Bye Majo!

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Today I was informed of the death of one of the most brilliant men I was ever allowed to meet and so I am sitting here with tears in my eyes, trying to honour him.

Manfred (Majo) Heinze was what I would call a ‘Renaissance Man’. Journalist, Author, Producer, Artist, Designer, Blogger, Apple-Lover, Creator of Digital Landscapes, Entrepeneur, Porsche Lover, Motor Cyclist, Cat Owner, Douglas Adams Fan and most of all a lovely, lovely man.

I met Majo for the first time almost twenty years ago at the monthly jour fixe of the ‘Tuborg Box Cologne’, then the coolest, artiest and best BBS (Bulletin Board System) in the whole of, er, Cologne. There he sat, with his ubiquitous fag in hand, dispersing knowledge, wisdom and witticisms with a maturity far beyond my years. For some reason or other I was privileged to become a guest blogger on his inimitable and utterly brillant website ‘Industrial Technology & Witchcraft‘ that for years became my first point of call on the internet and just reinforced my belief that this chap had an intellect that I wanted but likely would never achieve. He nevertheless let me blog about my little world in North-Otago and so I met him again, 15 years later, at the dinner table of another Renaissance Man. He hadn’t changed a bit and was as brillant and cantankerous as ever. That by now he was the unofficial voice of the German Apple user community and that his Mac-essentials blog was the most successful Apple Blog in Germany didn’t much phase him. He always embraced new challenges and projects, whether it would be steampunk in cyberspace or trikes, his curiosity was unstoppable.

The world has lost one of its unique talents, and I am mourning his passing.

I imagine Mayo now in a mixture of an Ian Banksian and Douglas Adamsian paradise with embarassed drones serving him cigars while he is holding conversation with a family of pens with a PhD from Harvard while in the background a large steam punk ship crosses the horizon, playing Rudi Carrell.

And so I  will honour him by posting one of his last youtube picks.

R.I.P. Majo. Fare Well and Thanks For All The Fish.

Nabaztag, my Nabaztag!

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I have been a keen Nabaztag user pretty much since they came out. My house is being graced by two of them, with Henriette (Nabaztag)  and Karlchen (Nabaztag/tag) adorning the office and living room. They advise us of the footy results over in Germany, tell us when email from the family arrives, give us their opinion on next days weather, play the story of the day from NPR, wriggle their ears spontaneously and sometimes just mysteriously glow.

As you undoubtedly can see, I’m a fan.

Nabaztag Antipodensis

 

Unfortunately the geniuses who designed the thing were never able to translate their brainpower into a working IT-infrastructure, so the Nabaztags’ performance was frequently hampered by spontaneous server crash, crummy code and a general laissez fair attitude to the whole back office thing. Due to the obvious problems the Nabaztags only ever achieved half of their promised functionality. Financially nothing really worked either, and so Violet, the company that produced them, went bankrupt as was being swallowed by Mindscape.

After this I expected my Nabaztags to fall asleep forever, but amazingly Mindscape actually seems to be putting some money into the bunny factory, and Violet’s website is now actually working and there is even talk of a new Bunny being released next year.

I am of course aware that these plasticky computer thingies are not particularly useful, but so is a dachshound or a cat, so I will keep them until their cute little ears fall off.

 

Not a Nabaztag.

Dear Americans….

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…hi there. I know you read this blog, I’ve seen your traces on my geotracker. That’s ok, I take it as a compliment. But we have to talk.

Again.

See here, over the last 2 years us Europeans (and the rest of the world, I presume) have started to warm to you again. You have an amazing president who (while not being able to deliver everything within the first two years but had a good stab at it) has singlehandedly turned around the perception that the rest of the world had of you. I even ended my self-imposed travel ban and visited your lovely east coast after 8 years again and was delighted to meet more open minded, friendly and intelligent people with a thoroughly modern and international outlook than you can shake a stick at, all delighted to be again embraced by the world after 8 years of being the butt of jokes and disliked for a disastrous foreign and domestic politics (and the odd war thrown in). It just re-emphasised my belief in what an amazing bunch of people you can be.

But now this: how in your right mind can you even think about re-electing the same people to congress, senate and state-mansions that turned you into in an international pariah in the first place? Some of them with views that are so alien to the rest of the civilised world that we are constantly shaking our heads.

So, please don’t let the nutters back in. Do you really want to make life harder for this guy:

Thank you for your consideration.

That will be all.

FB

Thinking about moving to London? Really?

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Over at Deutsche in London, an expatriate forum for -you guessed it- German expatriates in London, the forums are being inundated by requests from bright eyed and bushy tailed Germans (and, surprisingly, Austrians) who want to flee this mortal coil (or whatever you call life in Germany these days) and move to London, of all places. The requests are of refreshingly naive (‘hello, I am jobless here in Berlin, can I come to London and get a flat and be put on benefits?’ or ‘How long do my 500 pounds last on the housing market’) and wary locals often have to dampen the enthusiasm of the wannabe immgrants by introducing them the realities of inner city London life:

  • If you earn less than 2000 pounds per month and you want to live in the city, re-acquaint yourself with the lovely life of a flat sharer. Live with housemates who pinch your food, make love at 4 am in the morning before your important meeting and insist on drinking 40+ units on a Friday and Saturday night and vomit loudly on their way back to bed.
  • Forget about owning a car: you won’t be able to affort congestion charge and the insurance
  • Embrace public transport: sweat like the rest of your 3 million commuters in the Tube and get coughed on in the bus
  • Enjoy the lively drug dealer in your local park who will eye suspiciously for some time and get assualted by one of their clients.

And don’t forget: these were the good times: oodles of public money pushed into the economy, a banking sector that was spending like heck, quangos and NGOs in the thousands, companies actually hiring. That’s already changing. Councils are preparing themselves for 30% less funds to play with, the NHS is starting to reduce costs and the rest of the public sector is bracing itself for George Osborne’s cuts.  Beneficiaries will be hit hard, and the dole queues are likely to achieve the length of the seventies. The mollycuddled continental Europeans moving to London won’t know what hit them.

So,  if you’re sitting pretty (but bored stiff) in Duesseldorf and you’re thinking about coming over:

Don’t. Enjoy your clean streets and your drug dealer free parks. Coming over here might not be the best thing for your quality of life.

How to annoy your girlfriend and make a new pop filter

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Today I needed to record a podcast for a work project and fortunately I own an appropriate microphone, but during recording it was quite obvious that an abundance of the letter ‘p’ in my text a pop filter was necessary. The only problem is of course that here in the apocalyptical desert of South East Essex there is a void where good music shops should be. So I had to find another way. Fortunately the essentials were all available. Much to the annoyance of the best girlfriend ever, who is now one sock down.

Voila. One pop filter a la mode.