Last night on BBC4 they had a programme about Krautrock, which is essentially Germany trying to come up with it’s own non US-Rock-UK Beatles post WWII musical identity, I enjoyed that so much if you are in the UK or you know how to connect to a website via a UK Proxy server then you can watch that programme at Krautrock the rebirth of Germany the following day I realised that just after that they had a 2004 concert of Kraftwerk that to a non geek might not LOOK all that, but to a geek..  oh my god that was just awesome, you can catch that at Kraftwerk: minimum – maximum.

The first programme on Krautrock is all about the birth of electronic music really, the second is the ultimate concert on early electronica. I bought a Kraftwerk 7 inch vinyl when I was an EARLY teenager that was Tour de france, can’t remember why I bought it at such a young age but I must have always been destined for an enjoyment of all things electronic.

Happy Birthday to Me

Something I saw around the interwebs yesterday,

Use an Old Linux Computer to Put your Baby to Sleep

If you are not a computer geek, here is an explanation of how this very simple program works.

First the program will auto-eject the CD-ROM drive attached to the computer and will then close the tray. This will then happen over and over again until you stop it.

while [1 = 1]
 do
	#eject cdrom
	eject

	#pull cdrom tray back in
	eject -t
 done

This is the result…

The lazy person who thought this up, tied a piece of string between the CD-ROM drive tray and the baby car seat and as the tray would open and close, the smooth movements were enough to put his baby to sleep.

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.