What makes a certain piece of music stand out and what just makes is as random as elevator muzak? Yet there’s music for every occasion and in every place: When you turn on your TV, when you go shopping, even when you try to sleep and have Italian neighbors.
Busy me! Especially until Sunday afternoon where a crapload of work, pardon my bluntness, need to be done in order to pursue a quiet and contemplative Christmas. But at least yesterday I had the opportunity to sneak away for half an hour and came back with a wonderful Christmas tree.
Out of a spark of curiosity I attempoted to order Amazon’s Kindle from Amazon.com. Not because it is such a great thing that rockets human civilization to the next level, but because I am a helpless early-adopter and Gadgetinator. Now I only wish I was in an US prison. Because of that. ‘Nuff said.
Last evening I watched an interesting documentary on TV about the French Foreign Legion. If everything goes wrong in my life, I was pondering, then I’ll join them! Leaving everything behind, getting a new name, a new identity, even a new meaning perhaps.
Radiohead’s latest album is out! And I discovered it four days late. But I like their straight way of marketing: The album only comes as download from their website1 as a nice .zip with ten mp3s in 160kbps quality. How much does it cost? You decide. No really! You decide!
…but not in real life. Clipping errors for example. I guess everybody of you has seen them by now. Imagine the first Playstation games that came in 3D, especially the buggy ones where solid objects began overlapping each other. In fact it happens so often when working in 3D that even Pixar’s A Bug’s Life had some clipping errors going on in the grass now and then. It’s so ridiculously easy in the computer to do the impossible in the real world.
I’ve been to Munich recently and searched the town for an issue of the Herald Tribune. Hell, even in Graz you have more international magazines than in the culs-de-sac of newspaper kiosks in Munich. At least I could get my grips on the New York Times (not even any kind of week-end or special issue) which cost you in New York $ 1.25. Now guess what I’ve paid at the kiosk at the train station for a single issue I had to ask the clerk to hand me personally because there was only one (!) available behind his counter:
Hey everybody. The Promenade Blog is online again! Don’t know why this site has not been working for two days. Don’t care either. It’s just nice to be alive again in the endless voids of the web.
But what am I saying… you didn’t miss me anyway.
My favorite PC gaming magazine, GameStar decided not to print cheats, tricks and hints for games anymore:
The internet has established itself as source for cheats and hints; you will find more up to date and more accurate walk-throughs at www.gamestar.de and on many other sites than possible in the magazine.1
That is another way of telling that printed media are sooner or later becoming extinct. That’s why I decided to take a look back into the wild and crazy 1990s and my personal experiences with PC-Gaming magazines.
Read the rest…
Some days coming home feels like returning to a cluttered hotel room with a jet lag in the middle of the night after a long journey. In this hotel room something began to smell ugly but you don’t have the energy to investigate.
Read the rest…
