Tropische Jonglierconvention

I've been invited to accompany a troupe (gaggle? flock? Convention?) of jugglers to a place called Tropical Island. I believe it's somewhere southwest of Berlin. We leave tomorrow, sleeping bags in hand, and will return on Friday.

I neglected to tell them that I've got a mild, irrational fear of jugglers (Tachydaktylourgosophobiaophobia) and think water slides are questionably unsanitary.

Online video deluge.

Oh dear. I feel an addiction coming on. I've figured out some of the hidden stuff of the Vuze UI (like how to specify a URL for a torrent). I started poking around and came across this little teaser for Wall-E, the upcoming film from Pixar.


To download the full version visit vuze.com


That lead to a parody titled Halflife: Physics like no other.


To download the full version visit vuze.com

... which reminded me that recently I discovered some of my friends have never seen the original "Color like no other" ad:

Oscars big-money dealings lead me directly to low budget internet only sci-fi.

This morning I really wanted to watch the Oscars. Don't ask why. I just did. It was an impulse. I went to see if I could watch the Oscars online and quickly discovered that you cannot. Apparently the network execs dropped the ball on this one and defaulted back to the theory that if you ignore the web it will go away. As it turns out, if you ignore the web its the viewers that go away. Here's how it happened for me.

Somebody on metafilter mentioned grabbing the torrent of the Oscars. I liked that idea, but first I had to dowload a copy of the the ol' torrent client Azureus. As it turns out, Azureus is pushing a new rendition of their app called Vuze. I downloaded and installed it, but then I couldn't figure out how to grab torrents from a URL with the new UI. I'm too lazy to put up with crap like that, and it didn't really matter because I usually cancel torrent downloads before they're finished anyway. They're too goddamn slow.

Needless to say, I dropped the whole Oscar idea.

Instead, I started poking around the slick video offerings within Vuze. First, I watched a Jiu Jitsu video where they show you how to pin someone to the ground with your jaw. [I'm certainly not the first gay man to consider taking up Jiu Jitsu for purely carnal motivations...] After my little martial arts moment, I stumbled upon an episode of Sanctuary. Sanctuary is a Sci Fi series made specifically for the web, with a proper, full-on budget, production team, cast and crew. I had never heard of it, but it seems pretty well known. The whole concept is to build a show around active audience involvement online. Kinda crazy. Well I'm a sucker for any Sci Fi, from the totally campy stuff through full on Blockbuster insanity, so I'm already on episode 4.

Now here I am, my entertainment-thirst has been sated and I haven't seen a scrap of Oscar footage. Nyah nyah.

Finding the Gay in Berlin

I'm finally tuning into the gay groove here. It's surprising that I took this long. After all, I'm living in, like, the original gayborhood.

I love this website: http://www.poopsyclub.com/

Pooping chickens. Gays have no decency.

Saturday Afternoon in Berlin: A snapshot of my brain at the moment

The uber cool Ruby Users Group in Minnesota has an increasingly large faction that really digs functional programming. A few months back, an offshoot group formed who aspired to tackle the eponymous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) with the help of MIT's OpenCourseWare. Though I've never finished even half of SICP, I have set out to read it on my own a number of times. Each time I come back, the supporting materials online have increased. Though my current travels prevented me from participating in the group, I subscribed to their list out of curiosity.

After a few months of stop-and-start, an email cropped up on the list pointing to another SICP study group with a similar schedule. The link referenced the inkdroid blog, which I recognized but couldn't place. I assumed that it was one of the numerous Ruby/Rails bloggers out there, but as it turns out inkdroid is actually part of the code4lib galaxy. He also has a lot of Buddhist books on his bookshelf. Small world.

Sadly, I will be missing the code4lib conference in Portland, Oregon next week. I love the Pacific Northwest and want to hear the latest buzz from the lib-coder backrooms, but it is too far and too complicated to get there from Berlin. In the meantime, I've been tending to MediaShelf, launching the MediaShelf blog, discovering Berlin, meditating more, poking around on Gay Romeo (disappointing), and reading Gravity's Rainbow.

Here's a wonderful video from inkdroid's feed:

Allah, what will I be...

"Allah, what will I be at 50, if I am already bitter at 25?"
- Zulfikar Ali Bhutto