20.02.09
16.02.09
Finance Minister Of Japan Drunk at G7?
Word in the tubes is that the finance minister of Japan was drunk during the recent G7 meetings - you can judge for yourself if it is true or not - I don´t really blame him. His country just announced that its economy shrunk by 12.7%.
On a related note here is the first plausible definition of what the difference between a recession and a depression is in financial terms.
Recession: The economy will recover. Just be smart and be patient.
Depression: The economy won't recover. After 10+ years, the methods of investment will be permanently changed to something significantly different.
Update: The Minister has resigned after Japanese Press put the story out big time and the Japanese Prime Minister was ashamed for his country.
15.02.09
PoD: Bliss is ignorance - happiness is fiction
This image is from the blissisignorance.com guys who who say some interesting thought provoking and outright funny things about depression (it has to be embraced at points for a healthy mind). There are more hilarious photos like these on the flickr stream and nice depressing music on the website.
via the eternal metafilter.
(its a band btw)
13.02.09
Speaker of the Taliban uses EiPhone
Apparently the Al Jazeera Reporter Hamish Macdonald interviewing the Taliban Speaker Mullah Zaif saw how the guy took out an iPhone. Mullah Zaif said "the internet is addictive on this thing, very fast". Apple supporting the terrorists you should have known that, now every iPhone user is a suspected terrorist....
Via seven.mac
11.02.09
How fast can you talk?
This 30 year old FedEx commercial has the fastest talking person in that I have ever seen. I wonder if the human race "evolves" talking this fast one day. Funny as hell too.
2.02.09
Veggie Love
This advertisment was banned from superbowl (talk about prude americans) but I can whole heartly support the message...
18.01.09
Good Bye President Bush
Maybe you should get a job as an entertainer next...
25.11.08
Live Cinema?
Just stumbled over this. Thought it is kind of amazing that the term showed up in 1987 - never knew but you never stop learning I guess - music is of course taste but me as almost 80s kiddy tends to not dislike it.
21.01.08
Tradtional Media is still clueless
I just read a german study about media use in the "future" (PDF! warning). Its done by the "Gesellschaft für Innovative Marktforschung" (Society for Innovate Marketing Research) and boy are they a clueless bunch of wannabees.
take the following statement:
Vor allem das Internet wird hier eine entscheidende Rolle spielen und die etablierten (Massen- )Medien vor große Herausforderungen stellen. Die Nutzungsdichte innerhalb der nachwachsenden Generationen zeigt, dass sich das Internet zukünftig als ein neuer „Big Player“ im Konzert der wichtigsten Medien einreihen wird.
(It translates along the lines of "The internet will be playing an important part in the future and will pose a threat to established media.)
Well let me break it to you the internet IS a major player in the content market. Traditional media has been delagated to place 2, 3 and 4 in the target group of 14-19 year olds already and traditional media is already a dying species. We are in 2008 not in 2005 anymore. I can go on with more quotes out of this redicioulus paper that go along the same line - basically the people who wrote it (one studied politics the other socio-economy) should look for a different job because they are writing about a media as if it where at a standstill the last three years, but the media itself is living in the future constantly. The study reads like someone has not got that the whole "web2.0" thing is already a bursting bubble that was so much hype and from the beginning a mere marketing scheme for things already in place since internet 1.0.
one more quote:
Medien müssen sich daher zum einen als Plattformen verstehen, die den Nutzern bei Bedarf die Möglichkeit einer aktiven Mitgestaltung in der Auswahl der Inhalte bzw. des Programmflows bietet.
(Media must see itself as a platform that gives their users - if required - the possibility of an active co-designing of the content selection or the programm flow)
LOL... People ARE CREATING THEIR OWN MEDIA. If TV stations rush to the net now and give the user the possibility - if required - of co-designing their content selection or program flow - all TV stations will die an even faster death then they will eventually do anyway. People grab stuff from everywhere there is no brand loyalty anymore - its only the content that counts and that will be more and more created by the people who watch it them self. No wonder with these kind of studies that the traditional media is so far behind in their thinking. And just creating a "community" will backfire shorter or later because everyone is building "artificial" communities - at one point there are so many online communities as there are websites and then NONE of these communities will provide any value to anyone because people will just spend their time on their own community - which is rooted in real life.
The fragmentation of media is already taking its toll - the only ones who take a toll is the traditional media. Just ask your kid from next block how much tv he/she/it watches, how much its is on the interweb and how much of the time it watches tv its also on the intertube at the same time (having the tv as an ambient noise generator) and how much of this tv watching is really about 1 or 2 shows that would also easely be watched on the iTubes as soon as this is a viable option and how much less tv its gonna watch then and that it won´t care where the content is coming from in the first place and the trillions of places it could come from and the nonexisting filter and the paradise and the user generated content that draws them away from one place. ANALYST DUDES: The future is much more complex then just extrapolating media habits of yesterday to tommorrow - look around you stop reading the net and interview your "target" group. The future for big media is bleak, its scattered already all across the floor - we are aiming at a free media culture and you aint be able to do shit about it just speeding it up with "predictions" like this. (they are even getting paid -by big media - to do this - hilarious). Oh and read "settop boxes" in there somewhere - now let see if anyone ever makes a settop box that actually sells (appleTV I am looking at you) - because if not then its clear that the TV as the central hub of media is also loosing its status symbol and maybe even "the big screen" as well. It will only be there for immersive games and the rest is done on the portable screen (or the contact lenses). "onDemand" - is two words that already lost there meaning - on the interwebs ALL content is on demand or it does not exist.
The paper ends with the following statement:
Angesichts des hohen Stellenwerts von Fernsehen und Radio werden diese beiden Medien mit Sicherheit auch in der kommenden Dekaden eine herausragende Bedeutung besitzen. Daneben wird sich in Zukunft immer stärker das Internet etablieren.
(In the light of the high significance of TV and radio those two medias will with certainty have an outstanding importance in the coming decades . In the future the internet will establish itself alongside.
bold predictions guys n gals... now isn´t the internet already an established media - or did I miss something the last 10 years? and how much importance is certainty in the coming freaking DECADES?
I could go on and dissect every single sentence in this "buzzword complient" "ANALysis" but I leave the exercise for the dear reader if they dare....
24.06.07
My Computer Class 1987 Kleinmachnow East Germany
I know this might be amusing to some so as a sunday laugh I post a photo I just found while cleaning up. It shows part of the Mr. Aschbrenners Computer class anno 1987 in deep red socialistic Kleinmachnow / East Germany. Its me sitting in the middle on a kick ass KC85/II sporting 8 KiloByte RAM, a NO SMALL CAPS rubber round keyboard, a whopping "HD ready" 320x256 pixel screen, a "save me 10 times and you have one functioning copy" cassette recorder and an operating system called CAOS (Cassette Aided Operating System) with lovely BASIC. When I remember correctly this photo appeared in some kind of newspaper at the time. I actually programmed an animation on this thing back then even so there was no direct graphic access - I hacked around it by creating a custom font set and then cycling through the typefaces... ah the old times...
23.06.06
Sledgehammer to Nuke:
"I bring peace to the world"
Some real stories are better then everything you could make up. Three honorable people - one a priest - put on a clown outfit painted their faces white stuck a red ball on their nose and broke open a door - to a missle silo that holds a ready to launch armed and targeted 300kt nuclear warhead (27 times the destructive power of the hiroshima bomb). Once inside they used sledgehammers to break the silo lid that covers the warhead as to disable it - then they painted 'It's a sin to build a nuclear weapon' on it and sprinkled it with their own blood. The people are from a group called nukewatch in Wisconsins and the event was staged in protest against nuclear power and weapons on the anniversary year of Hiroshima. Needless to say that eventually they got them and they are charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief - no terrorist charges yet.
Makes you think if spying on peoples bank account makes your country that much safer if people can walk up to one of the biggest weapons you posses and work it with a sledgehammer during the daytime.
Pressrelease here.
4.02.06
blowverbod
blowing the green is vorboden.
26.10.05
Eerie sounds from Saturn.
Right in time for Halloween the NASA has made public some very eerie "otherwordly" sounds that where recorded from Saturn. They are strange bizarre and cool alltogether. Makes you wonder what generated them and how they came to existence. Interesting material to make a song out of if you are this kind of person. Best are the radio emissions from Saturn in my opinion (last one in the list) but also the surprise in the radar Echos of Titan.
5.06.05
Vijay worlds best golfer
After so much serious content on here the last days I thought I would bring to your attention that a Vijay is now declared worlds best golfer. I had to read three articles to find out that this is the first name of Mr. Singh a serious professional golfer and not Talvin Singh in form of a VJ.
15.05.05
Internet without a meaning
Today at 7:29 am I received a mail that came from nobody, had no subject and no content. Is the Internet close to Nirvana? Are we reaching a point of emptiness. Is it a try of some alien species to get into contact? Interestingly Apples Mail programm thinks all is ok with that mail - maybe Apple is creating a black hole right in the middle of cyberspace?
8.03.05
Watch it Shred
Today I stumbled across a link on VJForums that I think is utterly cool. There is a company that sells professional shredding equipment to destroy just about anything you might want to destroy. Boats, Computers, Plastic toys, couches concrete steel. You name it they can shred it. And to show us all how it works they have videos on their website showing the shredder in action on various stuff. I personally found the plastic toy destruction very sad... Now if you could put in nuklear weapons then the world would be safer.
22.09.04
How Home Computers Look in the year 2004
http://users.net1plus.com/scottm/HomeComputer.jpg
Addition: I know its a fake but still thought looks kinda cool :)
Posting and you
A great funny link showed up on a vjcentral thread today. Its a flash animation called "posting and you" and if you write regularly in a forum (such as vjforums) you will have a good laugh. If you never used a forum "omfg thats the big one111!"
14.07.04
Slashdot Obscure Fun
Reading through the Slashdot comments from times to times you get a feeling for the obscure fun of some of the geeks. Sometimes its pure genious fun. I just have to blog this one. It came up in the comments for a East German Consol Game that was found:
Myrmi writes on July 13th @03:53PM:
The Berlin wall was the largest official game of Breakout to have ever existed. They won.
then only 12 minutes later Rhinobird writes:
I guess that makes the new wall in Isreael level 2?
- nothing else to say -
21.06.04
Hey DJ - FUCK YOU
I found this really entertaining article from a DJane who talks about all her secrets of DJing...
http://www.viceland.com/issues/v11n5/htdocs/hey.php
An excerpt:
TECHNIQUE FLOW: The only slightly ephemeral skill to learn is flow. Have you ever made a mixtape for someone you had a crush on? Then you already know what flow is—the ability to maintain a mood. I was at a party once where the DJ kept playing one danceable hip-hop track, then one undanceable slow classic-rock track, one hip-hop, one slow rock, on and on like that for an hour! We would get up and dance, and then sit down, and then we finally just stayed down and shot him really dirty looks. It was the opposite of flow. To master flow, you just need to not be a fucking moron. Can you handle that?
Great inside view of the hard sweaty world of spinning records.
5.04.04
My Bike
Today my bike was featured at the Stahlwalzwerk Blog. Pretty Cool :)
http://www.prototypen.com/blog/schuppan/archive/000195.html
15.03.04
American have landed on Mars
After all the conspiracy theory stuff I thought I need to post something serious that has found its way onto our secret wiki site.
