Today I was at the dmmk — the German multimedia congress. Nikesh Arora (Vice President European Operations von Google Inc.) and Charles Fränkl (Head of Management AOL Germany) had a keynote about social networking and Web 2.0 — no news really. The panels later this afternoon were more interesting, especially the speech by Sören Stamer of CoreMedia about the explosive character of the web was actually very improvised but very inspiring, too.

Last weekend, I spent some time in the Saxon Switzerland at the Berghof Lichtenhain. They needed new pictures for their website, so Peter took photos of the hotel and the beautiful mountain landscape. You can find some pictures of the 2-day shooting here. We did some free climbing in the Czech Republic, too, which was very exhausting in the hot sun but still a lot of fun. By the way, free climbing started in the Saxon Switzerland at the beginning of the 20th century and was brought to the USA by Fritz Wiessner who emigrated from Germany in the 1930s.
Update 2006-06-29: I’ve just found a tiny video clip of Peter shooting the landscape.

On Wednesday I started a new Photoshop course at L4. The students will refresh and advance their skills in Photoshop and other applications and they will be prepared for their final exam at the German chamber of commerce and industry (DIHK).

This is something funny from my first internship at an advertising agency. The city of Trier wanted caution labels for their car parks to be aware of thieves. So, my job was to think about a slogan. It all ended up with this sign “Diebe nehmen sich so manches heraus” which is a play on words (Pickpockets unbag quite a lot). The signs must be from 1996 and they’re still there. Mike found it and sent me the picture.

On Sunday afternoon Marc played with his band Mondo Fumatore in Kreuzberg. It was a really quick ‘unplugged’ gig in the sun. I hate to say that there are no current show dates. But go and check the MP3s!

Gonzales played two gigs in a row at the Babylon in Berlin on Tuesday. The first show was sold out within a few hours, but I was lucky to get a ticket from a friend. Gonzales is a great piano player and his current show “From Major To Minor” is very entertaining. If you get the chance to see him — go and get a ticket quickly. You can find some videos of his shows on the label’s website.

A good friend of mine stayed with us a few days. With her she brought her broken iPod as rumor had it that I was a Mac healer. It appeared to be a severe case. The iPod displayed a broken folder icon when starting up and it didn’t mount on the desktop. Even after checking with Disk Utility and DiskWarrior which had helped me with severe hard disk problems in the past, I wasn’t able to fix it. I checked some forums and the Apple discussions groups and I figured out that it was a pretty common problem that arose after some years of using the iPod. So, the only solution was to get a new hard disk.
But I wasn’t willing to give up — not yet. So, I listened to the noise of the hard drive and I could hear how the disk’s head was kind of stuck when trying to mount. As my friend told me that she was already about to toss it away, I wanted to give it one last chance. I firmly hit the iPod several times against a wooden chair — et voilà — the head of the drive moved on and the iPod started up perfectly. I checked the disk with DiskWarrior and replaced the directory but there weren’t any severe problems and the iPod played music happily ever after…