I just posted my article about my bad experience with my new Nokia phone, which I returned to my wireless provider AT&T where I got it from, in exchange for a new iPhone that is currently on back order and hopefully ready for me to pickup and use in one, latest two weeks. How about “Semi-Fraud”??? I don’t know what word to use instead of fraud. Fraud implies illegal, what does not seem to be the case here. It might be illegal in Germany or other countries than the United States, but there is no indicator that I can see, which would indicate that it would be illegal here in the States as well. It is certainly suspicious and immoral at best. Beyond that it is up to you to decide what you want to call it or make out of it. But I also don’t have too much nice to say about AT&T. The only people who seem to hold stuff together there are the folks on the “first line of defense”, the support guys who can only help as much as AT&T itself of the third party manufacturer of equipment are capable of. “Heim ins Reich” or Something Like That Some of the bull that comes with dealing with AT&T is the creation of some master-minds deep within the corporate headquarters of this juggernaut. AT&T was broken up once into smaller pieces, because it became so big that even the “pro-free-market” conservatives in the government knew that something[…]
I was avoiding getting a smart phone with email capabilities and decent Internet connectivity for a long time. The reason for that is simple. I don’t want to make myself accessible anywhere and anytime to everybody. 24/7/365 Any-Time / Any-Where Availability Curse If you respond to any communication almost immediately regardless of the day of the week, time of the day and where you are at the moment, people will get used to it and act weird, if you suddenly change that habit and not respond as quickly as they expected. They might think that something is wrong with you or that they did something to upset you. But the only reason why you did not respond this one time was simply that you decided to take a time-out from your day to day business and personal life. Making you accessible 24/7 is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it is good that you keep updated of things where ever you go and in almost real-time, at the same time makes this also very difficult to get your mind of things and to relax or to take a step back and re-evaluate your current place in your and your family’s life. Interesting Facts about Taking Time Off You take your mobile device on vacation for emergencies, but who are you trying to fool? Especially when you start a break, the mind will not be on that new “break’” / “vacation” mode. Even if you traveled half way around the[…]
Welcome to my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. Make sure to keep tissues handy and enjoy a trip back to times when the computer world was still “intact” and a lot of fun. I hope to bring back some enjoyable memories back for one or the other of you. I will go beyond the simple nostalgic parts, which are clearly an important part of this and try to make clear and suggestive cross-references to things, mostly problems, that we did or did not have back then, but sill/again have today, in this advanced day and age. I created a video where I show some buried treasures of mine and talk about them a little bit. You can watch the combined video, which includes all of them, the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) sound card, the PCBoard BBS Software, the IBM OS/2 operating system and my ACE Demos Collection CD-ROMs below. Backup link to video on Vimeo.com Download this video?? in AVI format (140 MB) Note: Correction to one of the statements that I made in the video. It was a Pentium 100MHz and not a 486/100 where I ran the BBS with OS/2 on. Sorry for that. The video is a bit less than 13 minutes long and provides visual images that will bring back memories for many of you, if you shared some of my own personal history of course. I have actually a bit more to say to each of the treasures and started writing content. What I have[…]
This post falls into the category “old personal history of mine”. I thought that write once more about how I experienced things, especially because I grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the former communist part of Germany, the DDR or GDR (German Democratic Republic). People always ask me how it was like, so here is a story that describes one aspect of it, a very specific one though. Not everybody will be able to relate to it, but if you know what computer demos and crack intros are and interested to hear more about it, stick around. Computer Tales from the Former East Germany Back in 1987, two years before the Wall fell in Berlin, when my dad was allowed to take the Commodore 128D computer (with monitor and 9 needles printer) home to be able to use it for work there, I thought that this was the happiest moment in my life. I always wanted to have a computer since I got exposed to one for the first time in either 1985 or 1986 (That first computer wasn’t a Commodore, it was actually an Atari 800 XL with Datasette tape without any turbo load hardware tweak). There was no Internet and also no tech support to call, because that support did not extend to the area of the former East German state at that time.The only thing to go on was the user handbook that came with the computer. My dad gave me one empty floppy disc (remember,[…]
It’s not that I have already to deal with a lot of crap at the moment that something that just happened a few days ago has to come on top of all of it to “make my day” and “make my head shake in disbelief’“. It started with a big fat screen where you can see the snapshot of below, when I logged into one of my YouTube.com accounts. I was forced to acknowledge the message, before I could do anything else. I was upset at first, because I thought that once more some idiot would claim something that is not his to begin with to cause trouble and inconvenience for YouTuber’s, because they are full of themselves. Dreyfus – Jarre – Oxygene & The Demoscene Wouldn’t be the first time. I still remember when in February 2008 a company with the name FRANCIS DREYFUS MUSIC came along and claimed the video recording of the PC/MS DOS demo called “Contrast” by the French demo group “Oxygene” from 1996 as their intellectual property that I was supposed to be infringing on. Well, Dreyfus did believe back then that any video with the word “Oxygene” in the title must be automatically infringing on the rights they hold for the music by the French musician Jean Michel Jarre with the same title. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Right … Anyhow, I did a Google search for the name of the somebody who claimed ownership of material used in some of my videos. Matt Swoboda,[…]
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