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.

The Russian army prioritizes

Nothing new.

Oh wait. I got a new mouse pad today at work. It has a gel-filled trippy vertigo looking ergonomic wrist supporter. When I’m bored, which is seldom because I’m working so hard, I squeeze the gel and trip out all Cheech and Chong style (link fixed 01-24-04).

I’m.

so.

Lame.

By the way: If you are wanting some good german electric music, search up Dj Koze. He has an album called Music Is Okay. It’s from 2000, which means I’m so late to the party, but it holds up well.

Brilliant! Just what I’ve been missing from the American Advertising landscape.

I tutored the 11 year old stepson of a friend today in English. First time I ever did this. I was paid in beer; the universal currency. What a fugdup language that English. Yet at the same time a treasure. If I could, just learn, where to put, the commas, I wouldn’t sound, like William, Shatner.

I forgot to say that when I went to the doctor the other day I was trying to say that I had to throw up. The verb for that is sich übergeben. I kept saying unterbrechen which is not only totally wrong but also means to interrupt. So I was saying, “I wasn’t feeling well and I had to interrupt, twice”. See German is fugdup as well.

I’ve been listening to a lot of country music lately. George Jones, Waylon, Willie, Johnny, Hank Sr., Merle. What’s wrong with me? Nothing really. Maybe a little homesick. Is “Up Against the Wall (Redneck Mother)” VS. “Okie From Muskogee” the Country & Western equivalent of the “Southern Man” VS. “Sweet Home Alabama”? Well, is it? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Imagine I Was Ballin’

A few years back i was an assistant engineer at a recording studio in Chicago. One of the projects I worked on was this:



I’ve never seen the cover until now. I’m almost positive that I didn’t receive any credit on the inside cover.

I’m over it though. Really.

A story from the New York Times about a sort of nostalgia for the old East Germany Eisenhüttenstadt Journal: Warm, Fuzzy Feelings for East Germany’s Gray Old Days. Ausweis und Free reg. required!

CNN.com – German police investigate potato computer scam – Jan. 13, 2004: No matter where you are in the world, you are gonna find a wacko.