technozid

Finally Saturday evening arrived! The concert was part of the “Schicksalsfest” (Destiny/Fate festival) – a 3 day festival for fans of the Middle Ages. The setting was an old castle in Belgium, close to my hometown, and many attendees dressed in medieval costumes or phantasy costumes (a lot clearly influenced by Tolkien). Since my ticket was valid from 8pm on and the concert started at 10pm I was able to attend a very interesting demonstration of the different wrestling, knife-fighting, fencing and swordfighting techniques along with a historical explanation.

Finally the 6 Fiddlers Ralf, Stefan, Rainer, Frank, Tobias and the “new guy” Pat entered the stage. Since I never visited a Fiddler’s Green concert before, I was a bit surprised when one of their roadies – dressed with rags and a sheep’s skull – opened the concert with a ceremonial drum banging, but I was informed that this is the traditional opening of the “Folk Raider” character. I was approximately 7 meters away from the stage and once the first chords played I was glad that I had my earplugs since the sound was deafening. Well, I’m not 20 anymore, but I saw that several other people also had earplugs. Actually I was surprised to see that I was not the oldest person around. I would assume that I was at the lower end of the oldest third, but quite a lot of guests were clearly in their Fourties and even Fifties.

Lead vocalist Ralf ‘Albi’ Albers had a knee injury which forced him to wear a bandage, so he had to sit quite a lot. But this didn’t kept him from wildly moving and gesturing around. Along with fiddle player Tobias ‘Tobi’ Heindl (in typical tartan kilt) and Pat, the new guitar player who only joined the Fiddlers some 6 weeks ago), they did all the talking. Apart from being new, Pat also seems to be the youngest of the group and was subject to many (friendly) puns because he doesn’t know all the song titles and meaning of the lyrics yet. Accordeon player Stefan Klug celebrated his birthday that night and was spontaneously greeted with our regional birthday song “Hass Jeburtstach – Au hur!” which is too rude to translate and which clearly puzzled the group from southern Germany. Stefan, be assured it was meant friendly and actually it was quite an honour to receive such a chant.
The 90 minutes of concert were quite a good workout session, not only for me and the other visitors, but for the band as well. I knew almost all of the tracks excpet the 2 (3?) of the new album they are going to record soon. I was especially pleased when they played my favourite song “As I roved out“, especially since they gave it a Reggae-touch I never realized before (or which they evolved only recently). My other favourites were “Queen of Argyll”, “Lanigan’s Ball” and of course “Folk Raider”. I had the impression that the program was “aiming for safety”, playing more the traditional-like songs – probably due to the fact of the medieval setting. I had hoped for more modern songs like “Tangerine” or “Out of the darkness”. As for the traditional repertoire I had hoped for the “Black Sheep Rag”. But even so it was a great concert which made all of the estimated 200 guests dance one way or the other. A small group in my vicinity started to Pogo-dance on a few occasions. Though I had my share of pogo dancing when I was at the university it seemed quite out of place and a bit annoying during the Fiddler’s Green concert.

After the concert the musicians were available at the merchandising booth. I bought the “Celebrate!” CD which was recorded at their 1000th concert and had Ralf, Stefan and Tobi sign it. I also had the opportunity for a small chat with Ralf. Tobi was under siege by female fans, so it took me a while to get his autograph. I only had limited cash with me (as a precaution), so I couldn’t buy the “Fiddler’s Songbook”. However it’s available in their online shop, and since it is my birthday soon…

Finally, when the roadies began to pack the equipment after 2 (3?) encores, there was a demonstration by the fire artist group “Evil Flames” which was very impressive too. Nevertheless I left early since it was a rather long and tricky country lane leading to the parking field and I didn’t want to be struck in congestion in the middle of the night. I was home at about 1am and poured myself a glass of Laphroaig single malt whisky to chill down.

And what about my checklist? I should have taken a spare T-shirt since mine was soaking wet with sweat. I had too much water with me, but since I left the second bottle in the car it wasn’t too hard to carry. A towel would have come in handy too.

Thank you, Fiddler’s, for this perfect evening. I’m sure I’m going to visit one of your concerts again!

Via Gadgetopia: Peter Stevens found out that his neighbours used his wireless network without his permission. Though he should have properly secured it in the first place, he implemented some funny ways to annoy the bandwidth thieves.

Surprisingly offline media can still deliver genuine news to me. The recent issue of Internet World Business contained an article that the renowned German E-Mail Marketing specialist Agnitas has releas their email- and dialog-marketing software package as Open Source (see press release) .

Since 1999 Agnitas is among the leading companies worldwide to provide email marketing services and solutions. Agnitas CEO Martin Aschoff is a highly valued expert on all aspects of email marketing. He is panelist on many conferences and gets quite a lot of press coverage. I was able to see the Agnitas software on many shows. In a market which is under massive scrutiny and has a public perception of being slightly “shady”, Agnitas is clearly among the “good guys” of that industry, taking an active part in the legislative process and working with ISP’s and anti-spam activist on whitelisting projects and spam avoidance mechanisms.

Due to the pretty high price ticket on their services I never used them for my company. So I am pretty thrilled that I can now use their system as Open Source. From their point it is clearly a smart move: they probably get quite a lot of marketshare. Competition might very well get drained to a certain extent. And they will most likely have some users of the open source software move to a premium service sooner or later. Of course there is also the danger that they will cannibalize their charged services a bit.

Nevertheless I am looking forward to install the software soon. The product is called OpenEMM (Open E-Mail Marekting Manager), runs on any LAMP-system and can be found at OpenEMM.org.

Ticket? Check!
Digital camera? Check!
Water in plastic bottles? Check!
Earplugs? Check!
Rain cape? Check!
Rucksack? Check!
Anything I forgot?

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags are among the most controversial technology developments right now. Though benefits for logistics seem pretty obvious, many people are concerned with privacy issues, fearing that ubiquitous RFID-tags make their data trail even more transparent as it already is.

The European Commission has put a quite extensive questionnaire online: The RFID Revolution: Your voice on the Challenges, Opportunities and Threats. The good news is that it is open not only to companies or EU-residents, but in fact to everybody! You have to invest some time to answer all of the questions. But it offers a unique chance to voice your opinion on this matter. Also the questions themselves are very unbiased and try to shed light on all aspects of RFID implementation. For example there were questions regarding RFID use to prevent product piracy and for handgun control – two aspects that didn’t occured to me before.

The EU commision DOES ask for your input in all sincerity. Use this opportunity!

By DrDave:

If you are running Wordpress as your blogging platform and if you have been trusting enough to leave User registration enabled for guests, DISABLE IT IMMEDIATELY (in wp-admin >> options: make sure “Anyone can register” is not checked).

Thanks Jona.

Only 3 days to wait for the Fiddler’s Green concert at the Eyneburg castle in Belgium. There is supposed to be a weather change towards the weekend – I hope we won’t have thunderstorms that night. I’m going to post some more after the concert.

As mentioned in an earlier post I am brushing up my guitar – ahem – “skills” during my vacation. Yesterday I was sitting with my friend Holger who dusted off his old electric bass in a similar attempt. I told him about my guitar and when I mentioned the manufacturer’s name “Framus” he raised an astonished eyebrow. Since I bought the guitar back in the early Eigthies from a classmate for 100 DM (”felt” value today ~100 EUR) I always thought it was some cheap far-east factory stuff. But as it turned out Framus is a respected German guitar, bass and banjo manufacturer founded back in 1946. They went bankrupt in 1975, but began production again in 1995. Among the artists playing Framus instruments, there are the “German Elvis” Peter Kraus, John Lennon, George Harrison and Rolling Stones bassman Bill Wyman. There is quite an extensive article on Wikipedia as well as the history section on the bilingual homepage.

I was not very kind to my Framus guitar. It came in a light blue finish which didn’t look “cool” enough to me back then. So I “attacked” it with my dad’s hot-air fan and scraped the paint and finish off it, leaving bare wood and lot of scars. Then I glued a mirror between the pickup and the neck since that looked cool too. Click on the thumbnail to see the full image of the guitar. Last night I took some pictures of my guitar and sent them to Framus’ “Vintage Specialist”. This morning, he answered and told me that my guitar is a “Framus Junior de luxe (Model 10370)” which was built in the early Seventies, most likely in 1972. He also told me that it was modified since the original model only had a single coil pickup – my model is equipped with a humbucker-pickup. They only have a picture of a Junior 4 bass from 1973 on their page, but the similarity is quite obvious. So my guitar is probably only 5 years younger than I am. I have not yet made my mind up whether I should renovate it (I always feel inclined to use the article “her” on my 3 guitars), give it a new finish, get rid of the mirror etc. – or whether I should leave it like it is. Right now I’m tending more to leaving it like it is. What do you think?

In the office we are mostly working with Adobe InDesign, but we have some legacy and 3rd party files created in QuarkXpress. Recently we got some newer Quark files, so we needed to upgrade our old 4.4 version. However it turns out that we can’t upgrade, since the version we own has already been upgraded – according the Quark!
How can that be? After having a rather unhelpful sales rep the first time, upon our second call we got the information needed. It turned out the company we bought the licencse from (on eBay) had upgraded this very licencse to version 5 themselves – and sold the old package to us. According to Quark, this is clearly illegal. But even though Quark posesses all the registration information from that company, they want US to contact them AND refuses to upgrade our copy. Hey, are WE the ones who cheated on them?

I have been recently accused of pulling off a publicity stunt regarding my Bodenständig 2000 iTunes blog entry. I don’t know wether the bands record sales skyrocketed afterwards – my AdSense income for sure hasn’t. When the story broke I got well over 6000 unique hits – and not a single AdSense click!
This blog has not been started to make me rich (though I wouldn’t object). However I have a few expenses to cover and it would be nice if it could pay for itself. So I changed the advertising strategy for :tz: – no more annoying ads inside the articles. From now on, there’s only 2 ads on the frontpage: one AdSense ad below the first post and an Amazon ad below the second post. On the comments pages there is another AdSense linkblock. That’s it! Hope this is a good compromise between refinancing the blog and not being too annoying with ads.

Any feedback will be appreciated!