AC/DC rocks Berlin

If there’s one thing that everyone who barely likes rock music should have done in his life, it’s visiting an AC/DC concert. Yesterday was once again an absolutely amazing event – remarkable. The Olympiastadion in Berlin was such a fine scenery for AC/DC. The first warm-up band, called Boon, had horrible sound and wasn’t my personal taste so there’s no need to mention them. The second warm-up band, Volbeat from Kopenhagen, Denmark, was a way better and I would also say that they were good but if you’re playing as an opening act for AC/DC there’s nearly no one in the audience who really wants to see you. I would have enjoyed this concert but NOT on the same evening with AC/DC as a headliner.

Rosie at Download by ~ILoveBrucieD

The main-act itself completely kicked ass. While everyone else in that age gets retired and enjoys the last days of life the guys from AC/DC don’t get tired to rock as hell. Well, of course AC/DC is a very, very stereotype band but they don’t have to excuse for this because they are what they are – AC/DC and everyone wants to see them acting like this. So what else is to about this event which has the character of a holy mass for every rock’n’roller? I guess nothing else than : “It simply, giantly ROCKED!!!”

I met this one guy in the audience right after the concert filming all around the stadium and he was instantly repeating “Dude, this was so fucking awesome”. After a short conversation I found out that this guy took the long trip from Vancouver, Canada to Berlin just to see his favourite rock band. Canada, I salute you!

Quickie

Here’s just a short update of what has happened in during the last days since my last blog post. To be honest, nothing really special happened. It’s FIFA World Cup in South Africa and I try to watch as many matches as I can, even at work. I was so pissed with my old tube TV that I had to bye me a new 40″ flat LED TV screen and I also signed a new contract with my cable provider to get as much HD as possible.

Another thing that pisses me off for a while is my job. It bores me on the one hand and it stresses me incredibly much that I can barely concentrate on anything on the other hand. Actually it feels like a burnout syndrome but I’ll wait till the last day of my upcoming vacation in France if this feel is still present. If it’s so I’ll look around for a new job.

Straight edge is running well at the moment except one thing, my addiction for ice. From today on rule #6 which says “Say no to chocolate and candy! Subsist yourself healthy!” will change to “Say no to chocolate, sweets, ice, cake and candy! Subsist yourself healthy!”

I had to make this change because I personally think that my nutrition wasn’t that healthy as it should have been in last 2-3 weeks and there were too much of this sweet thing crap. Maybe with “Straight Edge 2.0” I’ll introduce something like a “day off”-rule to get more control into flexibility and wanted rule breaks. But I have to think about this rule.

Tonight is the night where I am going to see AC/DC in concert again. I’ve seen them last year in Leipzig in the Central Stadium and now I am going to see them in Berlin’s Olympiastadion which will be a great and amazing scenery for a rock concert of this size. For those about to rock, we salute you…

Number Thirteen – back to Fedora

I wasn’t very lucky with my OpenSuSE 11.2 system that was running on my mail and internet machine. Besides mail and internet I also use this PC for listening to music and watching some movies. Especially when I tried to watch HD movies SuSE fell down on his knees and were begging for mercy. Another very disturbing fact was that the soundserver crashed very often and curiously, mostly after Adobe Flash was active (even a few hours after). I switched from Fedora to OpenSuSE because Fedora crashed or freezed very often but afterwards I found out that some memory settings were chosen wrong. So now it’s time to turn back to Fedora and gain back more speed and bleeding edge repositories.

Unfortunately the installation of Fedora 13 failed a few before I finally made it to get working straight. One massive problem was an X server the did not want to come up after installing the proprietary nVidia drivers. I was able to fix this with a workaround first, adding nomodeset to the kernel boot parameters, and finally setting a fixed display mode (e.g. vga=773).

Fedora logo by ~Mola-mp

The final installation of the whole codec and media player bunch (e.g. kaffeine, smplayer, amarok etc.) went very well, except VLC player that still won’t work but this doesn’t really matter because SMplayer is my new favourite player.

Skype was another problem child because it is still an i386 application and it still requires i386 dependencies and for some reasons Fedora 13 x86_64 does not find the correct depencies and also does not install them. So I was able to install Skype via the Skype repo but it wasn’t working out of the box. I  finally found, after some research, the packages that are needed to get it working, just install the following

yum install libXv.i686*
yum install libXScrnSaver.i686*
yum install qt.i686
yum install qt-x11*.i686
yum install libsigc++ libsigc++.i686 qt.i686 qt

Until now everything is working fast and stable and I think that it is not going to change in the future. Finally I am very happy to be back to Fedora country especially because of the buggy package management system that is included in OpenSuSE with all its dumb priorities and messing up the system update.

The first month

There’s exactly one month that has past in the ‘straight edge’ project. A few friends and colleagues of mine followed me more or less successfull on my stone covered path to the ultimate “edginess” and some who tried to follow cancelled the whole project after a few days. Time for a conclusion…

Like I said a few times in the past, I feel much better now and I can’t say that I miss something urgently. I feel more and more comfortable with waking up at 04:00am to get off to gym to practice my every day workout and training. The training itself turns to a more interesting and less boring point by now because the muscle regeneration and buildup process is nearly done and I can focus more on cardio training. I have done a lot of muscle training, especially bulge, back and legs, to get a kind of more body control in the cardio training and to obviate joint problems. I had these problems last time where I started with sport though, mainly in my knees.

Every gym session, including last week, implied the cross trainer and the bicycle as the only cardio gear. From this week on I decreased the amount of muscle training and increased the cardio training, it’s now about 30 percent muscle to 70 percent cardio training instead of 50/50 that it was before. I jog every day on the treadmill and soon will start with rowing, each 30 minutes plus crosstrainer (40 min) and bicycle (10 min). I guess that this will give me an enormous boost to my reduction of weight (hopefully). I have to mention that the bicycle is only warmup gear, because I ride my bike as much as I can in everyday life.

workout by *Geironimo

My weakest point are my passion, or better obsession, for sweets and chocolate. One rule says that I am not allowed to eat chocolate and I almost made it to live without it. Well, I eat ice cream nearly every day but this is for sure going to be stopped with the next milestone of this project. And I bought me a bar of chocolate yesterday BUT it’s got only 528kcal on 100g and it’s a bar of plain chocolate. One piece every third or fourth day won’t really hurt.

One thing that I absolutely don’t miss are cigarettes and alcohol. Two good things about this are #1 it’s better for my health living without alcohol and cigarettes and #2 I save a lot of money because I don’t have to buy this shit. Drugs are taboo, too.

Well, what can I say at last. I feel very well with my new circumstances in life and I am pretty sure that I will continue with it after 15th July.

Garcia plays Kyuss

Kyuss is beside Fu Manchu one of my favorite stoner bands I like to listen to. My sweetheart made me a present last x-mas with tickets for a Fu Manchu show in Berlin which was totally awesome. This band’s got so much energy when they play live and they definately kick ass. I read on MySpace by the beginning of this year that Kuyss’ John Garcia was going to play some gigs where he will sing the good old Kyuss songs again. As soon as they put the tickets out for sale I ordered a pair for the show in Berlin and I was definately excited about what was going to be come.

kyuss by ~headbuzz

Yesterday was the day of the concert in Berlin and I went there with my girlfriend. The club where the show was going to be was full, packed and SOLD OUT and too warm. Special guest and warm-up band was Brant Bjork, former drummer of Kyuss, and this band was a kind of good but not perfect and for my matter of taste too loud. The bass and the bass drum felt like an interrupting heart massage.

Later that evening and after waiting too much time at the bar for a simple glass of water the time had come for John Garcia himself to sing Kyuss songs with a bunch of musicians I have never seen before. The show started pretty good but my worst expectations would finally come true because the band itself was nothing else than a stupid Kyuss coverband and the whole sound of the concert felt horrible. The bass was drowning everything like an old B-17 bomber and the voice of Mr Garcia was dabbling nearly all the time somewhere in the background without any power. Finally, the concert was made an horrible event due to the incompetence of the sound engineer. But I also have to mention that some legends should stay legend and they should live on in our memory and not in form of a “reunion band” that looks like a bunch of pensioners.

Long live Kyuss…

WoW – Wrath of the Hack King

So my odyssey continues. After having too many problems with my brand new World of Warcraft aka Battle.net authenticator I decided to disable this piece of modern technique and choosed to run my account without it. I have to mention that the authenticator ran out of sync.

WoW- Blood Elf Paladin by ~lychi

Yesterday I received a mail from battle.net that my password was modified and that I should ignore that message if it was me who modified the password. Of course it wasn’t me who changed the password. After hanging out in the Blizzard waitung line for about 30 minutes and listening to the World of Warcraft title score for nearly 10,000 times the guy one the other end of line told me that my account was actually hacked. I don’t know how these stupid retarted hacker kids did this but it was hacked. Once again I changed my password and so on and hopefully it will stay that way without external interventions and hacker attacks.

I also ordered a new authenticator and hopefully it will be more in sync as the old did (or didn’t). On the other hand I also have to admit that the Blizzard support team is really helpful and polite, the only thing that sucks is the relatively long time of waiting. I still like WoW and, like I said, I hope that I will be able to continue playing without any interruptions in the future.

Got that feeling

I don’t know why but today I feel an urgent need to get drunk. I haven’t had the need for alcohol since the beginning of living straight edge but today is one of these days where I just feel that need to get totally fucked up. Maybe it’s the fact that I am bored at work or that I haven’t been to gym this morning because today is my girlfriend’s 30th birthdays and I wanted to wake up with her. Interestingly do I feel much more exhausted than I feel on days where I go off to gym very early in the morning. Guess I got comfortable with gym in the morning.

Frauenkirche. by distancexkills

It’s so damn nice that I finally found a gift for my girl’s birthday and most importantly a gift that she like. I arranged a hotel room for a weekend in August in the beautiful city Dresden. Hopefully the weather will be nice and warm that we can discover a lot of sights and places in Dresden. Last time I’ve been there was around 1988 or so and I am really excited to see the rebuilt Frauenkirche Church. I remember last time where I was standing in front of this building it was nothing more than a bunch of stones, not even a ruin.

Girls with guitars

If there’s one thing, beside a lot of other things, that I hate then it’s female models posing on pictures with guitars and you can see, it nearly bites your eye, that they cannot even play. Man, this is so disgusting. Young, nude and beautiful women raping guitars on pictures with chords that can never exist and if they will be played they will sounds like the worst noise ever. The imagination is horrible…