Beyond Borat there is Bruno !
Nov 13And then there was Borat.
Ok , Since the Knightwise.com is on the 'loose' once again, we can do fun stuff as well. Time to cultivate your mind with the hottest and latest culty stuff thats going down. If you're not living on the moon, you probably heard of BORAT , the movie by the same guy who does Ali G about a journalist from Kazakhstan who does a tour of europe and the US. There has been a lot of fuss about this flick due to the fact that he kicks just about every country right in the nuts with his 'witty' remarks.
But now there is Bruno !
Well , next time you are around the watercooler, you can brag about BRUNO , the next character of this very talented actor. His show Funkyzeit with Bruno deals with the adventures of a gay Austrian reporter touring the us. Now what happens if a fictional gay character runs into a bus of american gullable teens ? Check it out ! (Of course : Thanx to Codemonkey Rob for the link.)
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Geek Guide to Aachen.
Nov 12Oh glorious days between friday and monday. Days we look forward to, days we enjoy, and days we mourn when monday comes and takes them away. So this weekend was a little different. Belgium celebrated 'Truce Day' where we remember the end of the first world war in 1918. Suffice the fact that the weather sucked, on saturday Belgium was drenched in autumn rain and devote of any economical activity, cause all the shops where closed. So we skipped the border and went for a little daytrip to Aachen.
One of the nice things of living in the nook of the country is that one is very very close to the "aussland" as we could say. 30 km's is the distance that devides us from one of the major Dutch cities of Maastricht, and a small 80 kilometers seperate us from the German city of Aachen. So we pop over regularly. Aachen USED to be the one stop shop place for all my hardware needs. Back in those days the VAT in Germany on computer parts was a only 16% (as opposed to 21% in .Be) and they had some excellent cash-and-carry computer shops to get ones hardware. So we used to order on line, take the car at 9am in the morning , drive to Aachen , arrive at 10, pick and pay our order and be back before dinner. (actually we had dinner in Vaals, in holland, before we came back home) What was nice was the whole international flavor, carrying three kinds of currency and having to speak Dutch, German and occasionally some French before the Saturday afternoon had started.
But these days things are different. The VAT in Germany went up , making it no longer interesting to buy computerparts, OEM systems are soooo cheap it isn't worth the while and of course the Euro has chased away the Gulden and the Demark. But i'm going to give you a little overview of where we went , so if you ever feel like going .. you know where to go.
When going to the city of aachen. The best place to park is probably beneath the Media Markett in the town centre. It offers safe and cheap underground parking ,but the cool stuff is , the general multimedia geek-out-paradise is right above you. So no need to "shlepp" around that 50" plasma cross town.
If you exit the parking lott , go to the main "AlexanderGraben" and turn right to stroll down to the center of the town. By then you have probably gotten hungry you can endulge yourself in BratWurst and stuff , but for us a great place to eat is the LOUISIANNA. This very American restaurant offers great ribs, chicken wings , all in a southern flavour. Downright excellent food. But the shop is strategically placed between 2 major points of interests for geeks like us.
At the entrance of the gallery there is the DATEC computer shop . A very small shop that sports a wide aray of hardware, but is very well known for the MIRAI screens they sell. Getting ones hands on one of their wopping widescreen displays (1440*900 resolution) for 257 Dollars US is a bargain. I personally have bought two over the last two months and absolutely LOVE Them. Looking at an apple cinema display (20" widescreen) for more then double the price, its not worth the hassle.
But at the end of the gallery, you walk straight into the SATURN MEDIA STORE . When it comes to getting a cheap bargain and a lot of hardware, software, dvd's, music and what have you to browse through , this is sheer heaven. When going shopping for your geeky gear, be sure to COMPARE the prices from the Media Market and the Saturn shop. These two shops are regularly at each others throats and that results in getting a price difference of 80 euro's or more , just by strolling through town.
And of course, no geek is complete without his dose of coffee. 2 excellent locations pop to mind. First of all , the spectacular "Glass Cubus" A coffeehouse on the top of Aachens major shopping street. Sporting a wide variety of coffee's and Java's its a bit on the pricy side, but worth the while. Where it only to be sitting inside , watch the world go by and having the comforting thought that nobody can look IN. (but be careful not to walk past it just like that. As you can see on the picture .. it can appear quite invisible.) There is also a Vodaphone shop inside the building, you'll find directions on their site
But if you are into American Coffee , be sure to walk up to the town square and (walk by the LUST FOR LIFE store ) and visit the local Starbucks . Since we don't have one of those here and we are big big Java sluts, you can mostly find the Knights perched up behind one fracking big cappuccino to round up the day. Mac
So next time you go over to the German side of the border, you might be interested in our little tourist tour. For all I know , we surely had a swell day. 🙂
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Service announcement : Back to Basics !
Nov 11
Hmm, nothing more soothing to end the week on, then a trip to the hairdressers. Think about it , being royally seated while nice looking ladies tend to your every need, get you coffee , wash your hair, and all this in an enviroment where there is always a lot to look at. And as I wait , the trusty macbook never far out of reach , gets popped open for a little article. An article about how I use technology in my life .. and about how I live. To get it all scrutinized in one line ? : Knightwise.com is going back to basics.
How it all started out.
A long time ago in the galaxy of 2001 I started my very own personal website. It was not much, but it gave a clear view of who I was and what my life looked like. Over the years the Knightsite evolved into a daily diary, a site full of fun stuff, sometimes serious articles, a bit of poetry, some cult stuff and also a lot of tech stuff. Not much later the site got switched to english and turned into a kind of a blog. Later on that blog got saturated with manuals about how I use technology in my life and slowly but surely (also with the coming of the Knightcast Podcast) The Knightwise.com website cruised the breach between real- and cyberspace.
A happy ship filled with articles about my personal life, tech reviews, the occasional cult item … Well you know : Life as I know it.
Six months ago, when I met up with Sebastian Prooth and Dave Gray, who where at that moment teaming up to form the Global Geek Podcast, I was introduced to a different style of writing. Both Seb and Dave wrote up great technology articles (certainly worth publication in print). These guys are major bloggers who also knew the tricks of the trade to get your stuff noticed. And from them I learned a lot and was inspired to whip up some great technology articles.
A month or so after that, the Knightwise.com website got noticed on the net. The article about 'Ubuntu for your Grandmother' hit the Digg front-page for 24 consecutive hours and the visitors shot up over 9000 in one day. Needless to say, i felt the eyes of the world upon me at that moment. In conjunction the Knightcast podcast joined the Techpodcast network , and I was shoulder to shoulder with the great in pod-casting like Andy Mccaskey and Mike Smith.
At that moment, I started to feel the pressure to produce top notch content both in pod-casts and in blogposts. Posts had to get hits, Podcasts I put out should be rich in text, poor in cursing and articles had to be promoted and pushed out to be successful. After more then 4 months of this … I have just about had enough.
Rate of posting went down. : Because I fellt (and I must underline that this is a purely subjective feeling) that I needed to produce top quality articles, the daily posts about small peaces of nothing went down and I started writing elaborate well-thought tech articles, that where rich in content , but in my perception lacked soul.
The membership of the Techpodcast network influenced me to start producing podcasts that where more structured (and thats a good thing) but that also started to lack the raw 'feel' of the Knightcast, that gave the show its charm. I mean , talking about live linux distributions while doing the dishes, having a sound-seeing tour to go apple-picking, crazy stuff like that was no longer something I fellt I could do. I mean , I was a member of the TPN , it all had to sound more techie, more professional.. And again .. seemed to lack the soul.
So I started slacking in both production of my podcasts, and in writing articles. This week , after a long period of thinking things over, evaluating the membership of the TPN and looking at visitor numbers, i have decided.
I Dont Give a Frack Anymore !
The last few months the knightwise.com website has fallen prey to the predator called popularity. Having the eyes of the world on your every syllable makes one write differently, having ones show hosted by the same network that brings people the big boys like slashdot review, the mike techshow and so on .. makes one think twice before one burps during recording. I got wound up in this, started to think who would read this, and changed the way I produced content. But today it ends. As from this week I resigned from the techpodcast network and made the Knightwise.Com website and the Knightcast podcast independant and not affiliated with any network whatsoever.
The whole deal is : I want to go back to the way it was. Feeling the Knightwise.com website and the podcast as a vent for my own personal creativity and a digital reflection of my life. This is not a technology blogg with soulless reviews, this is not a technology podcast with elaborate how-to's. This is my digital diary. I tell people how I live, how i use technology and show them the tricks of the trade. This podcast / website is not to educate you , it is not the blog of some pesky journalist. This is my life on the edge of real and cyberspace. And in my life I don't care if I'm popular or not. I'd rather write for 10 people who appreciate it then for 100 soulless diggers who just nose by and forget all about the site on their next click.
So its back to basics. The Knightwise.com website and the Knightcast podcast as a reflection of my digital lifestyle. A Techno soap if you will , but perhaps a cyber-lifestyle magazine with real people. My creativity is something that has seldom been bound by rules regulations and parameters. The only constant was its in-predictability. So the Knightsite is back like you have known it , or perhaps you are new and have never seen it different. Well , be prepared for everyday life on the digital threshold, where I'l give you tips and pointers, an introspection into my own life, where I laugh, where I'm sad, Where I get angry and swear, where I stop to shoot the sunset to show you on flickr. Because I have found out that the elemental truth is : It is in outing my own creativity that I find my passion.. And not in the number of hits that I logged that day.
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Yow Charlie , Its ya Birthday !
Nov 11Yep , I can officially say I've just completed another lap around the sun. Sitting in pole position on the third planet from the left i have so far completed 32 laps of 149600000 km each an an average of 30km's per second. Eat my shorts Shumacher ! But enough with the phisics. As social etiquette demands, this (along with newyears-eve) is one of those moments where you evaluate your current situation and proclaim propostorous resolutions explaining what you plan to change in the coming years. Let us not linger by the sidelines and jump right in.
So , you're 32. All grown up and no place to go.
Well , a lot of men my age are married or even find themselves at the point where they are paying alimony to remind them that 'for good or for bad' can turn sour pretty soon. They might even have kids and the highpoint of their day is the footy on TV or a raunchy magazine left behind at the trainstation. Compared to a lot of guyz my age (and I look for reference at my classmates from gradeschool) look a hell of a lot older then me, not only am i blessed with the sprout of youth (read : i have a babyface) I don't FEEL 32 either. When I see the soccer moms and soccer-dads waddle by with their carriages my spine tingles and I gently chuckle that those are the things farthest from my mind. I have found the love of my life (we have been together for ten years now) and I have become a married man last summer. No kids (no thank you) for both of us. And quite frankly, with the mindset we both have, its not gonna happen soon. If there is one thing I have learned about going over 30, then it is that nothing is written in stone after the third decennium. (unless you want it to) I hate the words 'settled down' because they imply resistance to change. Change is inevitable and thus I find myself far from settled. I would like some peace and quiet on the real estate front (people constantly want to buy our house) but beside that , i am content with the way things are. Where men used to get a mid-life crisis when they where thirty (balancing out the checkbook where do i want to be / where am I) I found turning thirty being an exiting experience with a general feel of : its all just getting started.
Cakes and Candles.
Every year around this time it used to be time for the "Big Knighty's B-day party" where I would invite all my friends and family over. Allthough i have enjoyed such moments greatly , i have refrained from doing them after my 30'st birthday. Is it maturity that dicates me to become more discrete when my birthday comes up .. Or have I just moved into different circles ? I do not know. My roundtable of close friends has grown very intimate and even those close friends are people I don't see on a weekly bases. But the ties are there nonetheless. If i where to throw a birhtday party for the people I interact with everyday (online) the cost in ailinetickets would be astronomical. Certainly in the last two years, geographical boundries have meant little to me. Where my old schoolbuddies peer with neighbours at the local soccerclub, I have daily skypcalls with buddies in the US and Australia. When it comes to real life social interaction I might be becoming a hobo ! Luckily the calls on my cellphone from my sis-in-law and mum-in-law proved to be a joy and all the links i needed to the geographically closeby world.
Conclusion.
I hate conclusions. They are so darn final. So I'll evaluate how I feel today. I'm 32, am sitting behind a sober but nicely equipped desk in a nice house. On the couch the girl I married this year is blissfully sleeping and I know that whenever she is around me , i can make her happy. I love her very much and know that we have something extremely precious and special going on between the two of us. In my ears music is playing from a server, over a network that I have setup by mysellf with skills i've learned from scratch over the past ten years. I could go on but it is suffice to say I am a happy 32 year old guy 🙂
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The coming of Cyber archaeologists.
Nov 03Will we need cyber archaeologists.
Looking at it, its the oddesd of things. This flimsy plastic box with two round holes in it, seems to come from another age. A brown warn little plastic tape worms itsself from one side of the container to the other. Only 20 some years old , the cassette is as obsolete as the dinosaurs. Yet a few weeks ago my dear aunt called me up in a panic, telling the tale how the evil old cassette player she had owned for so many years had 'eaten' a cassete with a recording on it of my late grandmother singing. I of course offered to go ahead and fix it. After half an hour of poking and prodding with a pair of tweezers and some sticky tape I managed to get the cassette back together. Now I just had to find a cassette player to play it on… It was at that moment i realised .. I did not have one anymore. The thought propped up to me that we store so much information these days on so many carriers, but yet all these media are futile and soon we won't be able to recover anything we stored 10 years ago because technology moves so fast. Will we need cyber archeologists in the future ?
Media are futile.
There are few media that survive the test of time. Even paper turns to dust after so many hundred years, depending on how it is stored. And so are the media we store stuff on today. The average lifespan of a cassette tape, a cd-recordable, a dat tape or even a floppy disk does not even come close to the lifespan of paper. Yet while a single peace of paper can hold out for a hundred years, a DVD rom with all the collected works of Plato won't last a hundred years at all. The loss off information that can occur when our media turn sour is only multiplied by the enormous amounts of data they can carry. To loose a single sheet of paper over the course of a thousand years might be a loss, To loose a thousand documents on a single cd-rom after 10 years is even worse. So what is there to do but to transfer information from medium to medium in order to let it stand the test of time ? Or what if we find the carrier that will last us to infinity.. What format must we use to write our data ?
Formats are fleeting
If your average DLT tape will turn brittle and break in a hundred years you might just have been lucky. Think not of the medium the information is written on , think of the format the information is stored in. Format types like .doc , .xls and so on are even more fleeting then their carriers. You can make your programs backward compatible into the extreme , supporting exotic fileformats of days long gone is a painfull task. Some, like .html, .txt .pdf and .rdf, might be supported for years to come, but what about other, exotic and propriatary standards, formats of backup programs and so on. One might hold a treasured box of data in ones hand but if the fileformat is no longer supported .. How can we ever access it ? Perhaps we will find the key to the format .. but what about the system it was written for ?
Systems are fleeting
It can be even worse. Say we have salvaged the medium and have somewhere found the original application to read it with. What if it only runs on specific hardware ? An evolution that is even faster then the formats and the media , must be the hardware ! What if the information we need only runs on some ancient system like say for example a commodore 64 ? Where to find one ? and even more importantly : where to find the parts if something breaks. Even to this day some "legacy' programs that are still being used in production, run on hardware that is no longer supported by the manufacturer. So what do we have to do ? Store both the information, the media, the original application AND the hardware it runs on in our archives ? What can be so important that we need to go through all this hassle ?
what is important
"So what .." I hear you say ? What if we loose that excell file thats 8 years old ? Who cares ? … But that is just it. We might know what information is important today, but we will never be able to tell what information is pivotal or trivial in the future. The first posting by Linus Torvalds on usenet might have been unimportant, Yett only history will tell wether this one event might be something for the historybooks. The fact is we store more and more information these days on systems, media and in formats that might not stand the test of time. Wether or not something will be important in the future is impossible to tell at this time, thus we risk turning the digital era we live in today, into tomorrows informational dark ages , from which nothing will be remembered in the future.
Cyber archaeologists
I see a new profession emerging. Perhaps starting out as a niche market, later to evolve in something that will turn into an exact science. People who spend their time looking through old digital archives. Who have the skills to work with old legacy hardware, know which side is up on a floppy disk , and God forbid, even speak the language of the old commodore 64. Cyber-archeologists digging through our digital past, being able to unlock and uncover the secrets of the past and bring them back in the light of whatever modern civilisation there might be. A proffesion that holds both the keys to FINDING information and being able to ACCESS it aswell. A trait of archeologists not speaking of the jurrasic but of the "basic" or the "x86" period of the past …
Epîlogue
As evolution speeds up .. so does the regression of the past into oblivion.
I for one do think we will have them in the future. Experts in finding what was stored but yet was lost. Keepers of keys that can unlock the files from our past and bring them back. With the amount of information we produce, the digital legacy we leave behind… its unthinkable that these things would be lost forever in a period of only a few decenia. Prove me wrong .. Digg into your past and find the first digital document you ever made ? Perhaps you"ll need a cyber-archaeologists to complete the task.
