We spent the day visiting several galleries and museums. First up was the Kathe Kollwitz museum (very close to our hotel) featuring her paintings, etchings and sculptures depicting the weavers' revolt and themes of war and death (personified). Amazing talent and memorable pieces! The museum also seemed to be situated in a local gallery row, so I'm sure we'll be back to that street.
Next we went to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Alte Nationalgalerie) - a pretty awesome building that was a work of art in itself. We saw some awful paintings mixed in with some gems, in particular one piece (forgot the name) that Ben was excited to see in real life. It reminded me of *Shadow of the Colossus*.
Finally we went to the DDR museum which we had been planning on for a couple days. It is supposed to be an extremely hands-on museum depicting the rebirth of social culture in Berlin post-wall falling, but is pretty underwhelming. There are some neat moments though.
Determined to get on some sort of normal sleep schedule, we "napped" until about midnight, then got some food (really good kebab stand) around 2:00am and now it's 4:00am and time for real sleep.
I'm a big fan of jackets, and I got a killer one from a nearby store. The cold and gray
isn't so bad now. Still gray though.
Well I finally got Internet working at the hotel by guessing some router settings. It's colder than we thought here and they eat a ton of sausages and potatoes (which are really good).
The airport in Zurich is an amazing piece of design... would be cool to spend some more time in Switzerland.
Our sleep schedules are still all messed up.
We were exploring how the subways work (pretty straightforward) and ended up stumbling upon a whole exhibit dedicated to the large hadron collider! Spent a lot of time reading how everything actually works, some hands on demos, and questioning a scientist who works on one of the four detectors (ALICE).
So I'm all packed up and ready to go.. German and Italian adventures up ahead.
I'm going to try micro-blogging from the trip, partly for fun and partly to test out some new technologies. I'll be taking plenty of photos to post when I get back, but I'll also be using my iPhone to take a couple pics a day and post them to flickr at night, which will also automatically post it to my blog.
In fact... this post is the first test... hopefully this goes through. I'll try to update most evenings if we have wifi.
See you all in a couple weeks!
So I moved my little face-maker into a new section: Toys! Not only that, but I've added a new toy! A melody-maker! I was actually looking for a way to combine my hobbies, and I thought about coding up a way to generate semi-random melodies (in key) as a springboard for songwriting... so I did! I'm using the awesome midilib ruby gem for this. It turned out to be more fun than I expected! If you set the tempo to 240 and turn on the "harmonize" option, you'll get some retro Nintendo-ish tunes.
I'm going to be messing with this more in the next couple of days... hopefully adding more scales, maybe chord progressions behind the melodies, and a simple metronome so you know where the beat is. Fun!
After momentarily freaking out about my passport being expired, it turns out that one of the advantages of living in LA is that it houses an official federal passport office, and expedited renewals take 3 days! Phew... for an evening, I thought my Germany/Italy (Germaly?) trip was in jeopardy. All is well, and I am now in possession of a brand new, RFID-chipped blue booklet. Yeah that's right, a little hidden RFID chip with all my info scannable through the air by any RFID reader. Nice.
I've been waiting for My Japanese Coach for DS ever since I heard of the other languages in the Coach series, and now I wait no longer. My first impression is that it is quite fun. It's not too much of a game, and it's not too much of an educational program, but a nice balance between the two. What I particularly like most is that it doesn't let you move on or jump around without having mastered each section of vocabulary. In this case, limiting your options is beneficial to actually learning something, and that sits well with me.
I helped Danny and James track and record a new hit single, Midnight Party. I dare you to click the link, and I dare you to not instantly find yourself in a rocking party, right where you stand. You'll dig it - particularly the blistering guitar solo. Note: this was done in association with a certain podcast that is walking a fine line between public and private. If you know what I'm talking about, listen to episode 29 for more info about this track.
So there's an RPG coming out for DS titled The Another World, created by Level-5 with help from Studio Ghibli! This is basically a dream come true for fans of both the game company (I loved Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village) and the animation studio.
The game comes with a spellbook (with information and little stories) that you have to reference to get through the game. How cool is that? So far the artwork and animation is pure Ghibli - I hope the gameplay and story are solid. Coupled with the re-release of Chrono Trigger, the DS is giving the SNES a run for its money as the best platform ever!
No way! He's a "decent, family-man citizen." Apparently that is the opposite of an Arab. I guess that makes me indecent by birth.
Since I'm going to be in Italy on election day, I'll be voting early, and the more I hear/read/see, the more anxious I get to cast that ballot.
If anyone has any suggestions about places to visit and things to do in Italy and Germany, please let me know. I'll be in Berlin for 4-5 days, and Italy for about 10 days at the end of this month. Cool.
Last Saturday was our Endless Reflections show at Nucleus, featuring work from the artists of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. This is some truly beautiful work, especially for fans of the story who understand the context. Several artists were in attendance signing books and art for eager Sandman lovers. Check out some photos here.
This Saturday is our book signing with author Dashka Slater and illustrator Catia Chien of their new children's book The Sea Serpent and Me. They will have a sit-down reading with the young 'uns, hold a panel to discuss publishing and their creative process, and sign copies of the book, art and prints. We've received our shipment of the books and they're wonderful! It all starts at 2:00pm.
A couple weekends ago James and I headed up to the mountain town of Placerville for Wally & Jessica's wedding. Thanks to the always-hospitable Tribbeys, we had a place to stay and a car to drive. Even though the fresh air was welcome (haven't left LA in a while), I was battling a persistent cold and downing honey-filled cough drops. It wasn't all play; we had a duty to document the wedding in photo and video form, and document we did. You can see the photos here... the video will take much more time to edit (Jamie's task, for the most part). We were there and back in record time, but it was nice to see some familiar faces and college neighbors.
While I was sick, I tried to knock off a couple movies from my list. Shall We Dansu? is entertaining, uplifting and thoughtful and I highly recommend watching the 1996 Japanese version. I haven't seen the U.S. remake, but I can't imagine any internal conflict about dance lessons as in Japan where ballroom dancing can be embarassing.
I also watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly which changed my (groundless) perception of Clint Eastwood. He's pretty damn good. They all are. I don't even quite think this is just a Western... it's actually quite epic in scope. And you get to hear Sergio Leone's infamous theme every 17 seconds.
This probably will mean very to little to most, but this my first blog post from directly within TextMate... no browser. It has a blogging bundle that works with any website that supports the MetaWeblogAPI protocol, which was (sortof) easy to implement using Rails' ActionWebService. It took me a while to find all the exact parameters and formats that the API expects, but now it works. I can even use nifty markdown text instead of HTML. Neat! Nerd!
What does that mean to you? Well sometimes (a lot of the times) I don't blog because I don't feel like using the web form, or composing it all in HTML (which is what I normally use). Since I practically live in TextMate, it's much easier to just open a new document, write something up, and send it on it's merry way to my blog.