I went to Germany way back at the end of the 90′s (can’t remember which year, have to look it up), and absolutely fell in love with crappy East Berlin, all the huge communist buildings and roads – bullet holes everywhere and graffiti everywhere you look, minimalist electronic music cafes, and the hardest of techno at my favorite club ever which of course was also a shithole to look at, but the atmosphere was electric. When you looked out from the top of the berlinner dom all you could see as you looked east was a skyline of construction cranes EVERYWHERE… and it felt like the stazi were going to leap out and grab you at any time as you explored this locked away metropolis.

Youth hostels were the way I explored the world back in the post university days and I met people on subsequent trips like an American Marine and some other guy I can barely remember, probably South American I think – getting drunk with one weekend new friends in a strange city was one of the many many great experiences I have had around the world.

Going to the centre of the potsdammer platz really gave me a sense of how this city I couldnt get enough of was changing from being the grassy messed up expanse of space surrounded by blocks of flats and club tresor (who after 10 years were forced to move out of the bank vault to a new place I have not been to YET), the area of Berlin where Hitlers bunker was, and to see it  on subsequent trips turn from that to a techno city with the Sony building and exhibition centres showing you what the mass reconstruction was going to turn this into.

Taking the S Bahn deeper and deeper into the east to get to the Olympic stadium where there was almost nobody there on my first visit you could really feel the history that had taken place there as you walked around the stadium interior and saw the swimming pool, again the huge area at the entrance to the stadium – very Nazi architecture massive and impressive. I went back to the stadium on my third visit to see that it was being turned into a modern football stadium with some arch or roof type thing, robbing yet another piece of important history.

The history of WWII Germany and Berlin will always intrigue me and I’m so glad I went over there and saw things before modernisation really got into full swing, I have never seen a place like East Berlin in the 90′s and prefer to remember it how it was rather than what it probably is now.

I went there another two times since then, found it great as well but it could never be as fascinating as the first time. Anyway enough reminiscing, here’s the film about die mauer.

Hope you Germans had a happy Unity day yesterday, in 5 weeks it will be 20 years since the fall of the wall.

So I have a few websites about various things here and there, one is a web development one which I started up in 2001 and haven’t really put any more of that kind of content on in oh 5 years or so, therefore to most developers of my standard it looks super out of date from that point of view.

But still around 600 people a day go there looking for help with JavaScript, some of the sample code has forms that point to my domain, so people copy the code, wack it on their site and expect it to go without having to make any changes (super lazy I know… ).

I saw from my reporting, there is a website for Miss California being created and they are using one of my scripts. So I thought hmm what are they using it for?, so now on my site I added some code to see what people are up to with what I offer, it’s proving very interesting already to see which sites are using code created by me then given away for free.

Decided to change the design of BradMcAllister.com what do you think?

Changed the sponsor banners to a nicer set of Brands, if you find this blog brightens your day why not check out my sponsors.

Now I just need to think up a better set of category names, current ones need revising, I have some spare time coming up so that might just get done!

Quite a busy day today, our 5th wedding anniversary so we went to Harrods for a nice luxury buffet lunch with a bit of wine. Like lots of Londoners if we go to central London it has to be on a Sunday so we can park there, but today is a special day.

We drove to Knightsbridge and looked for a car park near the store, after following one sign to a car park that ended up nowhere we found another and up one little side street found ourselves at Harrods own customer car park. One nod from the bloke as I was driving in and I carried on down the ramp until he told me to stop – confused I asked why and he told me they only do valet parking, so we spent 6 mins getting Theo and the pushchair out of the car in the middle of the entrance and handed over our wheels.

Off we walked to the Georgian restaurant at the top of Harrods where we have been before and know is a pleasant place to spend an afternoon. Two hours hearty eating later we were utterly stuffed with top quality roast beef, prawns & crayfish and more fancy deserts than I care to remember, and went to pay the bill – after 15 mins the waiter told me he was on the phone with the bank over some complication, I was getting very annoyed with how long this was taking and told him to cancel that one and I use another card.

Eventually I found myself talking to the Barclay’s on the phone at the till, my quality afternoon taking a turn for the annoying. They told me that I had spoken to them recently and they asked me to go to a branch with some ID to re-activate the account – I told them I knew nothing about this…

Last month I got two letters from Orange (the mobile phone company) congratulating me on signing up to a new expensive phone contract I knew nothing about which caused me to close an account I had opened for 25 years but decided not to use for the past couple as Natwest customer services are so shite.

It turns out already again I am the victim of the fraudsters, and someone  at 8 in the morning two days ago tried to change the address on one of my credit card accounts, again on an account I hardly ever use since my beautiful Morgan Stanley Platinum card turned into a Barclaycard when they bought them out… I just don’t like Barclays for some reason.

After 3 phone calls getting more and more angry trying to find out what the fuck was going on I got the someone trying to change the address story and a new card was on it’s way, so that’s sorted. Really amazed how much fraud is going around though, for this one it must have been some small ecommerce website being hacked or something – bit off-putting really.. I buy stuff online alot!.

I got the Harrods restaurant to call the carpark to make sure we were not charged for the extra time taken to sort this all out which they did with bullet like accuracy, the professionalism of Harrods employees is really impressive. It’s good policy in computing to require people to change their passwords frequently, it looks like the same may be the case for your bank cards – cancel them and get new ones every few months as fraud is getting out of hand.

Me and Natasa have been married for 5 happy years, accomplished so much and this year with the arrival of Theo we have an exciting future turning him from a bouncing happy baby into an awesome man.