For all those who loved Atari and whose first album was Van Halen’s 1984, this is for you.

All last week here it snowed and then on Saturday it all melted. Today feels like spring. I’m going outside to take advantage of it.

Guten Tag Liebe Freunde,

Yesterday I went to see Robotic Angel in the local arthouse theater here. It’s based on the manga called Metropolis and was directed by Rintaro. I’m not really into japanimation or Manga but this film was pretty cool. The animation style was great and atypical of the genre.

Today I did next to nothing so far.

Isn’t there some sort of football game going on today?

Hey it’s friday night and I’m at home writing in my blogizzle mah nizzle.

The fun never stops.

Actually, I’m taking it easy this weekend. Maybe I’ll right about last weekend and what I can remember of it. Maybe.

Work thoroughly sucked ass this week. Thank you Jonathan Ive and your team of crack engineers for making the iMac so freakin’ difficult to open up and service. Who knew that swapping a hard-drive from one iMac to another could take 3.5 Hours. Next time of course will be easier but damn! Other than that its a cool little machine.

Moving right along

One of the many things that some Americans can take for granted, depending on where they live, is 24 hour grocery shopping. Whenever I was living on my own it was no big deal to go grocery shopping at 10pm, 12am, 2am. It was convenient. I could fit it anywhere into my schedule. Most of the time it was done at a reasonable hour but if I had been in a recording studio for three days and was the last one to leave a session (The assistant engineer is always the first to show and the last to leave), I could always find something open at any time and go grocery shopping.

In Germany and, from what I understand most of Europe, it is different. Generally shops open at about 9am and close about 6pm maybe 7 on weekdays. That is about the same in America for most shops but usually not Grocery stores. On the weekends the shops open at 9 maybe 8. To be honest I don’t know when they open here on the weekends. I’ve never been up and out of the house before 10am here on a Saturday. Well, I probably was but it wasn’t because I had to be the first in line at Pennymarkt. Most stores close then at 4pm. On sunday the grocery stores are not open at all, so you have to make sure you have food for the weekend. If you don’t, you have 3 options:

1. Gas Station: Mmmm, overpriced packages of pre-made sandwiches, jerky, bread and beer.
   

2. Restaurant: A viable option but possibly expensive. Plus if you are a Sunday Slacker this means you have to put on clothes and venture into public. Hmm.
   

3. Starve: Its just one day. You can tough it out til Monday morning.
   

There is a fourth option which is to conveniently physically locate yourself at someone’s place of residence around a mealtime. I’ve never tried it in Germany though. A lot of times I’m afraid of being to forward here so I wouldn’t do it. German’s are not as open and “Oh hey! C’mon by for dinner” as Americans. Some are but it is definitely less common. But say you are over at your pal’s house around 5 or 6 on a Sunday afternoon:

Hey, Wanna eat with us?

Aw naw that’s alright. I got something at home.

Are you sure? It’s no trouble.

No thanks. I’m all set.

Oh Well. Suit your se–

Well alright. Since you twisted my arm

When I first moved here and didn’t understand the whole bumrush ALDI on a saturday at 3:55pm right before they lock the doors mentality, I would miss the shopping hours and eat whatever I had. This let to some creative culinary concoctions. Really fancy things like “Senf auf altem Brot”, “Schinken auf meiner Mitbewohnerin geklauten Kekse”, “Nudeln mit den Reste” and don’t forget “Gurken aus dem Glas”.

But now I got my shit together and will be running my errands tomorrow bright and early at around 1pm. Maybe.

Looking For Freedom

I’m all right. Tired, unmotivated and blah.

I found this interesting:

Baywatch star David Hasselhoff may have a hit TV show and the occasional soft-rock hit under his belt, but it appears that is not enough.

He’s still waiting for acknowledgement for his part in one of the greatest political events of the 20th Century – the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Umm Yeah. I asked a few people about it and they are either embarrassed or look at me like I’m crazy. Or both. I personally have no opinion.

This is great: Hey Ya Charlie Brown! Link Fixed! The original server probably exceeded their bandwidth Quota and got the furious beatdown of an angry server admin. I’ll post it on my server and face the consequences. Google be damned!

Apple’s core: The Mac turns 20

Trip Home From Europe Becomes Kafkaesque Ordeal:

“A German woman married to a Brooklyn schoolteacher had been told that she had all her papers in order when she took a quick trip to show off her infant daughter to her parents in Germany.

But her return home in late December turned surreal and terrifying when Homeland Security officials at Kennedy Airport rejected her travel documents, confiscated her passport, then detained her and the 3-month-old overnight in a room with shackled drug suspects. They let her go only after ordering her to leave the country no later than tomorrow.”

Gee I hope they are more welcoming to my friend Jens if we come over in a few months.

I deleted my oh so “Urgent Links” on the side for now. I didn’t like the way they looked in explorer. Sorry to the millions of people who rely on my site for traffic. They will be back some day.

Road Trip

Quite possibly I might go to America in March and do a road trip up the East Coast from Florida to New York.

The trick of course is planning work around it. I am planning on moving my company’s web site to another server. Usually this is easy as long as everything goes okay with the DNS. but we have so many CGI forms and scripts that need to be re-written in perl and PHP. This will take me some time, first to learn how to do it properly, and then a few weeks monitoring time after that to make sure nothing goes wrong and that emails get through and scripts don’t get hacked and shit.

On top of that the upper level/last step of our production chain is getting ready to move to OS X. We have to buy probably 6 licenses for OS X, Quark 6, BBEdit, QuickKeys, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. All that has to be installed and configured. I’m all for moving to OS X. In the long run it will make my job sooo much easier, but there will be some challenges involved.

We have a custom made piece of software written in REALbasic by a really talented programmer, but it doesn’t work in OS X. This software is crucial because it saves me so much time and makes extracting text from Quark and converting it to HTML so easy. We also have a website databank based on Frontier. Frontier is so fucking lame. It is a Content Managment System but I’m the one who feels managed by it. It is so hacked up and it has code practically falling out of it. I’m sure if we used it the way it was supposed to be used it would be decent. Any non-spec changes to the software from before my time there were not documented and I had to figure out what somebody did and why.

Anyway, our version runs on OS 9 only and I could probably port it to X but why bother when I’m moving it all over to PHP/MySQL/TYPO3 in the next 6 months?

So i got to plan my trip around this geek shit. While planning my means of attack I will listen to this so that I feel appreciated.