dweebs ensued, with a response rate somewhere below the annual savings interest rate on checking accounts (in fact I'm exaggerating, I didn't even write that many mails, it gets boring after a while); the guest book feature of one of the services proved interesting communication-wise, and an, as I thought, promising online friendship developed from one of the contacts; alas, differences in the perception of the virtuality/reality border proved fatal (imho virtuality is a subset of reality and virtual commitments to real (time) meetings should be kept, be those in real or virtual space, and that commitments missed warrant a cancellation or at least an apology). so I clinked glasses with myself, drinking myself into stupor (with "alcohol-free" sparkling wine: I don't need that much for intoxication) and later on went for a late night walk ...
