Last year probably gets the title “Year of losing electronics”. I won’t go into details, but in short I got the following stolen:
Three laptops
One tablet
One camera
Two mobile phones
A portable gaming console emulator
In one of the cases I was a little bit too trusting and the other was when my bag was unattended a short while. Thank $DEITY that I had proper insurance… Yes, it was annoying to lose those things, but they’re just things. Things can always be replaced, but data can’t. This is how I learned to take proper backups. Now I’m using DejaDup and rsync to do backups to my “home server”, and from that I do an offsite backup to my hosting provider. This should be enough for the next disaster, right?
Hmm, what other things has happened? Last spring when I was in Hong Kong I took the ferry over to Macau and tried the world’s highest bungy jump (233m). It was a bit disappointing. The scariest part was standing with my toes over the edge and looking down, but when I had started to fall it wasn’t so bad. I must be built the wrong way since I didn’t get a crazy adrenalin rush. Strange…
Anyway, I switched jobs in January to something I thought was going to be very good. Let’s just say that I got sort of blinded by the technology and didn’t look into what kind of working environment I would end up in. It turned out to be a less than pleasant working environment. The positive side of that is that I now know in what kind of company I really don’t want to work… Another very positive thing is that it in the end gave me the opportunity to move to Berlin, where I’ve now been living since two weeks.
Berlin is very interesting. The tech scene in Berlin is more or less crazy. There’s tons of meetups, hackspaces, coworking places and startups. It’s amazing. I’ve also been quite active in looking for jobs and I got a very interesting offer quickly, although I won’t write about it before I’ve signed a contract…:-)
I got around to fiddling a bit (no pun intended) with linuxsampler, paulstretch and the wonderful TAL plugins. Violin and glockenspiel are from the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra sample pack. The sound levels are not properly adjusted, so there’s some clipping. Anyway, I thought it sounded rather nice anyway. Ah, the background noise is a stretched out sample from walking through the turnstiles at the Hornstull subway station…
Oh, I also went to the Rammstein concert in Stockholm the 17th of February. Finally! I’ve wanted to see them for such a long time, but never got the chance. Either (the last couple of years) the tickets were sold out even before I got a chance to, or they cancelled. My biggest disappointment was when they were supposed to play at the Arvika festival in 1998. Three days (or so) before the festival it was announced that Rammstein would cancel due to an ear infection (if I remember correctly). Guess who they got as a replacement on short notice? Only Swedes will know of course, but… You’re expecting a bunch of angry Germans on fire and instead get the Swedish artist Thomas Di Leva. No, that was NOT ok. Ok, given the circumstances it was actually kind of hilarious…
Anyway, I recorded some videos from the Rammstein concert:
Finishing off with a clip of me from the Syntax Error halloween party…
I think I need to force myself to lower my level of seriousness when it comes to this. In the previous post I wrote “the procrastination stops here”. Hmm, well, it really didn’t, did it? If I’m going to get any practice in continued writing, I need to just write. Not to sit and ponder over what/how I should write or any special category. So, here it goes…
I finally took the time to upload the videos I took at Jochen Arbeit’s gig at Fylkingen last autumn:
What I apparently did take time to upload at that time was the Einstürzende Neubauten concert a day or two before Jochen’s side project:
I also filmed some clips from the Jean Michel Jarre concert in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago:
This is when Lydmor played in Örebro at the “Live at Heart” festival:
Finally I’ve actually done _something_ here… I registered excds.se and my Servage hosting account almost two years ago. During this time I kept coming up with excuses for putting anything up. “I have to read up on WordPress themes”, “I have to do/read X first before I do Y”…
Instead of going with a “perfect” plan, I’ll just let things grow organically (or fall into a disarray of bit rot) and see where it gets me…
The procrastination stops here.
And yes, I’m using a stock WP theme since it’s better to have something than trying to perfect an idea. As I was saying, procrastination is bad.
Another very positive thing is that it in the end gave me the opportunity to move to Berlin, where I’ve now been living since two weeks.
