I wrote in the past already two blog posts about the subject of the “Berlin Wall“, which accompanied videos that I created using moving and photographic images from those historic events. See The Berlin Wall – History Lessons Learned and The Berlin Wall and the Walls Between Us I created four versions of my “Berlin Wall” documentary already and also another short video that only depicts the events from 1989 that lead to the collapse of the East German regime. I am still not happy with the last version of it and still work on a version 5 of it. I gathered a lot more video material and found better quality sources for video images that I already used in the previous installments of my documentary. Also See Version 4 of my Video “The Berlin Wall – Lessons Learned” at Archive.org Special Video “Moments in History – The Fall of the Berlin Wall 1989” at Archive.org I also gathered some more historic facts and created a time-line for me to guide myself in my project. I came to the conclusion that it probably makes the most sense, if I split up the documentary into multiple segments, rather than creating one long video as I did for Version 4 (which is over 30 minutes in length). I am still undecided, how I am going to present the facts from the time line below; written narration or voice overs where I record myself and talk about those facts. An audio narration is[…]
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 the fourth and last episode of my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. This episode is about the French demo collection CD-ROM series “ACE” and also a bit about the demoscene and what demos are in general. Backup Link to Video on Vimeo.com Download this video in AVI format from Mediafire.com Part 4 – ACE Demo Collection CD-ROMs The ACE demo collection CD-ROMs are certainly not the only CD-ROMs with productions of the demoscene that were released over the years, but I will argue that this series covers more of the whole scene than any other release before and after it. There were occasionally good releases from the demoparties like Assembly, Mekka & Symposium and X, but those were not consistent and only covered one particular party. Note: You can find links at the end of this post where you can download the complete ACE CD-ROMs collection, as well as the complete content of many other demoscene related CD-ROM releases, such as the ones that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. The ACE collection covers the most important productions released by the scene between 1990 and March 1997. The collection has four volumes and spans 6 CD-ROMs altogether. ACE 1, which was released in 1994 covers the early beginnings of the PC demoscene, up-to September 1994. The same French demosceners would continue to release another ACE collection every year for the next 3 years. ACE 2 covers all productions between September 1994 and June 1995, ACE 3 (2[…]
Welcome to part 3 of my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. This segment will talk about the 32bit operating system OS2 Warp by IBM, but also about the history of my bulleting board system “Closed Society”. ?? Backup Link to Video on Vimeo.com Download Video in AVI format at Mediafire.com 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. Part 3 – IBM OS/3 Warp 32Bit Operating System After I had my BBS running on individual PC’s that were connected with each other and a “file server” via Novel Lite and then Lantastic for a long while, I got around buying a single “power PC” (=new) that was capable to run all nodes of the BBS all by itself.?? But let me take you a bit further back in time to when I first got started with my BBS that eventually lead me to the use of OS2 as the operating system of choice to run my multi-node bulletin board system.?? A Brief “Technical” History of my BBS I had not much money when I started my BBS. I was co-sysop at some other boards and also played around with local installations of Bulletin Board Software. I did not want to start a 1 node BBS (I had a U.S. Robotics 14.4 HST Courier with an “after market upgrade” to a full Dual Standard), which[…]