Thoughts during the breaks
I’m using hexadecimal numbers at Flickr, as prefix for the year in which I took my photos. And I just thought:
Hi, I’m Wolfgang. I was born in 7a5. Now we have 7e3, so that makes me 3e years old. See, I’m still young – in 2 years from now I’ll be 40…
Sounds fun, hm? 🙂
This is beautiful:
Pink Martini has two female lead singers – but when Saori had a hit with this one in 1969, they weren’t even born yet.
Thanks for listening.
Switched on two of my studio strobes and took my camera out, then I got down on eye level as usual:
Taken with the “kit zoom” at 31mm, but cropped a little more during post production. Midtoned as usual.
Thanks for viewing.
… I would most probably sign this petition, or contact the parliament myself…
Just my 2 (Euro-) Cents. Don’t want to lose Great Britain out of the EU.
Thanks for reading.
As announced, the German Wikipedia is off today:
I had followed and supported the change.org call and petition already:
But like suggested from Wikipedia, I also wrote to some (German) politicians who hopefully will represent us all against this planned censorship.
And if you’re a democrat, you should probably think about this as well. Thanks for your consideration.
P.S.: got a first answer from one of the parliamentarians already. Which shows that democracy actually works, it’s only up to ourselves to become active, and do the first (baby-) steps…
Here’s a nice video made by Navota:
So nice. Missing all of you…
Want to hear that last song again? Here you go:
List of musicians on that one is:
Thanks Navota, and thanks for watching.
Got another remix on a remix on a song I remixed a while ago 😉 that’s how it works at the ‘loops, folks. Have a listen to Rob’s upload:
List of musicians on this one is:
As always, thanks for listening.
Are you logged into Youtube, like me? Do you get personalized recommendations, and does your browser filter out ads and other unwanted stuff? Wondering what might be hiding behind all of that? Read on…
My browser (ESR versions of Firefox, mostly – the only more or less “free” one of the big browsers) doesn’t have many plugins installed, but one I couldn’t live without is ublock origin. It gets most of the unwanted crap out of my view, and sites which even try to circumvent this won’t be on my daily list of sites to visit.
But one thing it did as I just found out is to also reduce the opening (self-) ads from Youtube – you saw a short flickering, then the usual list of new videos comes up. Wondering what might be behind that blocked content, I decided to dig out another browser which I rarely use, and which isn’t personalized (means me not being logged into anything), and which also doesn’t have any plugins installed. At work this morning that was Epiphany.
So let’s see what was flashing away from my eyes this morning:
Aha. “Youtube Originals”, yeah I remember, had seen some of these announcements before – looks like they’re trying to become more of a real content provider (to monetize that of course). Ok. Not for me, thanks.
Under it, “Trending”, which I also never see normally. The state of mankind is a poor one if these are the topics of interest, frankly. Don’t want to be reminded of that each day, thanks. So let’s scroll down a bit more…
… where it becomes even worse:
“Topics” – yeah, these I see as well, and these are frankly a pain in your lower end. Ok, I get it – Google / Youtube knows nothing about me at this point, because I’m not logged in, so they show me the topics of most clicks or views or whatever their algorithm might be – and oh man, is this really the world we’re living in? What a strange species we must be…
I closed that browser after this, sorry, but cannot stand it. Google / Youtube is mostly wrong about getting my interest, but at least I don’t see crap like that when I’m being logged in. Instead of that, I see the umpteenth recommendation of old Miles Davis stuff, or Ella Fitzgerald just because I listened to *one* of her songs lately – but that is still worlds apart from… THIS (there was no other word coming to my mind, sorry).
It’s not only Youtube and Google – Vimeo or DailyMotion or all of the daily news aggregators aren’t much better, no one really has any kind of “artificial intelligence” which might be even worth that description of its own. Computers are thick (“Computer sind doof”), as a German pop song of the eighties used to state. Mostly of course, it’s *us* who are programming them. And we want self-driving cars, really? Robots in medicine? Thanks but no thanks.
Ok – enough of brutal truths of reality for one morning – now hand me that blue pill again, thanksverymuch…
Other news, for my/our German readers: in case you didn’t notice it yet, the German Wikipedia will be switched off tomorrow for 24 hours. Their form of protest:
So read all about it today while you can – tomorrow you’ll have to do with English or other languages.
And as always, thanks for reading.
A fun jam with Martin and Shi:
List of musicians, so far:
As always, thanks for listening.
And as always, if you’re a musician yourself, consider joining and playing with us – it’s fun! 🙂
Here’s a fun track from fanne, Shi, Offfocus, and me:
Hope you like it as much as I do. And as always, thanks for listening.
If you’re a musician yourself: please join us and have fun at Wikiloops!
P.S.: a bit of background to this song:
For fanne, Muriel was his crush in high school, with unbelievably clear green eyes as he wrote in his template track. For others, it was the most beautiful girl in their grade school class (read all of this on fanne’s template track). Then Shi came and took it to the next level with her awesome story-telling lyrics. For me? Yes, there were Muriels in each school grade, in my class in primary school I had even two of them in the same class, one blonde, one with dark hair. I never took notice of them until my parents and teachers found out that I’m short-sighted. So I got a prescription and my first glasses – and fell in love with both girls.
Maybe it’s these stories which make the track so lovely…
Thanks for reading.