SOPA? PIPA? - What the hell are you talking about?

If you have no idea what SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are about and why many sites, such as wikipedia.org or wordpress.org, will be blacked out tomorrow, go educate yourself. Watch the video below and/or visit some of these links...

Read about the English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout
sopastrike.com
Fight for the Future
The Problem with SOPA (And How to Stop It) on copyblogger.com

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Noch nie von SOPA oder PIPA gehört? Auf digitalegesellschaft.de findet Ihr viele Informationen "Warum SOPA auch uns angeht" und welche Auswirkungen SOPA/PIPA auf Europa bzw. Nutzer von Social Media Plattformen, wie Twitter, Facebook, etc., (und somit auch auf deutsche Blogger!) haben könnte...

Hier findet Ihr die Erklärung, warum die englischsprachige Wikipedia am 18. Januar aus Protest gegen SOPA für 24 Stunden abgeschaltet wird.

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PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

12 von 12 / 12 on 12th of January 2012

I FINALLY managed to take 12 pictures of my everyday life on the 12th of January 2012! I planned to take part in 12 von 12 in ages but somehow I always forgot or was too busy. Or too lazy. Anyway, here are my 12 picutures of the first 12th in the new year!

1. Morning cuddling with Mini, 2. Working on an ad for a client and editing images, 3. Framing photos for our living room, 4. Late breakfast

1. Planning our grocery shopping trip and what we eat on the weekend with my new Martha Stewart Everyday Food - Great Food Fast cook book which I got for Christmas, 2. Writing my shopping list, 3. We went shopping to look for a new weekly planner for 2012 but I didn't find my beloved Cool Diary from teneues, 4. Saw the Meine Kochschule von Johanna Maier on sale and now regret not having bought it...I think I have to go back to the book store later this week and buy it. Johanna Maier has been on my amazon wishlist forever as she is one of my favorite cooks!

1. Had a little snack in town: "3 im Weckla" (3 Nuremberger bratwurste in a roll) - a typical Frankonian snack, 2. Graffiti near the Bratwurst vendor, 3. Dinner: Goat cheese in Serrano ham with arugula salad, 4. Sepnding my evening on the couch with the cuddling kitties...so got to see them sleeping like this for the 3rd evening in a row!

See all bloggers taking part in 12 von 12 on January, 12th 2012 over at draussennurkaennchen.blogspot.com.

Lamp options for my new office

I'm currently sourcing lamp options for my new office (our former living room). Right now there is still the IKEA Maskros pendant lamp hanging in the middle of the room...totally misplaced. I narrowed it down to the following options...and I am either leanding towards a ceiling lamp in the middle of the room or a pendant lamp to hang over my desk. I really love the Classic pendant lamp with a pink textile cord from N.U.D. Collection and I plan to hang it over my desk but I'm afraid I might be blinded by it. My second choice is the rosette shaped ceiling lamp from heine.de but it's actually way over my budget (I didn't plan to spend more than 50 Euros on a new lamp...pretty hard, I know, as nice lamps are rare anyway!). Any other lamp ideas? Does anyone have a NUD pendant lamp and can you recommend it?

1. White pendant lamp from NORDAL available at car-moebel.de for 49,90 EUR
2. FOTO pendant lamp from IKEA in white for 19,90 EUR
3. Artemide Teti lamp available at connox.de for 36,00 EUR
4. Pendant lamp from SEBRA available at www.car-moebel.de for 44,90 EUR
5. Classic pendant lamp from N.U.D. Collection available at connox.de for 36,00 EUR
6. Ceiling rosette lamp from heine.de for 119,99 EUR

Happy 2012!

Happy 2012 from me, Paxon and Mini!

I'm in love with my new Garland lamp...

...although it's not really new. I bought the Garland lamp by Tord Boontje at Habitat at least 5 years ago. But I never knew where and how to hang my Garland lamp. Now that we changed rooms and the Maskros lamp from IKEA is too large and kind of too dominant for our new, smaller living room. So I decided to give the Garland lamp a try. Like I read on the internet before it was a pain in the ass to wrap it nicely around the lighting fixture and the bulb. And of course I didn't like the way it looked on the light fixture alone. (I guess you need two garlands to wrap it nicely around the light fixture without showing too much of the fuxture.) So I detangeled parts of it again (Ugh!). Added the lamp shade. Arranged the garland again inside and at the bottom of the shade. And ta-da. The garland and the shade look perfect together. I love it. Now I just need to buy a different bulb...

Light fixture: IKEA Januari
Garland lamp and lamp shade: Habitat (Not available anymore...unfortunately Habitat went bankrupt earlier this year and stopped selling lamps and accessories. Much to my regret!)

Rearranging and a fresh start

After I set up my work space in the living room a little more than a year ago I actually never moved bavk. What was planned as a temporary solution turned into a permanent set up. And the room that was once my office turned more and more into a storage room. Now that work as gotten a little slower and now that we FINALLY finished renovating the kitchen buffet cabinet we decided it's time to change back rooms.

Temporary work area in the living room

But after some pondering and measuring and discussing we decided it makes more sense to turn my old office into our new living/TV room. And to turn the living room into my new office. This way I have finally more space and light (!) to take pictures. And I even might be able to set up a little client meeting table in the future...

My former office almost empty and waiting to be cleaned and painted...

All my work and art stuff in the living room...ugh! Tons of work ahead!

So the following days will be spend rearranging, painting walls, sorting stuff, moving furniture,...I secretly wish someone would come over and pick up all the stuff I accumulated over the past year so that I could start free of junk into the new year. But I know this won't happen...however this will be a fresh start anyway! A much needed fresh start! All the stuff and clutter and the temporary work area in our living room started to wear me out. Left me back feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied with our current working/living situation yet unable to change anything. So, I have no idea how everything turns out and if I will like it in the end but at least it'll be some change. A fresh start.

Instagram Photo Prints

Somehow I always thought the resolution of Instagram photos is too low to have them professionally developed. But turns out I was wrong. When I ordered photos last month I just gave it a try and had some of my Intragram images developed, too! And they turned out GREAT! Much better than I thought! Everybody loved them! I ordered my prints at fotopost24.de in the smallest available square size which is 13x13 cm / 5,1x5,1 inch. See, even Mini loved them :-)



I gave most of the photos away to a friend who requested photos of Mini but I think about re-ordering more images to make a picture wall or have lots of them framed next to each other in one large frame.
 

And below one of my favorite images of Mini!
 

Beautiful October day in Munich Neuhausen-Nymphenburg

On Saturday we spend a beautiful sunny and warm October day in Munich. Though Munich is just a 2 hour drive away and I've been there dozens of times there are some boroughs I haven't discovered (fully), yet. One of the boroughs we strolled around during this daytrip was Neuhausen-Nymphenburg – and I can't believe what I've missed so far! Look at all those beautiful houses from the late 19th / early 20th century. So much amazing architecture! Oh, and there are tons of beautiful little stores, too, but these deserve a blog post on their own!