Koebler.net Blog

A very common drink during Christmas time in Germany, especially at its infamous ‘Weihnachtsmärkte’ ( Eng. Christmas Markets ) is ‘Glühwein‘ ( Eng: Mulled Wine ). Creating some Christmas spirit in California is quite challenging and making some home-made ‘Glühwein’ definitely helps a lot. I found a nice recipe on a German web page. Yesterday, I gave it a try and I can say it turned out fantastic. Here is the translation of the recipe into English to share with you. Give it a try…

Ingredients

• 3 Bottles of Good Dry Red Wine
• 3 Oranges
• 1 Lemon
• 1 Apple
• 3 Small Cinnamon Sticks
• 1 Star Anise
• 4 Cloves
• 1 String of Saffron ( pricy but worth it )
• 3 Table Spoons of Raisins
• 8 Table Spoons of Sugar ( or sweetener to avoid next day head ache )

Pour the red wine into a big pot and heat up slowly. Do not let the wine cook! Wash the apple and one orange. Cut the orange into slices. Remove the core and cut the apple into slices. Squeeze the juice out of the lemon and remaining oranges. Put all remaining ingredients into the pot ( except the sweetener ) and let them simmer for approximately 20 minutes. Taste the concoction and slowly add the sweetener. Remove the cinnamon sticks and star anise when the spice reaches your desired intensity. The fruit can continue to stew. When serving, the fruit should not be poured into the mugs ( strain if needed ). Pour the hot ‘Glühwein’ into pre-warmed glasses or mugs and the cold will be taken from your bones. Serve with a piece of dark chocolate to round out the experience. Guten Appetit!

Good to know: Never travel on the day before Thanksgiving! This is a screenshot of the traffic conditions in Los Angeles on Google Maps on November 25 2009. In particular, I like the LAX traffic loop. According to my brother it looks like a regular day in L.A.

I want to start a little collection of quotes I find on the internet or elsewhere. I have come across some really good ones and henceforce want to share them with you.

• “The value of an invention is based on how successfully you can commercialize it.”
  - Ron Kok
• “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. “
  - Thomas A. Edison
• “It is common sense that is the chief enemy of creativity.”
  - Picasso
• “The internet is fake, you can see the strings”
  - web
  comment no. 217 on The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos
• “Marketing is the view of the costmer towards a company”
  - unknown
• “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten”
  - unknown

more to come…

There is currently a really nice exhibition on data visualization at the PCMA in Pasadena that I can recommend. The displayed pieces include art work of Dan Goods, Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. You’ll find the latest Radio Head video “House of Cards”, which was made completely without film cameras. But instead with digital scanners. One of those scanner is set up, which allows you to experience your movement in front of the scanner on a huge screen. Live, direct and interactive. Really neat.

Last Wednesday, I had the chance to see the Dirty Dozen Brass Band at The Mint in L.A. This was a truly amazing band performance bringing the Soul of New Orleans straight to the heart of Los Angeles. The unbelievable talented musicians turned The Mint upside down and brought every piece of Mardi Gras they could bring on the tour bus to the Los Angeles audience. An amazing party over all and Jake Eckert on the guitar simply rocks! If your watching the Grammy’s this weekend, then you’ll see them perform together with Lil’ Wayne. Enjoy the show…

This was found today on the awards page of the web agency pushhere.com. Sorry guys for the post, but it’s just too ironic But keep up the good work.

If you’re using last.fm, this might be interesting for you. LastGraph is a free service that plots your music listening history as a stream graph. After a short rendering process you can download the complete graph as a .pdf. The picture you see is my personal graph. At one point, I have a significant drop of the amount of music I listened to last year, due to an off-line project I was working on. Give it a try for yourself at http://lastgraph3.aeracode.org/.

The service was created by Andrew Godwin using Python in the back end.

Last night, I could see The Sword in the Viper Room in LA and they played a really nice pure hard rock/metal. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a band that simply cuts the craps and gets to the point. Deep tuning and synchronous timing on the two guitars, bass and drums with nice straight beat made them sound really tight.

Additionally, it was nice to see that Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters stopped by and enjoyed the show…

My life has been moving forward extremly fast lately, so that I couldn’t keep up with this blog. But I hope the time I can spend on it will get better.

After the Euro-Tour 2008, I was trying to visit most of my family and friends in Germany and of course stop by the original Oktoberfest in Munich. Meanwhile, I had to do some major rearrangements with all the stuff I owned. Sorting out, organizing and reducing were the key words. A big change in my life was about to take place, which made selling my long-lasting Mazda necessary.

I moved to Los Angeles for work and to live (again). After having already spent a year in LA in 2004/2005 to study at the University of Southern California and to work as an intern at the award-winning web agency Hello Design, I decided to come back again with Melody for a longer term.

With a new Era, comes a new Blog theme I’m not done with the design yet. I actually don’t like the color defaults at all and am going to modify them over time. But the Layout is nice and I hope you enjoy it for now.

So, since I have been here, many events have happened that I will just give you a quick overview:

• Visited the American version of the Oktoberfest in Torrance, CA.
  Accurate German band, but shitty beer.
• Celebrated Halloween in West Hollywood as Kurt Cobain (Mel was Courtney) and participated in traditional American pumpkin carving with the Mayer family
• As a citizen of the U.S., I voted for my president Barack Obama and hope he can use his excellence to majorly change the States as we know it today.
• I saw DANZIG live in concert.
• I saw Mudhoney live in concert
• I am becoming a fan of the L.A. Lakers. They’re on fire this season! Watched almost every game.
• I saw a SUV in the middle of a 6-line freeway missing a wheel?! What the…?
• Been playing my Fender acoustic guitar, Gibson Les Paul electric guitar (thanks Erik) and Fender fretless bass (thanks Alan)
• Oh yeah, I almost forgot. We were evacuated from the house, because the fires that you probably saw on the media was heading straight towards where I am living. We packed all our essential belongings and moved to a hotel for 3 days. Luckily the fire men could stop the fire less than a mile away from the house. It was scary watching the fire approach the house on the news from a helicopter camera. But as always, it was less dangerous as it sounded in the media.

The complete Euro-Tour 2008 of Melody and me was divided up into six separate tours. The map above shows all our completed tours, each in a different color. We started traveling as we moved away from Paris on May 10th 2008 and have been traveling until October 1st 2008. But not continuously. We had stops at the Cannes Film Festival, in Bavaria and set up our “headquarters” in Berlin. The latter gave us enough time to rest after a tour and prepare for the next. Additionally we could explore Berlin – East Berlin in particular, that I hadn’t discovered yet for myself and was very important to me.
Each tour was an amazing experience. We made so many new friends along the way and have numerous funny stories to tell. I will go into detail on each of the tours a little in following blog posts.

Our traveling methods included air planes, trains, cars, bicycles and tons of walking. Most of the time we were traveling via train because we purchased a Eurail Ticket. That allowed us to travel 10 times on a train, wherever we want to go. This is only valid for non-EU citizens though. EU citizens have to purchase a similar pass called InterRail. For our accommodations, we tried to avoid boring cultural damaging hotels and used the fantastic Couch Surfing platform many times, as well as local pensions (bed & breakfast) or hostels, if necessary.

Generally, we tried to experience as much as we could from each culture and tried to avoid the typical tourists traps. Important was for us to meet the people, talk to them and explore each country by what they tell us. Some things we saw were planned and some were spontaneous, based on the tips the locals gave us.

It all starts by leaving Paris…