What was and what will be

A year’s gone and a new decades arrived. So what’s my resume for the decade that has just passed in the 21st century on this ball called Earth (“How peaceful it looks…”)? Great Scott, I don’t know and it’s barely possible to capture a whole decade in one single blog entry so I simply don’t resume the past decade. But what are my plans for the next decade? Guess what, I just don’t know but I can tell you some of my plans for this year. 2011 will hopefully be the year were I’ll go back to more creative oriented activities. I’ll definately do some more photography and will try to switch to some portrait shots or let us say, I’ll switch from landscape photography to something more human related because for me is the portrait photography something that looks like hard to handle and I want this challenge, because challenges simply makes you better and let you improve yourself.

One thing that’s still unfinished and I simply haven’t found the time for, were the bunch of music plans I had for 2010. I missed to remaster Narcosis’ “Super Satan Terror Demon 665.5” mini CD and to upload it. I also missed to get the original tracks for the CDs so I have to do some more complex re-editing to tracks that I got. It’s such a pain in the ass that the studio were we once recorded this master piece of modern black- and death-metal is no more (/irony off).

The second music project hasn’t been touched since I first announced it here in this blog because of… well… urm… issues? Some might remember, it was this electro, industrial thing called “Degraduated to be machine” which includes till now two barely finished tracks. The problem is, that I was working on the studio software several times but it turned out that my plans are much more complex than they first seemed to be. I want this whole thing to get much better than the first solo CD of mine which was more a bunch tracks mixed together, this second one follows a concept and I want this as perfect as it can be. PERIOD! I guess, it won’t be finished by the end of this year so don’t expect anything.

Recording Studio

Something that I’m going to do pretty soon is to upgrade my PC. I decided not to buy me a new Android phone and to upgrade my PC instead. There were to many issues and failures that were bothering me that led me finally to this decision. It’s a kind of sad, because I really liked the black mainboard and the CPU watercooler with its red LEDs inside that made the whole system look so damn eeeeeviiiiiil. I’ll give some details on the upgrade in another blog entry.

Back to music and the whole life thing. I still have this plan to move to Berlin, maybe it’s going to happen this year if I can make it to find a job there. If I can make it I’ll free my guitars from the dust and try to find some guys/girls to start a new band, I still feel like a stoner band would be nice, with a girl drummer.

Some might ask, what happened to straight edge? Well, straight edge will be back as sooner as you think. It might start on January 16th, maybe later. It all depends on the big thing called time and I never have enough time for anything. It’s going to be the “Straight Edge 3.0 Project” with customized rules and a new training plan that does not only inlcude a plan for gym, it will also include some other activities. I currently drink some alcohol from time to time but only small lashings and no hard liqueur. I’m so NOT satisfied with the fact that I started with this bad habit again and it will stop because I simply can’t stand the dizzyness while drinking something.

Any traveling plans for this year? Yes, but nothing totally fixed. I was wondering if I can make it to Asia this year, countries like Japan, Indonesia and South Korea has always been in my focus, but unfortunately is it so massively expensive that I don’t know how to pay for this. For the opposite direction, well, there might be a trip to New York, I always wanted to go to New York, a huge, big, crowded, dirty city that always fascinated me. I also have to mention that I have these itchy feet for Seattle, I can’t help it but Seattle is beside Berlin a city where I can go to at any time. To make a long story short, there’ll be definately a trip to the U.S. but no exact plans for the rest of the world. Hmmm, the orient could be nice, too.

Hadouken

Concert plans. There’s only ONE concert by now I have a  ticket for and that is the rocking, mind blowing, beloved FU MANCHU. Yes, I got a Fu Manchu ticket for Christmas again and I will see them in March. Damn it, I fucking love this band. If there’s a Misfits concert somewhere here around Germany I would go there too, no matter what it costs. Till now I am very unsure if I should go to the Roger Waters concert in Berlin and see The Wall for a second time. It would be nice to see the show in Berlin, because for me it’s something special because this very one album influenced my musical taste so much, but once again, the tickets are expensive and the seats you can get at the moment are totally crap. We will see.

Last but not least, gaming plans for this year. First of all, I’m thinking about canceling my ‘World of Warcraft’ subscription because I don’t like the new add-on. The balance between casual gaming and going back to the roots of ‘World of Warcraft’ totally failed, in my opinion. Maybe I’ll switch back to ‘Champions Online’ as soon as you can play it for free or I will give ‘DC Universe’ a try. I’m following TotalBiscuit on YouTube and he’s playing the beta at the moment and it looked nice and auspicious to me. Non-MMO games I’m definately going to play are ‘Crysis’ and ‘F.3.A.R. 3’ in March. ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ sometime by the beginning of this year and hopefully id softwares’ ‘Rage’ in September.

There will be some minor changes to this blog, too. One thing is, that there will be a “Game of the week” post every week with a kind of a review and I will do the same stuff with music, movies and photography. Anyhow, the “Game of the week” thing is for sure and the rest will come up soon and simply follows within the next weeks and month. …hmmm… longest blog post ever… yeah!!!

Closet cleaned

Last weekend stood under the flag of rearrangement and getting rid of some useless things from the past. Out of a clear blue sky I decided to sort out some of my old IT books to get some space to place the old books of my grandfather inside my bookcase. Seriously, I don’t need a book about Novell DOS 6.2 or MS DOS anymore and if I’ll feel that urgent need to find some information about this ancient operating systems I would find much more knowledge bases on the net than in a single book. And due to fact that I stopped coding in 2005 I thought that there’s no more need for books like C++ and shit like that. I finally made it in nearly five hours of pure bookcase management to find a worthy place for every book. My beloved game strategy guides are now on eye height and everything else is well sorted and easy to find.

Secondly did I finally made it to exchange the mainboards of my internet PC with the one built in in my media center PC. I did this because the board of my internet PC offers two 16x PCIx slots and I wanted to use one graphic card as a dedicated PhysX accelerator like I do in my gaming system (GF260+GF9800GT). The exchange went better than expected, the systems are still working, except for some pulse server bugs on Fedora. The bug in Fedora is not a major one because Fedora 14 is going to be released this week and I don’t want to do an upgrade, I feel like re-installing the system by keeping the home folder, like I did several times in the past. The whole setup procedure runs pretty fast, because all that is left to do after the core setup routine is to install the missing packages, every application is already configured in my home folder.

Unfortunately do I have to run my Linux internet system with a crappy GeForce 8600GT because this graphic card knows a nothing about PhysX so I had to place my GF9800GT in my media center for a while till it is getting replaced by a new PhysX dedicated card. I’ll also replace the cpu fan of my media center because the stock one sold by AMD is a kind of cheap and noisy and is going to be replaced by an Arctic Cooling Xtreme Freezer Rev.2. Hopefully the noise will disappear after that and the AMD Phenom II X4 965 will feel comfortable without making too much noise. Anyhow, the whole media center is going to be much quieter than it is now.

Borderlands GOTY DLC censorship

Today I received the Game of the Year Edition of one of my current favourite games called Borderlands. Because I do live in Germany and we have some stupid censorship laws here I had to import the uncut version of the game from good old Britain. After opening the box I saw what I already knew from blogs and forums about the game, that the whole DLC content is not included on one single disc, you still have to download the whole additional content.

After getting to the the proclaimed website where I could download the bunch of software I had to realize that I had to face censorship on the website as well. The patch 1.40 was the worldwide edition though, but by trying to download some international DLC content I got redirected everytime to the censored german version of the DLC. The solution for this problem was gladfully a kind of very easy. Just rename the file you want to download from

http://updates.gearboxsoftware.com/dlc/BorderlandsDLC1_Censored.zip

for DLC number one for example to

http://updates.gearboxsoftware.com/dlc/BorderlandsDLC1_Worldwide.zip

and you will get a fine uncensored version of the DLC. Hope it helps someone out there… and now go on and lift the secret of the vault and kick General Knoxx’ ass 😀

Why are his feet so high?

Sometimes life goes curious ways and punishes you that you feel the naked slap of life’s bare hand in your face without a doubt. I did some research on A/V receivers for nearly six month now and finally found one that suits my requirements perfectly well. Like I said, it took me nearly six month to find the one for me. Everything was planned in detail. The receiver was found and the speaker set as well but I missed one very important point, the god damn measurements of the receiver. Actually the whole thing should fit into the TV rack where everything is situated right now but who could have know that its feet are that high, that it can’t be placed within the rack. This truely makes me suffer and a kind of sad because this whole set was my birthday present and I am not able to use it right now. I’ve found this cool rack on the one and only true platform when it comes to modern interior – IKEA. Benno is a simple rack with a slight modern look, without these shiny silver things that you can find on so many other racks and it is made without any glass. Benno rules. Benno could fit my needs. Well, some day… till then I keep looking on my receiver and the closed box with the Teufel speaker set.

Comments blocked

Due to the massive spam appearance that affected me over the last weeks and months with the comment feature in this blog software I decided to deactive the feature for anonymous comments. I’ve no fucking interest in sharing links, helping someone with a college degree or buying pills et cetera. Actually I am not even sure if this function makes sense anyway. I leave the anonymous comment function deactivated till I’ll find a way to get rid of the spam.

For some reason is there a massive interest for all these spammers out there in the “Reporting for duty” blog entry. I’ve no idea what’s so special about it, maybe it’s the ‘duty’ and it comes into play with all these “Call of Duty” searches on google. Anyhow, I am going to enjoy the silence that will appear in my mailbox from this blog until now. If you really feel an urgent need to comment on something then register and wait for an unlock.

eBay and the curse of the retarted

Guess ’twas probably the last time that I sold hardware and stuff on a web platform like eBay because what I recently experienced over the last weekend was the worst case in handling hardware by an unskilled user. First things first, I’ve got a lot of old hardware laying around at home so I decided it could be worth it to sell some and make some money. I decided to sell two old motherboards, on pair of registered RAM and one access point. Yes, this access point, or should I say the buyer made me angry as hell because of his progressive stupidity.

I am not a true believer in mans intelligence but this guy was a real pain in the ass. The access point he bought wasn’t reset of course and it was a pure and simple access point without any routing, DHCP or whatever features. There was also a new firmware installed so the access point itself was up to date. All this guy had to do was to reset the hardware, take a look in the online manual for the factory default settings and configure it. Of course did he not take a single look to the manual and so he was bothering me that he can’t configure the access point. He tried to access the AP’s webinterface on 192.168.1.1 BUT the AP’s actually adressed to 192.168.0.231. He was also wondering that he’s getting no IP adress from the access point. Christ? Seriously? As mentioned above, it was a pure and simple AP that serves the user with nothing else than a WiFi.

He even made it to write me twice after I have sent him the link to the online manual which explains EVERYTHING to get things done. Obviously this guy’s got some serious problems with reading or a deficit in spending attention to something. But at last he did not reply to my last mail that explained the whole procedure in detail which is disrespectful for me personally. You help someone where you actually do not have to help someone and he finally kicks your ass. Stupid fucking retarted.

Why can’t it all explode?

Today’s like one of the most miserable days since a very long time. Actually I’m not pretty sure why, but I should have stood in bed and kept on sleeping the whole day. Last weekend wasn’t as exciting as I expected it to be because  if you’ve just visited a city like Paris a city like Dresden comes by like a small village in the middle of nowhere. Another horrible thing was that I devastated my media center and it wasn’t running the whole weekend. For some reasons the system was not bootable after I switched over to a single boot system and deleted Linux Mint. I had to install Windows 7 from ground on and on the other hand I had to re-initialise the RAID system where the OS was installed and my bunch of HD movies was stored, so the movies are lost.

Terrible thing today too is the fucked up weather outside. Dark, grey, pale and cloudy and no god damn summer in sight. I wanted to start off with gym today but I only made it to the bathroom where I picked up my toothbrush put it back and wandered back to bed. Though I am motivated to go to gym I am able to make it to the gym. I feel like I am stuck in a vicious circle and I can’t the portal which I have to break to get out of it. Seriously, I want to make some sport but I can’t get it done. Once again, tomorrow will be another try because I am pretty, pretty sure that I will not find the willpower in the evening today to grab my bag and go to the gym.

Problemiwigo

Unfortunately did I mess up the bloodreaver gallery application here on this website. I did a simple auto-update and after this simple update was I standing there with a much more complex problem. The Piwigo gallery application needed MySQL 5.x as a minimum requirement and at the moment the whole webserver has got a MySQL database version 4.1.2. I also did not find a solution to do a downgrade or better said, I haven’t found the nerve or the time to fix it. I finally switched over to Coppermine, which will hopefully serve me well, and re-uploaded most of the pictures that were content of the old gallery. A few pictures are still missing, mainly in the photography category, but they’ll be uploaded later.

A walk on the straight side

The first two days of my “Living straight edge” project has past and the first impression I got – “Damn, this is seriously tough”

Curiously the smallest problem I had was to stop smoking, the problem that is/was even worth was to disclaim sweets, candy and caffeine. Now I know how much I am addicted to caffeine and my once beloved Coke Zero. According to the sleep problems I got in the last few month and the tiny amount of sleep and rest every night I would say that this is one of the larger steps to be taken, to get away from caffeine.

Another thing that nearly drove me mad were the seductions everywhere. Wherever you go to you will find something really tasty that wants to be bought, that wants to be eaten and that wants to be consumed. I was a kind of shocked from myself that I am so devotional to tasty food. I have to confess that I was a sinner by ordering a Diet Coke in a restaurant because I was not regarding the rules of my project and forget the caffeine paragraph. I am sorry and promise to do better in the future. Well, the next step to take is the four times of sport a week. My enthusiasm is around zero degree but I am pretty sure that this is going to change within the first training sessions.

Weather experience

So, what’s wrong with the world and our weather god? Huh?

The weather forecast in the morning told me : “The sun is going to shine today” – “It’s getting warmer” – “All you people will feel like being in the summer” – “The winter is finally gone”

Well, by believing these ‘predictions’ I decided on this very morning on this very 26th of April Two-K-Ten that the time is now to wear short pants. I need to mention that I totally like to wear short pants. It is a kind of freedom to feel that the cloth ends right under your knee, not to speak of the indirect “air conditioning”. I also need to mention that I am a person that sweats, if you know what I mean, so I grab every little cooling I can get.

Anyhow, the forecast was wrong on this very morning on this… well, you know… it started to rain, it got colder and I felt like a kind of displaced. BUT, keep that in your mind, I will not bow down before the power and might of mother nature and its weather experiments, I’ll keep on wearing these short pants until the weather report tells me that the winter has arrived.

Curse you, Petrus!!! CURSE YOU!!!