More Rain and the Beginning of Fun

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 :-)

Last FM visualization

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.

Quiet Days in Darmstadt

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...