Silicon Nostalgia

Remember the glory days of 286-16MHz silicon, evil MS-DOS 5.0 and dealing with config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to get a few more bytes of free RAM, QBasic and Gorilla, Alley Cat (not the Unix command, but the CGA game), enhancing your pogo stick skills in Commander Keen 4, the early Lucas Arts adventures (They taught me not to put an egg into a microwave.), Future Crew's Second Reality, written in 100% pure assembly language Inertia Player, squeezing more and more bytes onto a floppy via overformatting with VGA-Copy and listening endless hours to elysium.mod?

For me this has been around 199prettyearly. And today for some reason I had the idea to convert some of the old MODules into modern MP3 files and to use them as ringtones on my Samsung SGH-D600 cell phone. So I sent them through a MikMod, GoldWave, Lame workflow, et voilà, there they are. They are some of the most famous tracks from around this time and they still make you move!

2nd_pm.mp3 | deflorat.mp3 | elysium.mp3

Sweet Home Palo Alto

Wow! I did just read at Symlink, that the satellite resolution of Google Local and Google Maps, respectively, got a lot better recently, so I just had to check this out and it's really amazing! Remember those most important places in Palo Alto? You can even see the yellow In-N-Out sign in "double double" resolution! :)

Home | Work | In-N-Out

Another Fucking Bed@N-Pir

Well, almost one year after I went to the last Fucking Bed Party, Almut, Berthold, Jacek and me decided to go there again. Actually, it was Kasia, who suggested to go there, because she didn't like to go to M1_The Club for some reason and Chris asked me to organize the whole thing for last Saturday and then both of them didn't join. :(

But let me start at the beginning: They and some other people met earlier at 7 Grad and so did I to pick them up. Unfortunately, this less than average place is making fucking entrance politics, which means their fucking bouncers didn't want to let me in for ridiculous reasons. Although this place was less than half full, they told me, that I was dressed up too casual. Well, it was just my shoes that sucked, but they're so damn comfortable. So I fucking lied to them and told them, that I just wanna say Hello to some people and that I will leave again in two minutes. Hehe and they fucking believed me! :) So I hurried to take off my conspicuous white jacket and hoped, that they won't find me. And this worked pretty well. After some time they started looking for me and even crossed my way a couple of times, but they didn't find me. Then I became too uncareful and they got me. Ouch! They immediately forced me to leave -- and of course they had to insult me! Suckers! Unfortunately Kasia and Charly weren't there yet, so Chris had to stay and they couldn't join to N-Pir.

I met Almut, Berthold and Jacek in front of the N-Pir. The guy at the entrance was very nice: He told me, that they are in the process of increasing their dress code and advised me to wear another pair of shoes next time, but that it would be okay for today. And that's the N-Pir! Entrance was 13 bucks like last time and the "decoration" was like expected: In the middle of the dancefloor was this huge bed again with nacked girls pleasing with each other, at the sides were cages with dancing gogos and on the walls were video screens showing lesbian porn. Business as usual! :) The girls rate was kinda high this time, so we were dancing surrounded by girls and didn't know, where to look at after some time. :) But I think, Almut also liked it, although her view was not as good. I took some pictures of the club and the bed with my digicam and got into trouble with security again. This big guy asked me, if I had a license for taking pictures. Oehm yeah, license? So he forced me to delete all the pictures in front of him, but I fucking tricked him and leafed into the wrong direction, showing only harmless pictures. Since I'm not a big fan of Pate No.1, N-Pir's resident "House" dj, because he widely mixes together all styles of music from metal to dancefloor and since I got really tired, I already left the club at 3:something am.

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Stuggi-Boogie-Benztown

Hmm, my brother is just back from Rio de Janeiro and already away again in Paraguay, having a lot of fun down there in South America and visiting a lot of cool places, just like I was used to do back in California, so I'm a bit jealous right now. It's still 3 months of "hard" work and studies until I'm gonna visit him. So I thought I should go sightseeing myself a little and headed for the Motorstadt am Neckar to see the stuff that I've already seen so many times before! :)

I made a big circle, walking from university downtown down to the main train station, up Königsstrasse to Schlossplatz, where I got some warming hot wine, then to Rotebühlplatz, Marienstrasse, Paulinenstrasse, Tübingerstrasse, Königsstrasse and back to university. Stopped at several stores, got the new SubCulture as well as the other city magazines plus some nice new flyers. An amazing thing I figured out (by discovering a new Harthouse record at Record-X-Press) is, that Harthouse has been relaunched and moved to Mannheim. Wow, is Xavier gonna cry for Harthouse now? I mean, Mannheim is not really known for its Techno Scene. But maybe I'm just too ignorant. Anyway, just listened to one of their new releases and sounds pretty acidish minimal, kinda cool. Have to check them out...

Oppressively Contracted

Hehe, just kidding...

A couple of days ago, my long anticipated contract for a working student job arrived, so I'm officially a member of "The Family" again. Cheers Berthold! :) The contract is valid for one year and I'm gonna work on a twice-a-week basis at the research center in Böblingen-Hulb starting next Monday on January, 9th 2006. Finally I'm gonna make some money again to pay off my debts, which have accumulated over the last year in California and which I'm still owing my parents. My supervisor suggested that after that one year of student work he wants me to write my diploma thesis there, so this looks really promising and I'm looking forward to Monday.

Happy New Year 2006

Aber jetzt, sozusagen better late than never: Hope you all had a Merry Christmas with lots of presents and, of course, I wish all of you a Happy New Year 2006.

Since we didn't have any clue about what to do on New Year's Eve (exactly like every year), Alex, Etze, Jasi and me finally decided to accompany Berthold and all the other guys to Blanc Royal @ Muttermilch, Stuggi-Boogie-Benztown. So we formed a party posse of 22 people, which guaranteed a lot of fun. Worth mentioning are the tickets, which had been lasered out of steel. However, I unfortunately forgot to take a photo. Blanc Royal, like the name suggests, everybody was supposed to dress up in white. I had a white sweater with regular pants and a white jacket.

After having some tasty, cheesy raclette with my family at home, I met Jasi and Berthold in the train and we headed for Stuttgart, where we met all the other people. The party was pretty chilly in the beginning, as everything was decorated in white, they had live soul music and served a four-course dinner, consisting of soup, risotto, duck and dessert. Unfortunately the dishes were pretty small, so some people decided to have an extra Döner afterwards. Also, the promised fire show was more or less a joke and the expected balloon competition didn't take place. Anyway, we had a lot of fun. At midnight some people went to Schlossplatz, but Jasi and me lost them in the crowd, so we celebrated on our own until we met them again back in the club. So there it was -- 2006.

After midnight the music turned into tougher and more progressive House beats and everybody started to dance. The funny thing is, that we lost Alex somehow. He just wanted to go outside, but did never return. No worries, he's fine again. So we partied till morning and took home one of the first trains.

Let's see what 2006 will bring...