Apr 14
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
- “He whos laughs has not heard the bad news”
- Bertolt Brecht
- “It might be true, but is it relevant?”
- unknown
more to come…
Mar 12
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.
Feb 06
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…
Jan 26
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.
Dec 28
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.
Dec 17
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…
Nov 20
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.
Oct 07
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…
Sep 23
Hi guys. I just want to say the soon there will be new blog entries coming again.
I was working hard during the Cannes Film Festival and have been on vacation since May. But I’ll share my stories as soon as I can sit down and write some stuff. I usually have been on the computer at internet cafés and was actually enjoying the vacation by avoiding the computer as much as possible. But I have experienced such much that I will have a hard time to write about everything. So check in soon again or subscribe to the rss-feed.