the smoke signal version of 'gentlemen prefer blondes'

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.

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!

not for publication, dubplate...

VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO 1966 Acetate LP

As the news about one rights owner after another threating to sue Youtube keep coming in on a daily basis (sorry, no links this time but you will find it if you want, trust me), my anger has been growing.
I was going to post a reply to the latest post at dj rupture's blog, but i figured it strayed too far from his issue and I evidently just wrote down things I had inside me and wanted to get out.
I better post it here:

From my point of view Youtube is on the verge of dying a slow death.
Everbody and their mom, our favourite vultures included, is now claiming their rights as they hope to get a piece of the cake that is Google's record revenues.
30,000 videos deleted on behalf of the "Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers", Comedy Central material deleted thanks to Viacom, NBC material (old, odd Saturday Night Live clips) deleted a while back... Bayern Munich (german soccer team) threating to sue, so are the GEMA (*the* German music rights management association...deleting what they object to would be a major thing...) and tons of majors.
The GEMA thing alone could become terribly complicated, or expensive for Google. Hmm, come to think of it, they probably don't mind ;)

I wonder how it will all end, this attempt to please all the world's different rights owners, coming from the most different juristical backgrounds in their home countries. They all have in common that they themselves failed to come up with any structure or idea that brings their contents online in one way (free) or another (creating revenue). And now they jump the bandwagon, demanding their share for not doing anything, after millions of users built a community in what is a social phenomenon.

I wonder if youtube ends up being filtered just like Google [sites not in compliance to German law - e.g. nazi propaganda - will be filtered out of the Google index upon request by state officials]. One way or another i am afraid all the odd, old, rare and exciting stuff will disappear again. Just like this stuff is not represented in legal music download services, but mp3 blogs or file sharing.

In other news... crap... for some reason the channel that was CNN here has been showing only a black screen for a few days now. Just in time for the mid-terms :/ I will just have to follow coverage online, as no German TVstation seems to devote its night programme to that topic. I think some did for the presidential election two years ago. Then again I can do without the fairly balanced accounts of Germany's "USA experts" anyway (yes, I really believe they are, but it is hard not to be balanced against Bush from a European perspective I might add ;).

I am writing this only to see if it will be properly published. I have another of those experimental evenings. After having composed my first document via Google docs, to editing which I now invited my label friends since it is our label's to-do list, I downloaded Microsoft live writer.

A stand-alone application to compose blog posts using a decent user interface which supports multiple blog accounts. I found it a bit annoying to log in and out of livejournal now that I have two LJs. Not to mention the powerful spell-checker that will save me some hassle with the research blog.

 LiveJournal tags: the internets

EDIT: hmm. works fine in principle. though the lj tags only work global and not to filter my posts like a proper lj tag. no fancy stuff like moods, location, music either.
i guess it will depend on my mood whether i use it for this lj.
i can always use it for the research blog. i don't have to log out from this one anymore, and that other one needs no tags or mood smilies.

i have created a 2nd lj today.
it is a research blog, required for me in order to get a graded participation certificate for a seminar i am part of.
required, but also replacing the need to write a roughly 12pages long term paper :)
quite an interesting approach.

i thought about integrating it into this journal, maybe via a separate tag. but i decided that just would have made things messy,
and rubbed this private blog into my class mates' (none of which i had known before today) faces...

it is about how movies portray urban spaces, focus on the bronx, new york [that issue and borough will be topic of the phd thesis that the girl tutoring the seminar has just started] and london.

i'd very much like all of you to follow it and contribute if you think it fits the occassion. some outside input would certainly be nice.
so feel free to add it as your lj friend, or bookmark the page or something...

http://tamas-stc0607.livejournal.com/
tamas_stc0607

what a pun, eh?

google just bought youtube (i'll spare me the burden of making this hyperlinks) for 1.65 bln $.
not sure what it all means, except that youtube is a big kid now.

EDIT: Well, and that the price somehow seems to support the notion, upheld by the original myspace ceo, that myspace
was practically given away as a present to news corp. more on that here

in other news... the answer to the question what marx and kafka have in common lies here (i feel i was caught in an
odd millisecond, i turned and wanted to say something to the photoguy, but well).

google news now comes with archive search.
not sure how it compares to something like lexis nexis, just because i never had an account there (only heard of it due to the praisals of al franken).
but it's sure fun to read a somewhat conservative report by the time magazine on the starting student riots 1967 in germany.
generally search terms like "benno ohnesorg" seem to be a bit too old [and german maybe] while results for exxon valdez already look way more impressive.

yes, i resort to short entries about news etc, but there's not much going on here right now except web coding,
some new tracks that aren't finished or can't be made public yet, and a new gig in october that i can't confirm 100% for now  ;)

sitting in a park under a tree and reading a... pdf.
wait.
heh, erm... nevertheless.
google book search now offers handy pdf downloads for public domain books.
yay!

maybe one day i will actually read my first long book in pdf form.
if only it wasn't so tiresome.
i demand at least a bookmark function for acrobat reader.
can't be that hard to implement.

life explained. on film, they say.

Made from within Flock.

I had applied for Flock (a new browser based on firefox that focuses on enhancing the social network browsing experience - ah, marketing talk ;) beta testing right when the first beta was announced, and got an email from them pretty soon, but later forgot about it. Now i installed their latest version and it sure feels fancy.
Heck they even support drag&drop of pictures into myspace comments for instance.

EDIT: Also, there is a css bug in my lj-layout now, the designer is aware and looking into it. There is nothing i can do, especially since my free account doesn't allow custom designs, so i can't mess with the code deeply enough to fix this on my own.

Blogged with Flock

these past days have been quiet. i found the time to send some overdue emails, clean my desk, get the new external hdd running, and focus on the internet more than
in the weeks before.
more blog reading, more colbert clip watching... more information overload, aargh.
i hadn't looked into the phenomenon of mp3 blogs in a while. now it is getting over my head ;)
too much.
mp3 blogs are part of this "barely legal" sort of thing that gets politicians in a frenzy i guess, screaming for the end of net neutrality.
they are so much to consume. basically each and every is like the most music-nerdy friends you have, telling long stories to every album
they show you. now imagine you have 20 of those, showing you things on a daily basis.
i mean, that is exactly what i love, people being passionate about music, and even more so if the music turns out to be exciting (some mp3s blogs may just turn out to be trashy),
but it's a lot to handle once you start and look through their archives.
one nuissance is that most of them host their stuff on sites like rapidshare, which nag you with countdowns and ads less you are a paying customer.

i stumbled across this site via youtube, and while the content already is massive it's their blogroll that is killing me.

this mp3 blog has stuff by paul lansky, can, john cale + terry riley (!), john cage, raymond scott, ... you get the idea
this one has idm gems from toytronic, astralwerks, cco, mille plateaux ... it's the one that leaves the worst gut feeling. i be damned if not most of them are available from itunes.
this one is pretty trashy, but hey, he has godzilla soundtracks, the koto album, more raymond scott, dr. who soundtracks...
and here i found amongst other things the only ep from a punk band that had bill drummond (later klf member) and holly johnson (frankie goes to hollywood).

i will need to take some time off of this to prepare for my dj sets tomorrow and on sunday night.
the first will be the biggest party i ever played at, though not neccessarily the biggest floor. the biggest local event guide is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a party that
features that exact number of floors. one of which is ours. i guess a total of 5,000 guest is not overly optimistic.
sunday night will be like the opposite.
my japanese acquaintance lambent is going to come by from berlin, and we will have some fun at the kapital.



...so i suggested to book him after i was asked for ideas by the kapital, and it was done.

this may have been a one-time thing though, since slik and me will be in charge of the sunday evenings
at the new atomino, starting october!!
i am so excited. finally a regular night to be run by me. i hope i can get some friends to come and play :)

oh, i forgot. i  added some older pictures to my picasa web account.
some of them at least captured something.

i pretty much had an afternoon off.
what better way to spend it than browsing through wikipedia.
i came across this list of unusual articles which proved most worthwhile. it is devoted to strange, odd facts, concepts, events, persons.
I had heard of some the stuff more or less recently. actually, given the relatively short time i know her, radiotik is responsible for a suprising percentage of my knowledge in this area.
For example Dark Side of the Rainbow , a theory that Pink Floyd and Dorothy go well together. That seems to be more common knowledge among U.S. teens than Germans, at least i am not aware that any of my friends would ever had heard of this. We did actually watch the movie this way by now and it was good fun :)
Or the fact that Americans believe Kennedy called himself a jelly donut.
And my final example is the Voynich manuscript a book in an unknown code or language from the early midevals that drove famous mathematicians and other scientists crazy so far it seems. it seems to deal with different aspects of natural sciences and maybe is an elaborate joke, or at least a deliberate attempt to create an unsolveable mystery by some old genius.
as soon as i learned about it i was really disappointed about the data protection / data security / crypthography lecture i attended a few terms ago. the professor didn't even try to make it exciting in the beginning at least. it was a pure, dry, high maths.
The manuscript is currently in a library at Yale, and they were generous enough to provide hi-res scans online. It is interesting to look at.



But many others i had never heard of. I do not intend to read all of that. But some have been interesting and/or funny to read and i guess more will be :)

In other internet news, Handbag/Abba, a breakcore/mashup/freestyle artist of Sozialistischer Plattenbau fame has been banned from Myspace for copyright reasons! Bear with me till Istari Lasterfahrer hopefully reveals details in a private message or otherwise.

What else? Ah! In case the word has not gotten to you yet: Stephen Colbert [that's "colbér"] did seriously show some guts at the Whitehouse correspondents' dinner last week. The president sat only 10 meters away, and Colbert literally punched him for 25 straight minutes.
Youtube links here or get it via bittorrent.

Okay, despite the fun this afternoon i would much prefer being in Berlin right now. Loefah is going to play tonight!
But well, at least i learned that Paul Rose aka Skuba/Hotflush will play at THCell next Thursday.
Since i will dj in Berlin the day after, at the Zentrale Randlage Birthday with Society Suckers, Atomly, Miwon, The Buddy System and others i am not going to miss that party at least.
Which reminds me, i did update my website yesterday with new gigs and release details.

today was the day i decided that the benefits are more than the downsides.
i eventually joined last.fm
here is my profile

that may be a bit of a skewed picture since i listen to vinyl quite much and don't have that stuff on mp3 anyway.
but heck, i can still network and find neighbors :)

oh it's been so long.
but i didn't abandon my lj, oh no.
i just didn't take the time...
let me give a quick update on things.

well. i spent the last few days doing mainly two things.
one was html and php programming. asger from denmark approached me last october, after he found my site via gutterbreakz,
and offered to redesign my whole website. an early draft looked promising, but then i hadn't heard from him until last week.
he suddenly sent an all new design, and i immediately liked it.
i used this occassion to get rid of old "sins" i had committed. mainly the use of frames and tables for positioning purposes only.
the new site is valid xhtml 1.0 strict and seems to still work even with ie6.
all in all, both from design and programming aspects i am very proud of it!



the other thing that consumed quite some time was setting up my digital media collection with picasa.
neat slideshow, collage and webgallery features which are easy to use plus the option to apply tags to images make it the killer
app i've long been looking for.
i decided to tag all images with the names of the people in them. quite some work, but the result is really cool. looking for
"christian basti" for example brings up all the pictures with both members of the society suckers that i have.
if i add "berlin" i only get the ones that were taken there.
yay! just the type of fun i like ;)

that was the immediate past.
the not-so-distant future is me and  radiotik going on a five-day-vacation to the czech republic!
we'll stay here and there. and see this and that.
before and after we will enjoy the beauty of this town, and home cooking.
i think it will be awesome :)
i will leave it at that for now, determined to write another entry about recent developments in chemnitz'
party scene soon.

you know what they say about new york's citizens.

well, i haven't been there yet, but thanks to a link from the planet µ board i still get to know them these days.

Chick #1: And I was like, goddamn, it's food...I can eat it, you know?
Chick #2: Seriously. Just because she's anorexic doesn't mean she can impose her thoughts about food on you!
Chick #3: Wait, wait, wait. Back up. You ate a cracker you found on the floor of the subway?

--Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, Bayard Street

overheardinnewyork.com

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!










thanks to spreeblick for bringing cuteoverload to my attention.