if i only knew...

I finished college today!

Today is a big day: i had my final exam and now officially finished college and have a degree in international marketing and total quality management. Yay!

No more exams, no more papers to hand in, no more annoying school administration stuff, no more traveling one hour each way to the end of the world for the most pointless and boring lecture in the world.

Instead, looking for a job, going to interviews and stuff like that. But first, a little rest, catching up with all my business plans and goals and projects that i didn't have enough time to work on while studying. I am sooooooooooooooooo looking forward to doing what I THINK i need, and not school dictating what i should be doing. Cheers to my new life!

Liking IKEA & Starbucks is OK

Finally, someone said it. It is OK to like Starbucks and IKEA. There are so many rants about why Starbucks is evil and IKEA is evil, and so on, it's sort of become trendy to bash them, even if people are actually frequent customers in the two institutions.
I have said this before, but this post: Ikeaphobia and its discontents inspired me to say it again: I like Starbucks and I LOVE IKEA and i am not ashamed by it! :)

If you're wondering why i like Starbucks: it's the ONLY place in Europe to get a Mocha and i am addicted to that stuff, and in Vienna where i frequent Starbucks, their coffee houses actually are very very comfortable, clean and serve good music, just what i like.

As for IKEA: I grew up behind the iron curtain, deprived of such capitalistic pleasures as well-designed furniture, so i was addicted to the german and austrian IKEA catalogs that friends and relatives brought back from trips to Western Europe. They were unbelievable eye-candy and "what's it like to live in a dream world" stuff for my Eastern-European, Socialist-Realist design surrounded self back then, and it's no surprise that i could identify most of the furniture by their goofy pseudo-Scandinavian names years before i was actually able to go to an IKEA store. And in addition to these fond childhood memories, i still think IKEA has great design and i love their products, as well as their clever marketing (not because i am a masochistic consumer but because i have a marketing degree so this stuff actually interests me!).

Fashion visuals: the ugly and the beatiful

A very thoughtful photo-essay about The Decline of Fashion Photography: An argument in pictures. If, like me, you've increasingly grown annoyed by the bland, boring, visually uninspiring or downright stupid photos in the fashion spreads of magazines in recent years, you'll like this essay. The good news is, there is penty of positive examples and i especially liked on of them: the fashion illustrations of Tobie Giddio (this would be the beauty part).

Best of Photoblogging 2003

If you ever need inspiration for your photography in 2004, or just simply need some eye candy, take a look at The Best of 2003 Photoblogs.