the smoke signal version of 'gentlemen prefer blondes'

so i now told ping.fm to exclude lj from my status updates, as i don't want to flood this nice blog. if you feel like , you can now hook up on twitter to get the micro blogs as well... that's Geroyche on twitter or http://ping.fm/UFqjB

videos from the elevate festival 08 here and videos from club transmediale 2009 here. hope ping.fm bot understands html (yes, i am posting this through google talk. gotta love all those open apis).

EDIT: okay, so the bot ignores html tags.
Here are the links:
http://elevatefestival2008.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc
http://www.vimeo.com/tag:ctm09

i am still in the process of configuring ping.fm (and learning the syntax). i don't mean to post every single status update here, but i might sometimes still forget to use the needed command ;)

now successfully using ping.fm to be in sync.

behold! it's the great ping.fm test

2009 is going to be exciting.
Here's the final moment of anticipation, and maybe the last time for a long while that Mr. President can/has to just sit and wait.

Here's a quote by him on government transparency.
"I want to open up transparency in government, so that you guys know what is happening. I want to revamp our White House website. I know it's nice to take the virtual tour of the China Room," he notes sarcastically, "but I want people to be able to know, 'today, this issue is going on...today's President Obama talked about his proposal for $4000 student college tuition credits, it's going to be going into this congressional committee, these are the key leaders in the House and Senate that are going to be deciding on the bill, here are the groups that are involved that are supporting it, you should contact your Congressman. Just creating the situation that if people want to get involved and it's easy. The information is out there, but trying to track it down isn't...The more we can enlist the American people to pay attention and be involved, that's the only way we are going move an agenda forward. That's how we are going to counteract the special interests."
http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/26265/obama_s_organization_and_the_future_of_american_politics

If you read back a little you'll find my bass club announcements.
Bass Club has had 9 issues meanwhile (details cf. myspace) and they were fun, mostly. There is a general sound issue at that place. Right now Bass Club is on hold for a variety of reasons, the sound being a major one.
Instead i am organzing a pure Dubstep night at a different venue, with much better sound.
The first edition immediately had twice as many visitors as the best attended Bass Club even though we had no headliner comparable to the Bass Club line ups. Which is about to change though.

You can download an excerpt of my set at that first party here.
Also check the neat flyers, courtesy of Randy Fischer, also staff member of Club Atomino.

got this lil' fella for a week now. it already accompanied me to dortmund, i.e. for two six hour train rides.
an additional 1gb ram is on its way, but i already love it, 'cept for a touchpad issue that seems to affect a large quantity of units.

I certainly wish this new investigative piece by the NYT makes the waves it deserves in my opinion...

Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

is a very detailed description of how the TV networks' military analysts, often perceived as independent authorities who help shape public opinion about US military ops, have been placed by the Pentagon and deliberately used to transport its message like Trojan horses.

Essential read.

Our very own dj crew Ruff-E-Nuff turned six lately. We had a party with World Champion Dancehallsound LP International and LA jungle/dubstep veteran 6Blocc here. We also gave away a new mix of ours. It features tracks selected by all us 4 djs.
Actually it is sort of merged from two battle segments. Dancehall vs. Dubstep followed by Ragga Jungle vs. HipHop. Fahda Sensi plays almost exclusively dubplates for his Sensi Movement sound or remixes while I stick with some of the past month's biggest dubstep tracks in my opinion.
Likewise D.I.S is playing unreleased ragga jungle stuff while Motorv8a spins tracks that stood the test of time.
It was funm mixing this thing (and a challenge too). Hope listening is fun as well.



fahda sensi vs. geroyche
01 bugle - what i’m gonna do
02 bramma - from dem [dub]
03 bramma - stand alone [dub]
04 bramma - value of a lady [dub]
05 kromestar - hungry dub [crater 004]
06 peter tosh - legalize it (east coast remix) [war 002]
07 tes la rok - gunshot (juju remix) [narco.hz 008]
08 mavado - chat too much [dj rudebway rmx]
09 busy signal & mavado - badman place [vinyl shotz rmx]
10 mavado - gangsta [rmx]
11 bramma - action [dub]
12 benga & coki - night [tempa 030p]
13 the bug feat. warrior queen - poison dart (skream remix) [ninja tune 202x]
14 mala - lean forward [dmz 012]
15 mavado - squeeze her breast [rmx]
16 mavado - phone call [phoenix rmx]
17 aidonia - reload [phoenix rmx]
18 dr.evil - it’s dr.evil [vinyl shotz rmx]
19 kode 9 - magnetic city [soul jazz 161-12]
20 l-wiz - cowboy universal [redvolume 004]
21 6blocc - murderer [bootshake 007]

d.i.s vs. motorv8a
01 jah konda - we at war
02 general malice - strictly roots
03 foxy brown ft. barrington levy - mr. dj
04 tester - blind to you
05 nas - nas surviving the times
06 d.i.s - culture
07 Styles p (feat. jadakiss) - how we live
08 direct feed - scalp dem
09 fabolous brooklyn (feat. jay z and uncle murda)
10 general malice - i luv it
11 paulie walnuts - jah jah run tingz
12 krs one - sound of the police
13 krinjah - smoke weed


You can listen online, or download, and comment here

Letter sets like this one (including a sticker set) make me wonder if I should not start to write letters again.

Kode 9 & Spaceape, Scuba in Leipzig last night was awesome btw. Check my youtube profile if you want to see some impressions.

One of my photos from a trip to Prague in March 2006 (heck, that will have been two years ago soon!) has been included in the new Schmap!! guide to Prague. Guess that makes me a published photographer ;)

While being a published academic student might actually be prevented by my web design job. I just can't find the time to revise a certain paper as wished.

Happy New Year to anyone who still bothers to check this page after months of silence. Maybe I can find time again to start publishing more often. Time will tell.

A couple of weeks ago Gusset brought this new Nickelodeon show to my attention. It seems they got their selves a really funny hit.

Yo Gabba Gabba! is a show focused on music and dancing, aiming at elementary school kids.
It's beyond awesome, as some minutes on youtube will undoubtedly make you realize. That link will also provide video results for actual kids dancing to the show as they watch it on tv, which are no less fun :)

The show features really proper (oldschool) hip hop/party beats, fun puppets, star guests (one star guests is dancing with the puppets in every episode). It has everything that used to make kid's television exciting.
Here's to give you an idea:





The best part, well for a non-american anyway, is that I've recently come across this tv streaming solution that lets you stream nickelodeon (us) among other channels (comedy central (us) [hello Colbert Report!], fox news [yay! ;)], cbs, ...).

TVU Networks is technically supposed to even allow you to just stream the stations in your browser but their site has been experiencing technically issues lately. There is a stand-alone player however that works just fine (without any firewall hassle for instance). The download site is defunct right now too (whatever is up with their site?) but i guess google can help a fella out there.

Yo Gabba Gabba is on weekdays at 10:30am pacific, 7:30pm uk, 8:30pm cet (i.e. I started writing this article right after having watched today's episode, which featured an uptempo two-tone ska song on cleaning up your room :)

Now go and dance!

I kind of don't even really want to talk about Iraq anymore.

But the question remains why the hell did the Neocons do what they did. They certainly knew better. And not just "experts warned them, they should have listened"-better, no - they seemed to believe it. Well either that or Cheney just is one good actor and can transport the government message convincingly even if he himself disagrees with the decisions made (I have not looked into material about the specific positions during the Gulf War, I know some favored invasion others, including Bush Sr., did not). But if the later is the case, then the basic message is that politicians do not speak their mind and argue against their own beliefs if the situation demands it.

Richard "Dick" Cheney in 1994.

There are certain paradoxes within the current German way of life. I especially mean the attitude toward resource consumption. One of them concerns water. According to Wikipedia, where there is as so often no citation for the source, the average German private consumer in 2005 needed 126 Liters per day. The average American consumed 382. The decline in Germany has been dramatic ever since the raised ecological awareness started to form during the 80s. East Germans quickly adopted that. East German consumption fell from 142 to 93 Liter per day and person in between 1990 and 2004. On top of that, the population shrunk too in East German during that period.

So why isn't it all positive, and where is the paradox? Less consumers, consuming less on top of it, basically have on major drawback. The water stays in the pipes longer. Less floating energy, longer durations, less power to carry away dirt and mud. The water becomes dirtier and even more toxic. The irony of it all is that the suppliers and pipe net maintainers have to fight this of course. So they pump water through the systems every now and then... Lots of it. Last week, for a week, pipes in my quarter have been cleaned. That is what brought the whole issue to my attention again. A newspaper article describes one of those cleansings, just a very small fraction, half an hour of cleansing, a pipe in front of 5 houses. Amount of water needed: 15,000 Liter. A local family of three spends that much in two months. I haven't really made the maths, but it is not all wrong to simply assume that the water Germans learnt to save, by manually stopping the toilet flush (we have efficient flushing systems for that), and lord knows what, is "wasted" on cleansing.

According to readings, pollution levels exceed the limit times 320 in some cases before the  cleaning. One reason why bottled water is the no.1 beverage in Germany. Yes we know that coming from the plant the water is as fresh as a daisy, but... (I know, there are filters..)

And one thing is for sure too. The water needed for the cleansing because people use less surfaces in the companies' calculations, and affects the every rising price for water. Paradox.

More details, in German though, in the Wikipedia entry.

Another of those paradoxes concerns waste. I have no time at hands, but in short: especially in East Germany new modern waste dumps had been built, designed for the consumption levels of 1990 or so. But less people live here now, and an elaborate system of separating waste (paper, plastic, glass get recycled) reduced "common waste" dramatically. Now they are not working on full load, which makes it more expensive to run them. Less waste also makes wastemen less efficient. Waste disposal gets more and more expensive as people produce less waste. And the dumps even import waste from other countries to be able to still use their capacities.

Oooh, baby, baby
Baby, baby
Oooh, baby, baby
Baby, baby

Get up on this!*

Remember the days when you would just go into a store, trust the clerks judgement and buy a product? Well, maybe not entirely. There have always been tech mags with expert reviews and all. But nowadays... I turned into a semi-expert on tft panels lately. So far I had always had a CRT (17") and valued its flexibility and (still superior?) image quality, but for a few months now I finally felt affordable tfts can compete. I have been running my 17" at 1280x1024, thus I knew I needed a nice big 22" (resolution 1680x1050) since I had no intention of losing vertical space. So I picked some favorites and turned to the net.

There I found that, of course, there are specialized forums with lots of people reporting their impressions about certain models, and even uncovering some semi-scandals. Apart from being able to identify common issues, you learn for instance that there are such things as "panel lotteries".  An example: Samsung introduced a widely acclaimed new 22" (226bw) a few months back, very pleasant reviews for the built-in Samsung TN-panel (there are 4 different LCD technologies, TN panel being affordable allrounders used in 99% of the mid-priced consumer displays, but with some drawbacks, e.g. no good for professional color-proof DTP), but was so overwhelmed by demand that they turned to 3rd party suppliers for panels.

Even though they claim that those 2 different panels (code A and C) met their quality criteria, user feedback suggested something else. Eventually, instead of being overt about all this, Samsung silently removed the features that had indicated the panel used. Supposedly they got lots of returns. Some people kept returning their tft till they had a Samsung panel. This, and other common problems reported by users turned me away from the Samsung model. But Samsung is not alone in this. Anyway, where was I? Praise the net, from a consumer perspective that is... and if you can spare some time for research. Can't wait to get my new baby now. The real challenge was finding a store that had it in stock! Did I mention the flexible mounting, and support for 90° rotation? :)

*If you don't have Salt-N-Pepa's Push it stuck in your head now, well, I guess then we have less in common than I thought ;)

Damn. Both Bergman and Antonioni reported dead within the last 24 hours. Essentially those were the two whose movies sucked me into all this classic cinema geekiness. Not to say they turned me into a cineast. I had been going to the movies, watched independent contemporaries too. But only after I saw some of their black and white movies (notably Tystnaden and La Notte) late at night on TV during a phase in my life when depressing tales about human nature had lots of appeal (I mean, they still do ;), was it that I started to actively seek out more classics. I started to dig deeper.

I owe Antonioni and Bergman a lot. By chance I re-watched Scenes of a Marriage only last week.  Actually I learnt only yesterday that there is a Swedish 300 minutes TV version of Scenes..., I need to get that! Even just sitting through the theatre cut is a painful and yet fascinating experience. Even though it is not his strongest film they way I see it.

And I am glad to still have essential movies from both of them to watch for the first time.  I always felt I should watch Fanny and Alexander sometime around Christmas. That is yet to come, and I already look forward to it. Somewhere I heard yesterday that we should consider Bergman not as a great director, but as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

On the bright side, I think both had enough opportunities to say what they want, weren't taken from us at the height of creativity. Their body of works is substantial and here to enjoy - or to endure ;)

Our Secretary of the Interior, star of my latest T-shirt, courtesy of dataloo, has been sitting in a wheel chair ever since an attack by a mentally challenged woman. Currently many people feel he is traumatized since and, spurred by terrorist threats, transforms into the an enemy of the state and constitution himself.

Stasi was the East German Secret Police. Stasi 2.0 is his vision. Including federal spyware that he wants to be able install and use secretly on private computers, prohibition of communication for suspects he cannot legally force to leave the country, camps for suspects without legal status (yeah, right, after the incredible success of Guantanamo), killing of suspected terrorists (by the way, in 2001 the FBI called the Reclaim the Streets freeparty movement a terrorist threat to the US), long-time storage of connection data and (already in place) criminalization of so-called hacker software, I.e. the tools every network admin and alert private user uses for penetration testing and the methods taught during every CompSci education.

which is still my latest ep, nearing 2 years of age already (well in October, but  Jesus, time flies). of course I look up  my own name in search engines regularly. boy better know...

turns out there's a new dj mix which features all (!) of the tracks from this ep. 24 tracks, 5 from me. well, a dj can't help it if the music just so good ;)