Minimal Spirit

Long time no Update

2009-05-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

I forgot to write in my blog in the last several months. I was surprized that some friends of mine read it and even asked me if i am ill or in trouble, since I have not posted here for a while. Everything is ok with me, I enjoy life, I love my girlfriend Deni, and research in the university is getting more and more interesting.

I travelled recently to Paris, La Rochelle, Amsterdam, Sofia, Tokyo, Rome, Naples, Groningen, life is good :-)

I also managed to get a paper and a worksho proposal accepted, so I will travel most probably to Montreal and Seattle.

You can read more about me in the blog of Deni.

Eternal Sunshine of the Moving Mind

2008-07-31T03:30:00.000-07:00

Science is Art

2008-07-29T08:18:00.001-07:00

I am slowly going there, getting exciting images from my research

Paris, City of Light

2008-07-17T02:54:00.000-07:00

I was in Paris this weekend and the cliche is true, this really is the city of Light and Love. Even though I slept between 3 or 5 hours every night , I feel perfectly refreshed now, life is beautiful!

Movement Space

2008-07-03T07:21:00.000-07:00

The movement trajectory analysis I am doing reminds me strangely of some cubist paintings of Marcel Duchamp, depicting people in motion. It will be cool to make cubism with my robot simulator...

Robotics Stuff

2008-04-29T03:50:00.000-07:00

I read some cool articles about robotics today. First, a philosophical piece about war and loss and making machines die instead of us , then I jumped about to a video to this funny robot-mongoose cyborg smelling explosives , then I read 2 more cool articles about everyones favorites: Big Dog and Little Dog

Life is good

2008-04-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

Recently I was on vacation for 10 days in Iberia, it was wondeful, so I feel now really refreshed and in in perfect mood. I post here a picture of some modern artist from the CCB museum in Lissabon, the river Duro flowing into the ocean in Porto, and "The Triumph of Death", by Bruegel, a painting in the Prado in Madrid that fascinated me,as well as this one of "The three ages and death".

Now i am trying to make up for my vacation time and i am working hard back at the university.
I am progressing at my job in the robotic grasp research, this could turn to be really interesting, I post a screenshot of a succesfull grasp...

I also want to experiment with some new algoritms for image processing in matlab, combining my old work on Voronoi diagrams. Unfortunately, matlab is a bit slow with images, mich slower than java, so so far i am doing single image, video may have to be done in java... I post here an artsy colofful image, which reminds me a bit of some Andy Warhole I saw recently in some museum somewhere...

2 Articles

2008-03-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

An interview with Professor Noel Sharkey and an speculative article about human-like robots

Robots and war

2008-02-27T11:04:00.000-08:00

A not too scientific article, which however rises interesting political and ethical quetions for robots that can become terrorists or soldiers. Right now all such devices have a human controller that decides to push the trigger and kill , or abstain. How will be responsible if a AI robot does this?
Consider this article about Korean military robots as well.

An Inspirational article

2008-01-18T00:56:00.000-08:00

An interesting article about future robotics progress and several robots that will enter human life in the next few years.

BCI meets Robotics

2008-01-17T06:48:00.001-08:00

A cool article about monkey brain controlled robotic bodies.

Robotic Articles

2008-01-11T07:51:00.000-08:00

I am finding more and more articles about robotics. The google news web page has cool custom sections and gathers interesting robotics information, like this article here, where some 10 coming robots are briefly discussed.

A book partly available online for manipulation techniques

Some interesting videos and papers

I want to start collecting the best robotics articles I have read. It is easier to post information on my blog instead of on my website, so I will gather here cool links and tag them "robotics"

New Animated Voronoi - Giger

2007-11-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

new techniques:

-masks for facet floating
-contruct geometric configurations like rotating point cycles
-color/lens attributes of facets

Sorry for bad video quality, Youtube limits the maximal resolution, in PAL 720x576 they look a bit better.

Animated Dripping Mirrors

2007-10-23T10:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Freddie for animation support and Giger for artwork!

Liquid Rotation

2007-10-13T02:38:00.000-07:00

An interesting effect comes with combining a rotation mask and an algorithm for deforming rectangles to any polygonal form.

Muse

2007-10-11T03:30:00.001-07:00

New Design

2007-09-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

I have been experimenting with merging Voronoi diagrams and photo crops. It is analogous to the original cubism algorithm, but with irregular polygon shapes.

My inspiration are Picasso and George Braque, but it is a long way until there.

Berlin Berlin

2007-09-18T12:16:00.000-07:00

I have finished my PhD applying campaign. I got offers from five different universities in the Netherlands and Germany , and decided to go to Berlin. The research group is great, the city also attracts me. Now i am looking for a cool appartment there, stay tuned for updates.

I have worked on new rotation angle masks for cubism and the results are here.
I also plan on reading on L-systems and grammars for computer graphics and fractals, an interesting new tehnique might come out.

Giger

2007-08-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

Back from Switzerland, more inspiration for cyberpunk Giger remakes after Rave Street Love Parade Zurich

More Rain and the Beginning of Fun

2007-08-09T14:51:00.000-07:00

It has been raining the last 2 days, which kept me at home. I checked this online label Thinner with lots of free minimal music, suggested to me by Cefo , also known as 032 on the lastfm community. He has great taste for music and has really opened me for great stuff like Andrew Pekler and Alva Noto and Jan Jelinek. By the way, the last fm service functions really and has managed to suggest me already some of these artists based on my previous choices, but it is still better to get introduced to new music by a good friend.

I also played with this funny flickr interface, it is a nice game.

I am relaxing now, but I think the next few days will be exciting. This weekend I will be at Bodensee and then in Zurich, next weekends I will jump with a parachute, it will be great. Also the Weiterstadt filmfestival will begin and I plan on going there, it was great last year.

The sleep I got the last few days will be quite useful :-)

Some rainy days

2007-08-07T14:27:00.000-07:00

The raining season in Darmstadt is in full swing, so it is the ideal time to sit at home and work on the computer. I have been busy working implementing some geographical map features for fwcrawler, which proved to be relatively easier than i thought. The idea is to put users and artists to their countries of origin in the world map. I will be able to put it online in several days. I have used some pretty advanced stuff from wordnet to be able to create a small geographical database with countries, cities and counties. Some bugs remain, for example the database considers James to be a river in the USA, and not a personal name, and Twin a city in the USA, and not a family relation, but this will be fixed and running in no time.

Besides, I have sorted out some of my old stuff and made some new images. Enjoy.

Multi Cube Layers

2007-08-04T06:55:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to combine cubes of different granularity. It seems easy for now to create several cubist images with different cube size with Java and than combine them as layers with different blending in Photoshop. This has the advantage that one can adjust the myriad of Photoshop filters available and see the final result.

More Cubism and Photomosaics

2007-08-02T11:27:00.000-07:00

The latest images, experiments with techniques, shapes,texture

Cube Me

2007-07-23T02:09:00.001-07:00

Photo mosaics can be funny. A large "me" made of thousands of small "mini me's" :-)

Dirk's birthday

2007-07-20T18:51:00.000-07:00

TOnight was Dirk's birthday, a good friend of mine who studies design. We had a nice party with old friends from Darmstadt.
I got inspired to do a cubist portrait of Dirk, but I did not have a photo of him with quality good enough to print, so I could not bring him the present in time.( i was also totally tired today, first several hours of final diplomthesis revisions and then 3 hours of aerobics and volleyball)

But maybe some other time. At least I got ideas for a cool new modification of cubism with classical photomocaics software
The result is here, Dirk liked the idead to make a photo collage of him in cubist style. I will give myself some time to make something really good, the first result is here

Cubism Improvements

2007-07-14T13:56:00.001-07:00

I improved my algorithm in 2 small ways:
-automatic blurring of region borders
-more flexible window cropping

Cubism Caricatures

2007-07-11T00:58:00.000-07:00

I have played some more with my Java cubism algorithm.
It can be summed in several steps:
-create a hexagonal grid
-split the hexagons in 3 parallelograms to simulate 3d cubes
-assugn to each hexagon a cut from the original photo image
-calculate the cut size according to the image content of the photo, e.g. eyes are an important visual element and should be repeated more
-from each quadratic cut get three deformed subshapes to create 3d cube illusion

In this way, a single input picture gives illusion of multiple angles, eyes become facetous, etc. , all one needs is my java program, an input photo, and a mask with important regions. One may manually choose eyes, or use a computer vision algorithm to do this automatically, or use any other image to superimpose, e,g, the photo of a famous person works nicely with a caricature of the same person :-)

I wondered wheteher it may be interesting to create a photo gallery of caricatures of politicians with my algoritm

Giger Li Revisited

2007-06-29T09:21:00.000-07:00

Neo - Cubism

2007-06-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

Last Updates and again a new Domain

2007-05-03T07:21:00.000-07:00

Hi there
internet is really amazing, with several clicks we have now our own web site - FMcrawler
We have a forum and links for the last,fm program.
Maybe it is high time to reveal the project on the last.fm forums and to gather user feedback.

By the way, I hope that if I write my name Nikolay Jetchev here, google will finally notice and index this blog with my name.
And in order not to leave this post too dry, one more picture :-)

Art goes on and New Domain

2007-04-20T05:21:00.000-07:00

Finally I have a domain for the last.fm application, so I can handle the potentially enormous traffic :-)
This is the address

And I have included the voronoi design there, here is a screenshot from the latest version.
Probably I should also write a table with intructions as well.

I have also experimented with Voronoi diagrams with nonliears generators, the results can be quite beautiful.
The "nonlinear algorithmic geometry " lecture I may do this semester will be dealing also with Voronoi diagrams, so it was quite a pleasant surprize that my personal interest meet my academic ones.

Computer Art

2007-04-17T04:36:00.000-07:00

Ah, art is fun. The last week I have spent probably more time playing with java and photoshop(all the images in this blog are created by me) and looking at optical illusion books and pictures, than doing my job at Fraunhofer. I will describe some of the stuff I did. These are just first steps in a vast new domain, but already there is some eyecandy :-)

First, I looked at some interesting web sites about fractals. It manages to explain them quite nicely using complex math. In a few hours i wrote my own java code to do this. (there are programs like ultrafractal, but it was not intuitive enough for me). I am facinated by the concept of the fractals: infinite copies of the self twisting and fillling the universe. If I study more carefully the theory i may even find other interesting fractals, this is a very rich domain for mathematicians, and a nice stimulus to get into complex math.

I also learned about voronoi diagrams.
They are easy, yet have interesting properties if one goes deeper (geometry and diskrete math needed here for amazing results). It passes perfectly for my last.fm visualization, as can be seen from the screenshot. I have written the voronoi engine in java, now remains just to experiment with different point generators.

I also played some more with the polygons from last week. I did the poster for Elena'S birthday. I think it was a quite nice present, the picture here is 4x4 smaller copy of it, printed on A2 quality photopaper. I also experimented with impossible figures, like this classical triangle with unending edge. The good old Escher was againg quite inspiring for me, his tiles are perfect filling of any polygons.

So much art for now, i will try visiting tomorrow some weird lecture "nonlinear algorithmic geometry to see if also brings me some new ideas.

Op Art

2007-04-01T05:18:00.000-07:00

I was this friday on this exhibition in frankfurt. Op art means optical art , or art meant to confuse the senses. There were some really good installations with mirrors, for example a room with glass floor and ceiling which gives illusion that there are multiple floors with people beneath it.

I got really excited by some posters giving an illuion of warping space. It remings me a bit of the works of Escher, the favorite artist of most mathematicians :-) Now I am trying to do something like this myself. Here are my first tries, i will post more later.

Last FM visualization

2007-03-29T00:25:00.000-07:00

Check out what I have done in my free time the last several weeks.
Last.fm is a cool web 2.0 site with amazing amount of information. I have written an applet that browses visually the database in the form of a graph.

I am working now with Andie, a friend of mine and young artist from FH, on a way to make cool posters from the information extracted from there. What I find cool about this is that the image content is customized to the indivisual user: if you are a hip hop fen you will see your favorite afroamerican artists, if you are into electrnic you will see the weird art of electrnic arists, etc. You may either start from your profile, if you have one, like me, or from any artist you like, and then go on exploring.

If you have any suggestions write them down, I guess I will be updating this pretty often. Andie and I are full of ideas, like making the graph an online radio, connecting to other social networks, etc.

I also need a better server, so I can disclose the project on the last.fm forums and handle the thousands (hopefully :-) ) of enthusiastic fans flocking to my site.

Ich Liebe Berlin

2007-02-20T07:26:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to Berlin. The plan was somehow hastily conceived, and until Thursday night i was not even sure that we are going. But than we made up our plan and as usual, drank until early morning to celebrate eveb before the journey.

We started our trip with Bojana on Friday 3 pm. We went to Berlin for 25 euro with a car we found from Mitfahrtzentrale. This is a rather cool concept, both economically and ecologocally: drivers who would otherwise travel alone offer places in their cars for money online, driving like this is quite popular in germany. There is even a bulgarian site for this, but it has not too many offers right now.

We arrived in Berlin around 10 pm. Bojana found a relative of her aunt who lives in Berlin - Köpenick, Liljana Schmidt, and she was nice to allow us to stay at her place for several days. She was a really nice old lady, probably because she has worked in a University and enjoys young people. Her apartment block is a bit similar to those in Mladost or Ljulin when it was first built in East Germany, but it was amazingly well repaired, painted and maintained. It shows that even "panelki" can be a nice place to live, if one puts some effort.

After this we went to a Frank Brettschneider minimal party in the centre of Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg, which was quite cool and full of people from all over the world. We stayed until 4 am and then took the 1 hour trip back home. Berlin is quite large and spread out city, but the transport grid is amazingly effective 24 hours !

The next day we slept until 12 am, had a nice breakfast with Liljana Schmidt. Then we visited a nice Dali exhibition, which managed to surprize me quite good with many things i have not seen before from Dali, and i have seen quite a lot from him. Afterwards we met on Unter den Linden with Jana, Gopeto, who had taken another car form Darmstadt, and Tihomir, who like a real hippy hitch hiked to BErlin. We drank some beers and then found a nice drum and bass party for the night. We thought we knew the address, but felt a bit lost, until a nice man took us in his car and drove us to the party to save us the time. The party was good, full untill 6 am, and much cheaper than back home in darmstadt. We went home at about 6 am, Bojana, Tihomir and me. On the way we met Beni and Tittilein, or whatever, some nice quite drunk local people from Fridrichshein. We chatted with them and they invited us for a bottle of wine at 7am in their homes, quite nice. We went home finally at 9 am, but we still did not sleep, but had a nice big breakfast with Liljana.

Finally we slept until 3 pm or so, and than went to the Bode Museum, which had a nice medieval/byzantine collection. We met some other bulgarian guys there, Stojan and Miro, some friends of Zlatka, and had some beers with them. Afterwards we found several cool party offers even for Sunday night, but we were too tired, and just strolled around Potsdamer Platz and the Sony center, the flashy part of WEst berlin made of steel and glass

And on Monday we went back home, again with a mitfahrtzentrale. We had planned so much more to do, like visit the Berlinale, the TEchnical Uni Berlin, some propaganda poster exhibition, etc, but we were already like the living dead from much beer and party :-)

Monday was the Rosen Montag, a day for catholic carnevals in germany, and the last part of our trip, the train from Wiesbaden to DArmstadt was full of drunk and masked people, it was a nice end to a nice trip.

I really like Berlin, it was my 3rd time there, and each time it was non stop fun. The technical university there also has some quite nice research areas, i may try to get a PhD program there one day, and i could imagine myself living in Berlin one day. The city is quite open and multicultural, there is even a Baj Ganjo pub there :-) , and prices for rent and food are still lower than in Darmstadt.
But only time will tell when i will visit Berlin again
I have planned a trip to Munchen at the end of March, and i will see how they compare.

2 more weeks passed

2007-02-09T06:19:00.000-08:00

Damn, blogger and mozilla just erased the post i wrote for 30 minutes. So annnoying. I guess the problem is i just don'T enjoy writing too much. My friend Pesho is a professional translator and he uses skillfully the language to express his thoughts like an artist. I guess i have gotten myself too deep in math, and i have lost a bit the language touch i had back in ACS. I make still interesting observation about life, but can't organize myself to write them down.

Yesterday was my last exam, Visual Analytics. I passed with an excellent note. We also spoke with Dr. Kohlhammer to meet again to discuss my text visualization idea. The idea on 2 words is to make a graph like visualization of a text collection. A potential scenario is a manager overwhelmed with text data, who take a brief glance at pur cool looking visualization tool and decides what to read or not. Well, let's see what happens, things might work out really well if Fraunhofer Section a3 buys into my idea.

We wanted to celebrate after my exam yesterday. So we drank a bit of beer with Bojana, Samuil and Tihomir. Than we watched The Naked Lunch . It is a weird movie based on the drug fueled lunacy life of the real beat legend writer William Burroughs. The director is Davind Cronenberg, author opf masterpieces like the Fly and VideoDrome. He manages to create a weird atmosphere, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Casablanca . Aliens with tentacles, talking anus-cockroaches and insect typewriters, blah. Still, it was a blast watching the movie with many people, we laughed so much with disbelief at what happened onscreen, the black humor and fantasy of the director Cronenberg and author William Burroughs. Boyana reads the book on which this movie is based. But i don't want to ggo again in the sick sad grotesquely funny and ironic world of Burroughs. I respect shock entertainment for its ability to make us see the world in a different way, but i don'T want to endure such shock images too often.

Wien in 3/4

2007-01-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

Long time no Post, I will try to fill the void now.
I was in Vienna last weekend, to visit Irina, who makes practica there. My journey started on Friday in a funyn way: there was a big hurricane over Europe(evil globa warming) and many flights from Frankfurt were averted. So we decided to drink with Samuil and Bojana until 3 AM, thinking it is possible I won't be able to fly. I checked in Internet to see that I will fly, and had to leave home at 7 am, for the 9am flight, after 3 hours. But if one feels good lost sleep matters less. It was a nice weekend, with culture, museums, and drinking of Schnaps with the natives of Vienna, listening to gipsy music. I met Doris, a nice goa-girl from Vienna. She has been this summer in the big trance festival in Rodopi mountains in BG and she was really excited about it and loves Bulgaria. We got drunk with her, listening to Gipsy music that she brought! Vienna really is an east-west crossroad, where the slavic, german and even turkish influences mix. The most obvious architectural style is the pompous baroque of the Habsburgs and the whole city is a bit snobbish with its culture, opera and balls. I visited the museum of Modern Art, MUMOK, which had some nice things, but the bottommost floor was full of images too perverse and ugly and evil even for me, avoid at all costs :-) I enjoyed much more Heironymos Bosch and The Last Judgement Tryptich at the fine arts academy, which is a depiction of hell's tortures, but it feels like fantasy, unlike the horrors of MUMOK, which are all too real.

The images from my journey are here. Especially for it I bought a new kodak v705 camera. It is quite nice, with 7 megapixels and wide angle lens, it is also small and compact, and I got it at bargain price of 169 euro, instead of 300! Still, i am a tragic photographer, I really shpud practice more to get better pictures. Right now I gotta be lucky to make good shots, somehow i don'T have an eye for details and so.

I am in a study mode now. I have an exam in Visual Analytics on 08.02, i gotta finish my SIGIR paper by 28th, I have to do some more work for my Diploma, I have to work in Fraunhofer, and besides this, I have plans for cooperation and open source programs with Martin, and some art interactive project with Andy, WEB 2.0 rulezz!
I got inspired by this last.fm enhancement, which generates a desktop form the album covers you hear. It is still a bit unpractical for desktop, icons become difficult to distinguish, but is cool, a desktop with content customized by the users musical preferences, downloaded by RSS. Web 2.0 at its finest :-)

Le Grande Bouffet

2007-01-14T03:24:00.000-08:00

Wednesday was a day of hard toil! It started with a visit to a swimming pool. I did only 5 pool distances, while Boyana managed 30 ! Shame for me, last year I could do 10, I should swim more often. Than I had a visual analytics lecture, than programmed a bit in Fraunhofer, than finished a draft of my paper for SIGIR 2007 and wrote an email to my Professor.

The Thursday I went to a theatre play in Darmstadt. "Welche Droge passt zu mir", or for those who can't sprechen, "which drug suits me". It was a monologue by a housewive, who is bored while her husband is far away, and her son visits school. So she hooks up with the plumber, who supplies her extasy and cocaine. And then, and then, and then... It was a piece with a good scanario, some realistic situation, realistic description of drug effects, no overdriving in the direction "Drugs are bad, mmmkey" or "Drugs rule". The screenwriter showed well the psychological states of a 32 year old woman experimenting with her body. The one weak point in the play by my humble opinion was the acting itself, the actress was not as good as she could have been, i did not like her voice and her emotions did not convince me enough. I guess this is because I visited 3 theatre pieces in my BG vacation, "Marsrutka", "Stereolove", "Zelenodiwo", and I really think that the Bulgarian actors are quite tallented. Maybe I should go next time to theatre in Frankfurt, it is unfair to compare a city of 150000 like Darmstadt to Sofia which is capital and 10x bigger.

After the theatre we expected to meet Mitaka, who was coming back from Bulgaria, but he was late - some woman died midair (!) by heart attack or whatever, and people panicked and stopped the plane at the nearest airport.

On Friday Jana, Moritz, Gope, Boyana and I visited the An Sibin Irish pub. A real Irish folk-roc-punk band was playing, 6 drunkards and a cute girl with a violin :-) The atmosphere was really nice, Guiness beer is amazing, and we had a good time. The pub was also full of American soldiers, from the nearby bases, who were also really anjoying themselves and their beers. In the good old times before 9/11 there were many times more Soldiers nearby Darmstadt and many discos had them as their primary audience. Now some of the bases were downsized, so the discos closed or changed style, and now An Sibin is the main meeting point for G.I.'s in Darmstadt. On some day one may feel one is in the Midwest - an irish pub with irish waiters and several hundred american customers.

And on Saturday was the event that gave the name of this post, and where the pictures are from (stupid blogspot, how can I set the coordinates of the images ?). Actually, "Le Grande Bouffet" is a classic dark comedy from the 70's, which I plan to see soon, and it means in translation "the big eating". On Saturday Boyana and I prepared a nice dinnner for Steffen and Miriam, because we lost a bet. So we tried our best and cooked rabbit stew, inspired from a French cooking book. Rabbit with thymian, parsley, garlic, onion, bacon, red wine and potatoes. It was amazingly delicious, a real step forward for our cooking skills. It was also the first time in my life when I eat rabbit meat (or I just don'T remember), and it was gorgeous ! Afterwards I planned to see the movie "LE Grande Bouffet", I expected it will ba a biting satire of western culture of consumption, but I was too tired for any long intellectual movie :-)
So I watched "Dwoynikat", or "The Doppelganger", a classic BG comedy from 1979. I watched it for the 5th or 6th time, but still the comedy genius is amazing. It is the story of a scientist, who does not have enough time for both social and academic responsibilities, so he asks his cousin, a barkeeper, to help him. The cousin has no idea of science, but he enjoys drinking at cocktails and seducing the science co-workers :-) Well, watch the movie, it is a piece of genius, and anyone who has something to do with science in Bulgaria, BAN or Sofia Uni, will enjoy it fully, it captures the essence of "nauka", with the stress on the letter a :-).

Quiet Days in Darmstadt

2007-01-09T04:58:00.000-08:00

Yuppie, I am back.

The year is starting slowly again. I went Monday on work, and was surprised to see that my room in Fraunhofer institute has been changed. I am now in a new room, with better window view and less crowded. Still, the old room had some odd charm - no windows, weird medical sensors , torsos and mannequins. They are builind a CAVE device there right now, which should be something like this, but even better with never before seen technology, as my advisor Rene boasted. And if really is so good I will test it and blog it here, I promise.

On Monday I visited the Visual Analytics exercise for the first time this year. This a lecture course about combining the strengths of human and machine pattern recognition, for better analysis of data. Sounds too abstract and sometimes it tries too hard to describe things we see intuitively with academic terms, but it is also fun sometimes. This exrecise we tried to see the pattern in this sequence of numbers visually - 5, 20, 60, 36, 36, 51, 153, 129, 9, ... The answer was not elegant enough for my taste, but it was good exercise. It reminded me of Hofstadter'S book about analogical thinking, where he seeks for patterns in number sequences by using simple observations humans may make when looking at the numbers, finding peaks, valleys, etc.

But even though I did some stuff on Monday, i am still not 100% efficient, and have fun with other things than math. I drank a lot of bourbon for Boyana'S name day on Saturday. She gave me Henry Miller as a present for the New Year, and I am really excited about the book. Isn't it weird, Henry Miller is a realy old author, often overlooked, I learned about him accidentally while browsing on the Net and got curious. An than Boyana gives me this book, because she has been reading him the last several weeks, funny coincidence. I cooked some Indian food for Boyana and Welislawa on Sunday night, and played poker and drank on Monday night. I also watched a good drama with Nicholas Cage with Gopeto and Stoyan. I started playing Defcon , a simple board-game-like strategy, where the world powers devastate themselves with nuclear weapons. The game is very cute and mimimalistic (ohh yeah, i love the word) . "Perfection in design is achieved when you have nothing more to remove" - Antoin de Saint Exupery. DEFCON has also added Mod support , so many fans are creating more beatiful maps of the earth and weapon icons. It will be really a cult game, especially for fans of Dr. STrangelove

I am wondering how to embed short audio clips in my blog. I enjoy listening to music a lot, and sharing it in my blog will enhance the emotion. For now, i will embed YouTube clips, but this is a bit unrealistic, because i don'T enjoy videoclips of music as much as the music itself. Well, this autechre video i show here is good on its own, the weird world of Pi the Movie and autechre music blends perfectly, but when i listen to autechre I don'T have such paranoid ideas :-) But besides the ferar and paranoia, the math part of the world of Pi really matches the moods I feel with Autechre, this music really stimulates me to think abstractly and go deep in math. I guess I will be hearing more of it the next few weeks...

The Beginning

2007-01-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

And so it is. After ignoring the trend for so many years, I finally got my own blog. It is Sunday, January 7 now, a time for a fresh start of the year...

The airport lost my luggage, so now my room is even more empty than usual, but I am not too pissed off. Still, it is funny that this should happen on my first flight Sofia-Frankfurt as a EU citizen, but hopefully tomorrow it will be back. I don't have any clean clothes, so I can't jog in the woods, or go swimming, or go to any cool party, so starting this blog is the best thing to do with my time right now. After all, all I need is a clean mind, and an Internet connection.

I am sitting in my student dorm. I am in the mood to change things and improve myself. I am cleaning up my room, throwing away old stuff and old letters away, the feng shui way, organizing stuff on my hard drive, scribbling notes and ideas for my diplom thesis. I am also planning for the months ahead, what to do and more importantly how to do it in an organized way. Well, one more day of relaxed holiday mood, and tomorrow the real world begins again. So long for now. And to leave a sweet taste in your mind, some eyecandy from my vacation in Sofia