today, i saw dracula (imdb). the one from 1931. well, you might now think, “so what?” well, i did not just saw the movie on a big screen, but the more important reason – the one which made me pay CAD 52 for this show – was the score. the original movie did only had music played during the intro and the outro. until 1998, when minimalist philipp glass was given the task to write a score. he composed a string / piano piece, performed by him and the kronos quartet, under the direction of michael reisman. well, a philipp glass score together with the movie is still no reason to spend that much money – but a live performance of the score by philipp glass and the kronos quartett themselves, together with the movie, definitely is. the whole thing happend in the context of the high performance rodeo 2009 in calgary; an advertisement can be found here.
this was actually the first time i saw the movie. and probably the first time i saw béla lugosi in a movie not made by ed wood. well, it was quite funny, even though some of the dialogs were hard to follow because of the score.
anyway. this event was definitely worth its money.

since january 4th, i’m living in calgary now. here a few impressions from inside the place where i’m living this time:

and here a few impressions from a walk i took today. also compare them to these photos i took last may, as i ended in the same park i began with in last may. note that the current temperature got up to +14 degrees celsius right now (3 p.m.), this morning it was a bit less but still positive.

some ducks swimming in parts of the river which are not covered by ice:

finally, the place where i’m staying. very easy to recognize due to euler’s identity scratched into the concrete:

today, a friend of mine gave me and some other people a guided tour through zürich. here, you can see some impressions.

i just read an article on torturing of inmates of, say, guantánamo bay and american prisons in iraq by exposing them to too loud, repeatingly played music, for example songs by metallica, nine inch nails, eminem, etc. this is really shocking, but what made it way worse was the last paragraph, which states that while bands like rage against the machine and massive attack are opposing the misuse of their music, metallica apparently likes it.
first i hoped that the article was somehow wrong, that they meant it in an ironic or sarcastic way. then, i started searching the web, and found a video interview on blabbermouth by 3sat with james hetfield from metallica and an article in the guardian. some quotes:

“if the iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then i’m glad to be part of their exposure”

“we’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. why should the iraqis be any different?”

“part of me is proud is because they chose metallica because he [mohammed al-qahtani] thought he was hearing the sound of satan”

“it is just a thing — it’s not good or bad.”

this already sounds pretty bad, but then i read this and watched the video, from 4:45 starting. sorry, but i really had to think, “what kind of idiot is this guy?!” if you compare listening to phil collins on the car’s radio for a few hours to constantly listening to the same piece of music with a very high volume for a whole day, you’re either a complete idiot or you talk without really thinking.
in any case, shame on him.

yesterday, i did a snow hike in engadine. first, i walked from guarda to lavin, and after that, i continued by train to saint moritz, and afterwards i returned home. the weather was awesome in the beginning, but after some time the sun hid behind some clouds, making it impossible to make good photos of the snow. too bad. the sight was still great, though.

today i went for a short walk to the irchelpark next to the campus where i’m working on. here are some impressions:

another panoramic view on the lake:

a panorama of most of the scenes in the previous pictures:

yesterday, i attended a concert of die toten hosen, a german punk band. the opening band was something from norwegen, and i didn’t really like it. but, opposed to that, the concert by the hosen was good, even though i didn’t knew most of the newer songs. they played a lot of classics, like alles aus liebe, bonny & clyde, eisgekühlter bommerlunder, liebesspieler, schön sein, pushed again, wünsch dir was, zehn kleine jägermeister and hier kommt alex.
the technical gadgets were pretty nice. every band member (except the drummer) had his personal light man, who operated a spotlight aimed on that person. moreover, a set of led arrays hang down above the stage, forming a “broken” monitor, sometimes showing the waveform of the music, or animations fitting to the music.
we got three encores (most of the classic songs were played in the encores), one of them featuring a side blow to berlin, saying that now they’ll play real “jazz” (pronounced as jatz in german), featuring the beginning of eisgekühlter bommerlunder while mimicing jazz.
actually, the concert also had two bad sides. first, as so often, there were some assholes who thought that the smoking ban does not affects them. unfortunately, a common problem :(
the second thing was the great connection of the sap arena to public transportion. there’s a train station very near, the mannheim rangierbahnhof. featuring two wooden (!) platforms and no (!) ticket machine, a huge crowd was squeezed into short fast trains. well, even if there would have been a ticket machine inside the trains (which apparently wasn’t, as it turned out later), it was by no mean possible to reach it. whatever. we were pretty happy as after maybe half an hour the train emptied considerably, allowing us to finally sit down.

spielwiese moved to a new server today. it’s way faster now, as you might have already noticed. unfortunately, the ad rotator plugin which i used to display the random lyrics stopped working, probably it doesn’t like the php version running here. maybe i’ll replace it at some point…

two weeks ago, i did a small round trip through switzerland. first, i took a train to bern:

then, i continued the old lötschberg trail to brig, and then continued to realp, where i did a small stop to wander around in the snow. finally, i continued over andermatt back to zurich.

today i cleaned up my blog a bit – at least on the technical side. i wrote a plug-in which encapsulates all my changes to wordpress, so the underlying wordpress is now a standard installation, making upgrading way easier.
moreover, as you might have noticed, i added a login box to the right margin. after playing around in the last days a bit, it seems that my goals can be partially resolved using role scoper. well, not perfectly, but at least to some extend. (so there’s still the need to write the optimal blog software.)