Cheezer and Louzer

OK, so I went to Germany last week. My company sent me over to try to sell some software. I visited Erlangen which is near Nurnberg (or as we say, Nuremberg) in the south-center of the country, sort of. Here’s the wrap-up:

- Weather: Cold then snow and so really cold. We walked around most of the time though and I liked the cold clean air just fine.

- People: Wonderful, very nice and most everyone speaks enough English to allow us lame Americans to not be forced to learn anything. I tried hard anyway, but as one of my German colleagues actually told me, my Deutsche pronunciation sucks.

- The town: Erlangen is a nice little town with about 100,000 people or so. The two major attractions are the company I worked with and the local University. They work hard to keep the town in the traditional looking buildings and such and I liked that a lot.

- The trains: Great! Ran on time, very modern and well-run system. It’s very easy to buy tickets and ask questions when you’re not sure what the next stop is, or whatever.

- The food: Just fine but I don’t think I’d like to eat German food all the time. They do have Italian, French and other restaurants though and it’s all good quality and reasonably priced. The major drag though is that most restaurants allow smoking and you go home with that awful smell all over you. Yuk.

Overall, I had a good time and enjoyed myself immensely. With any luck I will get the chance to go back someday soon. Here are some pictures I took:

http://picasaweb.google.com/peterries/ErlangenGermany?authkey=80euZnbXRGI

This game was one of the finalists at this year’s Independent Games Festival dealie and I really enjoy playing it. It’s a point-and-click game, which means that you are shown a scene, with a bit of animation making it lively and you have to figure out where to click to move on, solve puzzles etc. There are about ten of these puzzles to solve in this free online game and then you can pay a very reasonable $6.90 for lots more. I’m there.

Wow, this sounds like my kind of movie. Story line, from Japundit:

Sanada Hiroyuki and Miyazawa Rie star in a film about life during the transition from Edo to Meiji periods. The film has no big action sequence, no thumping loud score, no big war scene at all like the time period it is set against may suggest.

In fact the film is mostly conversation. And it owns! Watching this film is the closest I have ever felt to what ‘Ancient Japan’ must have looked like, sounded like, and been like..
Seibei Iguchi (Sanada) is a low ranking samurai who lives a meager life taking care of this two daughters and his old decrypted mother. Every night after work at twilight, he goes home to take care of the house and works his second job to pay off debts he incurred due to a long and slow death of his wife.

I’ll have to look for it.

Anyone seen it? Reviews, please.

I have had this book in my collection for a long time. I picked it up at a used book store in San Diego ages ago, instantly fascinated by the subject matter and photos. I assumed it tells the reader how to put on a play that is approved by the Communist Chinese government. It seemed to tell the story of a prole- tariat worker who overcomes the repression of the decadent bourgeoisie to realize her fated role in the People’s Army, fighting the good fight.

I did some quick Google searching tonight and found this article in the Wikipedia. It seems my guess about the play was more or less correct. It’s one of the so-called ‘Eight Model Plays’ that were allowed by the Gang of Four, and more specifically Jiang Qing, during the Cultural Revolution. The book’s copyright appears to be 1975 so it was made about ten years after the ballet first premiered.
That wiki article then led me to this YouTube clip, of the play in action. It’s really odd but wonderful to see the stills I’ve had in my head for about ten years acted out like this. Now that I understand it as a ballet and not a play, I see that there is no dialog. Shows you how much I know about ballet, I should have recognized this right away. It is just so odd and cool to see communists engaged in what is obviously a Western style dance for entertainment. The Chinese treated it as education for the ignorant and illiterate masses but it is apparently still loved as just a wonderful work of art, world wide, to this day.
More pictures from my book after the break…

Read the rest of this entry »

I created this wonderful little picture tonight in about 30 minutes using a free tool from Google called SketchUp.

It’s a 3-D modeling tool that’s intended to be used to create really quick, sketches so you can noodle on a design, or quickly communicate an idea without all the usual detail included in a CAD drawing.

It was very easy to learn to use and I am thinking of many cool uses for this now. Woodworking projects were the first thing to come to mind. Any 3-D design job would be made easier with this too though.

This thing rocks. It’s Apple’s new iPhone. It is actually a cell phone, an iPod (4 or 8 GB of storage space), and a PDA all in one. It can surf the web like nothing before it and could not be simpler to use. They have parnerships setup with Yahoo, Google (yay!) and Cingular (yay for me!).

This is the bomb, as the kids say.

$500 or $600 on the standard two-year plan with Cingular/AT&T. It’s not out till June this year but oh man. This is gonna change everything. My RAZR looks like crap now.

Two posts in one day! Amazing.

Anyhoo, I am reading this book and really enjoy it. if you’re into learning about China or just places you don’t know about already, it’s very nice. The author spent a couple years in central China with the Peace Corps and he describes all he learned about Chinese people, culture politics and so on. Very nice read and great information about very recent times in China. This is especially interesting for me, of course, because of the adoption we’re still going through.

If you do read the book, you should check out this Time magazine follow-up story from 2003 where the author goes back to the city he originally visited in China (Fuling) to see what had changed in the few years since his first visit. Here’s a hint: A lot and very little at the same time. It’s very interesting to read more on the topic of the book, and that seems a chance you don’t often get.

I’ve had this book, which is a bit out of date now, for a long time but just found it in my library again recently. Read the info in the link to Amazon for more on it, but basically, there are a lot of parrellels in it to my own experiences as a salaried worker in America.

If you’re interested, ask me and I’ll lend it to you for a bit. It’s always humorous and interesting to read, but even more so when you’re into all things Asian, or Japanese in particular.