About Me
This is the personal site and weblog of Patrick Fey. I was born and am currently living in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Germany.
In 2002 I founded Proterzio, a small webdesign consultancy and webhosting business. From January 2005 till September 2005 I had a great time serving my alternative civilian service at Diakonisches Werk Hamburg. I’m currently studying Computer Science at FBI, a faculty of Hamburg University.
So is it you, who writes me from nachtarbeiter.net?
No. If you get an email that originated in the nachtarbeiter.net domain, it is not neccessarily from me. Actually there are a lot of people that have an email address here. These people are friends of mine (old and new), relatives, neighbours and others. I think even M. has an email address here, which he setup himself when we shared the same server. He must have forgotten about it long ago. No really, I don’t know if he still uses it, but it still exists on this server for him to be ready when he needs it. Among other things, these email addresses are one of my motives for not hosting my blog on www.nachtarbeiter.net, but on this dedicated address. Otherwise the contents of this blog might be associated with the wrong people and I don’t want that to happen anytime soon.
Why Too far afield?
All once in a while I’m asked about why I started a weblog and why I gave it the name Too far afield. Well, actually this is not a difficult question for me to answer, but it will take some time, which I hope you have.
Most certainly one can not say that I am an early adopter. I didn’t decide to start my own weblog until January 2004. However, I had already thought about doing so for a very long time.
The first time I became aware of the concept of weblogs was when I began to dig deeper into web standards. I think the first weblog I read was that of Jeffrey Zeldman. He posted way more than today back then, at least once a day, sometimes more often. In his posts he always linked to the blogs of friends or to other web standards advocates blogs, which in turn linked to their friends blogs in their posts. Thus I became aware of a lot of blogs in a relatively short time and I began to read some of them on a regular basis.
Reading all the great stuff one can read in blogs (e.g. personal experiences, politics, technical discussion and other things) I quickly liked the idea. When something interesting happened to me throughout a day I would pause and think: If you’d got a blog you really could’ve filled a post with that crap. So I decided to start a blog someday – earlier or later. I wanted to write in Enlish. To share my thoughts with a bigger community on the one hand and to practise my rusted English on the other hand. But I still missed a good name.
When I one day read a piece in The Guardian, it was a perfect fit. The article was a review of the famous book Ein weites Feld by the even more famous German author Günter Grass. The title of the English translation of his book was Too far afield. That was the day my blog became life.
However, I hadn’t named my blog after Günter Grass’ book. I haven’t even read this book and haven’t read anyone of Grass’ books by the time of this writing. But it was only when I read the article in the Guardian, that I knew the right name for my blog. Instead of being connected to Günter Grass, the term Ein weites Feld is connected for me to another German author. This author – his name is Theodor Fontane – wrote the book Effi Briest. It’s about a woman that suffers from a huge amount of problems due to a marriage arranged by their parents. All German students have to read this book on their way to their A-levels examination. At least they had to when I was a student. At one time in the novel, Effi Briest’s father says: Mein Gott, das ist ein weites Feld!
This expression became a so-called geflügeltes Wort – a dictum – in our German class. We used it day in day out for all kind of situations. That’s why I used the English translation for my English blog, too.