the last yard: "we are a handful of guys and gals in amsterdam working on new ways to broadcast and receive digital audio and video through today's current networked infrastructure".
the last webcam picture of the large hall in vienna's sofiensäle, shortly before it burnt out completely.
what the heck is swarmcast?
just took another look at mashica. again and always very nice. look at the source code for some beautiful ascii art.
hooray, opocensky & opocensky are back from their holidays! the "fettgarten" days are over, finally... but wait! no, they are open again, but only the shop. the lunch table opens not until monday. sigh.
at least hannes and i bought some bread, ham and cheese for take-away.
e-mail from london. pimi sent two fine links to me: august shift cover made by soda. and douglas rushkoff’s “open source” novel “exit strategy”.
once i really thought the "alpbacher mediengespräche" would be interesting. this year you can listen to representants of mesozoic bigcos like bertelsmann and pro7 talking crap about "entgrenzte medienwelten" (media worlds unlimited), or: on the quest for making even incredibly much more money sucking the juice out of the eastern neighbours.
at least there are some guys allowed to picture the media landscape in yugoslavia and russia as quota exotics...
i wonder what money juggler helmut kohl will be talking about at the political symposion. donation party unlimited?
for the sake of pretending political awareness: nazi and east german propaganda guide page.
certainly, my week-end in berlin was great fun, though. it was a nice wedding in wedding – although the official part at the civil registry office was more than a good reason not to get married at all. i mean, why do germans always have to point out that everything must be "ordentlich" (orderly)? it's such a pain in the ass. introduced and still propagated from the right as a german "prime virtue" it even reached out to the left as the fundamentalism of political correctness. but i digress.
the wedding party took place at the allotment colony "ideal 3" where we got stuffed with yummy cakes, bratwurst, salad and grilled meat. many pictures were taken and accompanying tales were written on these for documentation. makes me reconciled again <g>. best wishes and a very more thank you to heike, walid and all their relatives and friends.
on sunday i went through almost all the bars and pubs in mitte, starting with "keyser soze", having the cabaret intermezzo at "kalkscheune" mentioned before, back to "strandbad mitte", some indian food at "nan" (kastanienallee), a staroprama at "bar roberta", then heading for "die assel" as meeting point and finally getting the blues at "alea iacta est". many thanks to claudia and tibor for hosting me, to martha, elke, haugi, darius and last but not least my sister milli for being around. i've had a fine time.
it accidentally happened that i was in berlin during the commemoration of the berlin wall or "anti-fascist protection wall" (western / eastern version). and it makes wonder why there is hardly any of my favourite blogs mentioning it, resp. mentioning it as "wall blahs" ("mauergefasel") at the utmost.
here in austria the development of a software product is more sensational although austria was one of the first countries to pick up the gdr refugees in 1989. but also the german bloggers remain silent, even those i would have bet they would write a little anecdote.
e.g. this one i was told by dr seltsam: in those trembling sixties, the german minister of defense, franz-josef strauß, planned to bomb an eastern-german city with a "pre-emptive nuclear first strike" (that was a common terminology at that time). sounds like nonsense, but i was reassured it is to be found in strauß's autobiography.
strauß needed the approval of the usa to produce and control nuclear weapons in germany. because some us-american cia hotspurs considered the idea interesting and contacted strauß to aks him which city he was thinking of, the german chancellor konrad adenauer and the president of the states john f. kennedy, both knew that they are coping with maniacs. so kennedy decided to urge the russian president chrustschow to solve this problem and to abandon the menacing war.
the solution was that lethal bolchevist stronghold that divided "berlin (west)" and "the democratic berlin" and it should endure 28 years until the people of eastern-germany left their doter government behind (another story).
if it is very likely that things happened like that? who knows. fact is, the times of being on the run is over. at the moment, the view is quite one-sided. but just as the successors of the eastern-german regime cannot escape its legacy and responsibility, the western world will have to face history once again one day.
"keine atempause geschichte wird gemacht es geht voran." – fehlfarben, "ein jahr (es geht voran)".
my father escaped from east-berlin shortly before the wall was built but already at a time when caught refugees ended their lifes in prison.
