Christmas Day

Christmas came, and we enjoyed just being at home together in Trossingen. All six of us (June, Stephen, Silke Marlon, Joyce and I) got the presents we wanted and had a late turkey dinner after a walk in the woods. Joyce got new Star Wars figures to go with Stephen's old ones, amongst many other things, even STAR WARS Monopoly which she went on to win in the evening. Poppy kept a watchful eye out for Coco. We had a good Christmas. 

After Christmas, Steve, Marlon and Silke went to see the new Star Wars movie. A week long break for me but there's still a lot to be done, and soon I'll be back to doing it. Maybe even writing that book!

GESEGNETE WEIHNACHT...........ZEIT ZUR ENTSPANNUNG........................

                                BESINNUNG AUF DIE WICHTIGEN DINGE ………

                                                   UND VIEL ERFOLG IM NEUEN JAHR.

Das Jahr 2015 neigt sich dem Ende zu. Ein hoffentlich gutes Jahr für alle von uns. Ich wünsche uns alle eine ruhige Vorweihnachtszeit und ein frohes Weihnachtsfest, Gesundheit, Glück und Erfolg für das Jahr 2016.

"The soul's joy lies in doing."

-Percy Bysshe Shelley 

Fourth Sunday of Advent

“My soul magnifies the Lord” Luke 1:46

The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, the words are so familiar that we may miss what they might say to us. If we read the words, we find there are certain contrasts that tell us about God and that tell us about ourselves.


The contrast between real power and imagined power. Verse 51 says, “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.” The Jewish people have seen great empires come and go; the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, each empire appeared in the Scriptures that would have been read in the synagogue, Sabbath by Sabbath, and each empire then disappeared. God’s strength continues century after century, and those who thought themselves great have been scattered, their names have been forgotten, their empires have become passing details in history. The verse has much to say to us today, when we watch the news and become concerned about worldly powers, we should remember that God scatters the proud, that those who believe themselves great in our own times will count for no more than all the proud empires of the past. Next time we watch the news, we might ponder God scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.


Another contrast is one described in Verse 53, “he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” It is a statement about what God has done, about how his Kingdom works, but, when one looks at the world, it seems far removed from reality: the hungry are still hungry and the rich have not gone away empty. It is a contrast that is still to be fulfilled for those whose daily life is one of absolute poverty, those for whom every waking hour is a struggle to care for their families and themselves, but there are signs of God’s Kingdom coming. The communities where there is the greatest sense of sharing, the greatest joy, the strongest ties, are not those where affluent lifestyles are lived behind ever more sophisticated security systems, they are not those where people find themselves spending more and more on the latest cars, the latest technology, the latest fashion, the latest label; the strongest communities are to be found among those who are poorest in the world. Spend time in African villages where poverty is extreme and there is an extraordinary sense of the warmth and generosity of the people; spend time in the most affluent parts of Dublin, and people will pass you without speaking. There are riches that do not appear in financial statements.
-Ian Poulton.

Third Sunday of Advent

I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming” Luke 3:16

Saint Luke tells us in Chapter 3 Verse 7, “John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, ‘You brood of vipers!'” Where does this happen? Where do the people go in order to have this robust encounter with John? Out to the River Jordan, John exercises his ministry out on the edge. There were plenty of places where John might have taught, in the Temple courts, in the synagogues, but John chooses to turn his back on the religious institutions. John’s ministry challenges people to come out from the places where things were safe and familiar and listen to what God might be saying to them in a place where there are no other distractions.

Does the place where John exercises his ministry have anything to say to us about where we might go to find the voice of God? Do we prefer to stay in the places that are safe and familiar, or are we prepared to venture out and listen for the voice of God in places where we do not feel so secure, in places where we might feel vulnerable? Are there places where we might go that would be like the people of John’s time going out to the river?

Why does John exercise his ministry? To prepare the way for one who will baptize “with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” It is a challenge to us, to see Jesus not just as someone in the pages of Scripture, not just someone about whom we speak in our worship, but as someone who is present in our lives through the presence of the Holy Spirit. John has spoken plainly, do we hear what he is saying to us? Do we know the Spirit is with us, not just when we come to church, but in every moment of our lives?

-Ian Poulton.

Haruki Murakami on writing

In a surprise public appearance at a literary event in Fukushima last week, he likened the solitary act of writing to cooking one of his favourite foods, deep-fried oysters.

His wife can’t stand the dish, so he has no choice but to cook and eat them alone, he told the audience.

“I am lonely, but they are delicious,” he added. “Like the relationship between solitude and freedom, it moves in an endless cycle. Picking out single words that are contained within me is also a solitary act so [writing novels] is similar to eating fried oysters by myself.

When my mind grows pressured when I think that I am writing a novel, I feel more relaxed when I think that I am only frying oysters.”

Writer and long distance runner, author of amongst others, Norwegian Wood, and What I talk about when I talk about running.

Second Sunday of Advent

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. ‘” Luke 3:3

If we had to look around us to pick out the prophets in our own time, I wonder who we would pick? Who on television or in the newspapers would stand out as being the sort of person who in thirty years time people would say that he or she was a prophet. The painful part of being a prophet is that the prophet’s role is to stand against the rulers and the spirit of the time, it is to look at the society around and to denounce what is wrong and to call people back to the ways of God.

Just think about the news stories of the past week, how on earth do we start to try to take on what is going on in the world around us? The answer is that we don’t. We are not asked to do so, we are asked to prepare the way of the Lord.

We ourselves have nothing to offer the world. It is God who offers people the life they cannot imagine. We are to prepare the way for this God; we do so by doing what people have done since the days of John the Baptist, we repent for the past and we pray for the future.

-Ian Poulton.

Innocence + Experience Dublin 3

From local papers to international magazines, the sentiment has been unanimous: The Innocence + Experience tour has been mind-blowing.
For me and others in the family, it's always a special event and always reignites my love for the songs.

The determination to get the tour to the smaller arena in Dublin can be compared to getting PopMart to Sarajevo: Pull out all the stops to make it happen. I’m not sure how many rock groups feel that strongly, valuing their audience with as much reverence and respect as we give them. It’s a bond that few understand. It defies explanation, as does the idea of showing Cedarwood Road to the world. Simply amazing, the best Friday of the year! 

Bono and David Bowie

"People would not react if I went out and carried on like Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger or David Bowie. People do react if I go out and carry on like Bono. And I like that."

-Bono

And as Bono might say auf Deutsch:

 

"Es sind meine Teenager-Jahre als Bowie-Fan. Ich bin noch immer ein Fan, war aber damals in Herz und Kopf noch erheblich empfänglicher. Und jeder dieser Songs hatte eine unmittelbare Wirkung. U2 schulden ihm viel. Er machte uns mit Berlin und den Hansa-Studios bekannt, er ist der Auslöser dafür, dass wir mit Brian Eno arbeiten. Von ihm stammt die Freiheit, in hohen Lagen zu singen und so der „männlichen“ Stimme eine weibliche Nuance zu geben. Und nicht zuletzt ist da die ästhetische Überhöhung – der Versuch, auf der Bühne neue Wege zu gehen. Bowie hatte keine Angst, in neuen Größenordnungen zu denken und Drama auf die Bühne zu bringen." 

Ich sah ihn zum ersten Mal, als er bei „Top of the Pops“ diese Nummer sang. Es war so, als wäre eine fremde Kreatur vom Himmel gefallen. Die Amerikaner schickten einen Mann zum Mond – wir hatten einen Engländer aus der Tiefe des Raumes. Und obendrein hatte er noch eine irische Großmutter.

 

First Sunday of Advent

"Advent: In the overwhelming commercialism of this time of year, it is easy to forget that the season of Advent that begins on Sunday is not focussed on preparing for Christmas, instead it is a time to remember that it was in “the time of this mortal life” that “Jesus Christ came to us in great humility” and “that on the last day...  he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead.” To talk of such things can bring odd reactions, people thinking that such thinking is not part of their tradition, that the idea of Jesus returning is only something for those whom they would regard as religious zealots, that it is no more than an optional belief for Christians, yet every time we say the Creed we declare a belief that he will come again to “judge the living and the dead.”

Are the odd people not those who say that they believe what they say they believe every Sunday, but those who say the words every week, but then say that they do not believe them? If we do not believe in the advent of Christ, if we do not believe in the coming of his kingdom, then is our faith purely about the here and now? And if our faith is only about the here and now, then why do we believe at all?"

-Ian Poulton.

Die Armee der Poeten

Von Arthur Horvath.

Liebe Freunde,

am 19.11.2015 starten wir die „Dann geh doch … mal in meinen Schuhen“ Kampagne der YOUNG Stage Kids. Den Film gedreht und geschnitten hat die wundervolle und großartige Anna Mönnich die auch eine Dokumentation über Young Stage dreht. 

Ich teile die Meinung der Kid´s in diesem Video (Passwort: Arthur) und weiß, dass ich nicht machtlos bin sondern auch persönlich mit Euch allen gemeinsam die Macht habe die Dinge zu verändern und zu handeln.

-Well done Silke, nice voice!

And this is my right foot in 2015:

Thanks Reg!

and thank you Ali, Candida and Cynthia. The Innocence & Experience show in Cologne was the best stage show I’ve seen since Pop in Mannheim in 1997. The story told is part of my life story too, just amazing to see it presented this way.

Yes, the new music is autobiography. Yes, that may be self indulgent, but no more so than any biography or memoir. All we have is our stories and our lives, our experiences. And that's what this show is about? Growing up in Finglas as it was in the 1970's. It was the same in the 60's. I just loved it.

Here we are proudly collecting our VIP tickets:

Where the streets now have names ...

There is a song from Eric Church called "Springsteen". That tribute song has prompted a Scottish band called December to write and record a tribute song for U2, and it's quite good. Have a listen (and enjoy the Dublin scenery) in this new video for their song, "Alison Stewart."

To understand my appreciatzion of this video,  for Cedarwood Road think Ballymun Avenue and for Mount Temple think Mountjoy. I was there even before Bono.




December chose the song title when it became apparent that the song had been written from Bono's wife's viewpoint.

Equality in Ireland?

Stephen Donnelly

"It turns out that the wealthiest 20% in Ireland own about 70% of the country's total wealth. And for the less well-off? The least well-off 20% own more or less nothing and actually, it's worse. The best data available on wealth distribution comes from the Central Bank, and it shows this: The least well-off 40pc of Irish households, nearly two million men, women and children, have an almost zero per cent share of Ireland's wealth. We're O.K. with a certain amount of inequality - the 'ideal' situation according to a recent poll was that the wealthiest 20% would own over 30% of all assets, the poorest 20% would own about 17%, and the middle 60% would own the rest.

We don't believe that we're anywhere close to that ideal, however. In fact, we believe the wealthiest own not 30%, but 60%. And we believe the poorest own just a little over 10%. And then there's the reality - 70% of everything for the wealthiest and nothing for four in 10 people.

The Irish have an inherent sense of fairness. If you work harder, it's fair that you get more. If you invest more in your education and skills, it's fair that you get more. But it's clear we're not living in anything remotely close to what we believe to be fair.

Imagine bringing a box of 100 sweets into a primary school with 100 students, and trying to sell the current situation in Ireland to them - 20 of you are getting 70 of the sweets to share between you, another 40 of you are getting 30 sweets to share, and the final 40 of you are getting nothing. And we're going to base this allocation on how much money your parents make.

The negative equity generation don't belong in Ireland's 40pc who have no assets. They are way below that - they are the students in the primary school who were told that they have minus 10 sweets, and if they worked hard, then the total tally against them would be changed to minus 9.

And if they kept it up, year after year, then some day they can be like the 40 kids who have no sweets. For many in the negative equity generation, they'll get back to zero in their 50s. Imagine the damage that's doing right now, and the impact it's having on their children.

So if we're at a level of inequality that's much worse than we want, how did we end up here? Part of the problem is that the 20% at the top have far greater influence over the political system, and so the laws, and the tax regimes, reflect what they want, rather than what's best for the country. Partly it's due to a conspiracy of silence - the data used was only published this year, and so the sort of analysis we're looking at now was difficult to do in the past.

Partly it's due to accepting a 'masters of the universe' orthodoxy - that there's a small number of people who must be paid vast sums of money to create the wealth which will, in time, trickle down to others. In 1980, top CEOs in the US earned about 40 times what the average worker earned. By 1990 it was 80 times. It's now nearly 400 times.

So what can be done? Progressive budgets help, by seeking higher contributions from the wealthiest. Serious investment in, and reform of, education is essential.

Deprived areas need a lot more help, schools need a lot more teachers, colleges need more funding and control over how they spend those funds.
Communities must be planned to ensure a cross section of society live together, rather than the current physical separation of poorer urban communities.

Now we know - Ireland is much less equal than we thought it was. It is much less equal than we want it to be.

And if theory and history are any guide, then without some serious changes, this inequality will get much worse. In America, a country Ireland tends to track socioeconomically, the wealthiest 1% now own a staggering 40% of the country's wealth. It's time we started to move in the opposite direction."
-Stephen Donnelly.

Ireland 20 Argentina 43

Still, despite the result above they played some great Rugby!
It could easily have been the other way around.



It is good to be irish in this day and age.

Ireland 24 France 9

When the going gets tough, the tough get going, and rarely has it got tougher than it did in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff yesterday. But this has been a good hunting ground for Irish rugby, and never happier than yesterday. Even Muhammad Ali in his pomp didn’t roll with so many punches as this Irish team yesterday against a French team intent on beating them into submission.

I can hardly remember a more exciting match or ever seeing an irish team play so fearlessly. As Keith Wood commented quite rightly on TV “The most extraordinary level of bravery I have ever seen,”  Ireland thus beat France for the first time in four World Cup meetings. 

Schwarzwald Marathon

Erstmals 1984 und heute mit 67 immer noch dabei!

Ein herzliches vergelt´s Gott an alle Läufer/-innen auf der Strecke, an die begeisterten Zuschauer und an all die vielen engagierten Helfer. All diejenigen haben wieder dazu beigetragen, daß der "Klassiker unter den Naturläufen" wieder (in 1:43:08) erfolgreich zu Ende ging.

Will Greece soon be rich?

“Europe Should See Refugees as a Boon, Not a Burden” is a New York Times editorial that is typical of a view espoused by politicians eager to preside over a larger population. Young hard-working immigrants will make a country rich and enable schemes such as Social Security and Pensionfunds to keep going (a better ratio of workers to government-dependents).

At the same time we hear that roughly 3000 migrants arrive on the shores of Greece every day. “Greece’s Dismal Demographics” is a 2013 New York Times article on the aging/shrinking Greek population:

The most frightening figure is a Eurostat projection which estimates that, in 2050, 32.1 percent of the Greek population will be over 65, compared with 16.6 percent in 2000. And this projection was made in 2007, before the crisis hit Greece’s population. We were still living high, before widespread unemployment, hasty retirement and the emigration of those with the skills to succeed abroad. New projections will most likely be much worse.

If the Times is correct, won’t Greece benefit hugely from the waves of migrants arriving on her shores? If Greece can hold onto most of these new arrivals, and not let Germany lure them farther north, shouldn’t it be the case that Greece will soon be much richer than Germany?

And, if immigrants lead to wealth, why are European Union officials having to force EU members to accept immigrants?

-Thanks to Philip Greenspun.

Browser compatability now

In 1994, when Netscape Navigator was the most popular web browser, Marc Andreessen declared the browser would replace the OS. Clearly aimed at Microsoft, who proved them wrong with Windows 95, it still was a sign of things to come.


Now, Chromebooks and web-based tools like Google Apps routinely put everything on the Web. Faster, smaller, much cheaper computers, twenty years of development plus routine access to broadband have made “everything on the web” (or in the cloud) routine for us.

Up to recently however browser compatibility was a big headache. Now Html5 has changed all that, browser + Html5 = new OS! 

Html5test.com measures Html5 compatibility and provides a point score. Today Firefox 39 scores 467 of 555 points; Chrome 44 scores 526; Safari 9.0, 400.) In general, the four main browsers have improved hugely in the last few years.

Better browsers were supposed to replace operating systems since 1994.

Instead, they’re slowly replacing local applications, especially for mobile. Today, companies write applications and apps for iOS and Android, which you download through the App Store. Over time, many apps will become HTML5 wrappers, using CSS3 or JavaScript for many functions, then most, then all.

When browsers become “all” HTML5 or 5.1 (due next year), then more complex programs like Insight can become an URL instead of an app? Maybe.

The rich get richer

Upward social mobility, or at least the promise of upward social mobility, is what keeps most western societies going forward. This has been the case since I left school in the sixties.

 

People get out of bed in the morning because they expect today will be better than yesterday. We invest enormously in our children to give them the chance to do the best they can. Real life seems to be a constant striving for self-improvement for all. It’s like a conveyor belt.

 

This is what social mobility is all about and upward social mobility demands a bit of room on the hill for everyone. There has to be a chance.

 

But what happens if that social conveyor belt stops? What happens when the concentration of wealth at the top becomes so extreme that there is very little left to go around? What happens when policies all over the world explicitly work to make rich people richer?

 

This is exactly what has happened all over the West in the past 10 years. The recessions have provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity for rich people to become even wealthier. We have seen a massive transfer of wealth in the recession from the middle to the very rich. This has ensured a significant wealth divide – the sort of inequality not seen for over 100 years.

Not good for the future.

-Thanks to David McWilliams.

Live like this?

"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, listen to music, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook in the evenings. Work regular hours."
-Jane Kenyon

Please Share

But why? One thing I would like remind people of: Other people will see what's on the Internet even if you don't click "share." You do not need to single-handedly "share" or forward everything that comes your way!

In fact, please don't put your name on anything if you can't take responsibility for it. That applies not only to silly jokes, but also to other pass-it-on messages, such as those accusing individuals of animal cruelty or other crimes. 

I didn't do anything..

That's the first and best defense every toddler learns. If you don't do anything, you don't get into trouble. Somewhere along the way, it flips. "I didn't do anything when I had the chance," becomes a regret. The lost opportunity, the hand not extended, the skill not learned...

Wouldn't it be great if we knew what our regrets were when we still had time to do something about them ?
-Seth Godin again.

Welcome ..

.. to the new family member, Joyce's dog Coco! Came all the way from Spain to Leverkusen.

Greece says "No more!"

The Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has quit, despite the country’s decisive rejection of the eurozone’s terms for the country remaining in the single currency. Announcing his resignation in a blog post entitled “Minister No More!” on Monday, he wrote: “Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants and assorted ‘partners’ for my … ‘absence’ from its meetings; an idea that the prime minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty."

“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”
– Robert A. Heinlein.

Did you win?

w2007 - 1Km - 4:16

A much better question to ask (the student, the athlete, the salesperson, the film director, the programmer...) is, "What did you learn?"

Learning  compounds. Usually more reliably than winning does!

-as I well know from experience:

Perfect? -not me!

It's possible you work in an industry built on perfect. That you're a surgeon or nurse or an air traffic controller or even in charge of compliance at a nuclear power plant.

The rest of us, though, are rewarded for breaking things. Our job, the reason we have time to read blogs at work or go to conferences or write memos is that our company believes that just maybe, we'll find and share a new idea, or perhaps we'll invent something important or connect with a key customer in a way that matters.

So, if that's your job, are you focused on being perfect?

Perfect is the ideal defense mechanism, the work of Pressfield's Resistance, the lazy part of your brain looking for a way out. Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (-or anything important).

You're not in the perfect business. Stop pretending that's what the world wants from you. Truly perfect is becoming friendly with your imperfections on the way to doing something remarkable.

Amazon AWS weiterhin führend

Im Magic Quadrant von 2015, der die wichtigsten öffentlichen Anbieter von Cloud Infrastructur as a Service bewertet, wird Amazon Web Services von Gartner als das Unternehmen mit der vollständigsten Vision und der höchsten Fähigkeit zu deren Umsetzung genannt.

B.B. King RIP

B.B. King died last Thursday at the age of 89. He was just magical on tour with U2 in 1989. In 1988, B.B. reached a new generation of fans with the single "When Love Comes to Town", a collaborative effort between King and U2 on their Rattle and Hum album.




"I'm no good at chords!" -must be one of the best understatements of the 20th century!

"I'm one of those rebel kind of guys. They kinda, look at me kinda wierd, they say, here he is a 62 year old and look what he's try'n to do!"

I'm more than glad to say I saw him after Rattle and Hum at the Hohentwielfestival (near Singen) in 2004. Thank you for all those many years of music B.B.

And luckily enough his life story is here, filmed in 2012.

IKEA and Shakespeare

I saw this yesterday on irish television. IKEA quoting Shakespeare to sell furniture but it sure is impressive. One of the better ads.



The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1, Prospero

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
.....
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

There is this however:
"Shakespeare selling mattresses is probably what might have been expected as the logical outcome of society becoming a market where everything, and everyone, is treated as though they had a price label attached. People’s most intimate personal lives are the stuff of daytime commercial television, and journalists claim freedom to intrude into the private lives of people who have endured tragedies, but it seems that a point has come where thoughts on our very existence are no more than the stuff that advertisements are made on."
-Rev. Ian Poulton.

What went wrong with Windows 8

All of us now know that Windows 8 requires the user to learn quite a few new features, most of which, once learned, are handy. But why are they puzzling in the first place?

Well: Microsoft assumed all Windows 8 users would be familiar with Apple or Android smartphones or tablets.

But if you're not used to smartphones, a lot of things in Windows 8 are puzzling. It's as if someone built a car whose controls were designed with the assumption that the driver knew how to ride a motorcycle.

But a PC is not a smartphone and does not benefit from acting like one. Windows 8.1 backtracked a little, toward normal PC behavior; Windows 10 will move back even more, thank goodness.

Programming in 2015

My current developer platform is:

1. CSS.
2. HTML. (Bootstrap)
3. JavaScript.
4. Node.js Server.

Think of how much you have to learn to become really useful in this world. At least four different syntaxes, and a CSS preprocessor.

HTML is XML, JavaScript is like C or Pascal. The server could be written in any number of different languages. And JSON. None of them are going away.
I've been working with software for many years, and right now would be at a loss to write a simple "Hello World" app. What a Tower of Babel we have once again today.

Systems grow when they are simple. The big strides in technologie happen when the platform gets reduced to simplicity. Examples include:

COBOL, UNIX
Superbrain with CP/M and Basic.
MS-DOS with Wordstar and Quickbasic.
Turbo Pascal
Superbase
The Web with a plain text editor.

With all these systems, getting started was relatively easy. Typing and modifying "Hello World" was easy. From there, there were no huge cliffs in the way of becoming proficient and useful.

How to proceed? I am starting again, this time from Node.js and building out with Bootstrap on Amazon S3.

And once again I am confronted with the big gap between ideas and implementation. Wish me luck!

Climate Change 1978

I also remember the newspaper articles and expert warnings from the late 70's. It's difficult to foretell the future, even for Mr. Spock.

And also as I'm here, Happy Birthday to Reggie today.

New York 1590 - 2015

The elevators to the observatory at the top of the new World Trade Centre show an animated time lapse that recreates the development of New York City’s skyline, from the 1500s to today. From a swamp to a city in 60 seconds.



Perhaps someone will do the same for Dublin some day. (Dublin celebrated its 'official' millennium in 1988, meaning that the Irish government recognised 988 as the year in which the city was settled and that this first settlement would later become the city of Dublin.)

12 days in Ireland

At Easter and one of the highlights was two days in Killaloe, what a great place when the sun shines. Vicky and Philip are lucky to live there. Here are Joyce and I at the lake house, 

And Silke and Joyce after a game of football,

And drinks before dinner on the banks of the Shannon.

Acrobat revived

On holiday in Dublin over Easter Marlon asked me what my favourite U2 song was. There are so many it took me a while to sort them in my mind but after mentioning Bad as an all-time favourite for many years -especially live, and then leaving out songs specific to a particular year or special occasion ("Stay" in Cologne 2001, "Streets" in Mannheim in the rain 1997 and the version with the introduction von Hamish Hamilton on the 2001 Elevation DVD, or "Kite" while driving under a full moon on an October night to collect Steve from the train in Rottweil... I could go on!) I said Acrobat. He immediately played it on his iPhone and wasn't too impressed by my choice. However, not only has it a great instrumental part, the lyrics manage to juggle 3 parallel meanings: the disgrace of Ireland and IRA; a woman, her falling apart and rise from that; and the hypocrisy in each of us. So once again for Marlon, here it is the way I've heard it in my head for years. (Many Thanks to Bartek for the video,)



And coincidentally this week on atU2:

Results from the worldwide #U2Request campaign are in, and U2 fans on Twitter have voted "Acrobat" as the U2 song they most want to hear during the upcoming Innocence + Experience tour. The event, organized by Italian fan Angelo D'Arezzo, took place on April 14 with fans naming a song they want to hear.

The results? No surprise, really. "Acrobat" was the top vote-getter by a landslide, with almost three times as many votes as the No. 2 song, "A Sort Of Homecoming," and more votes than the next three songs combined.
Here are the top 10 songs with their vote counts:

1. "Acrobat" - 3,592 
2. "A Sort Of Homecoming" - 1,289
3. "Exit" - 1,195
4. "So Cruel" - 1,062
5. "Please" - 823
6. "Lemon" - 648
7. "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" - 643
8. "Gone" - 610
9. "Heartland" - 603
10. "Kite" - 601       

The great thing about Software

In software today you can "drop it in and see what happens" and if it explodes into a thousand pieces, you know you have to go back and re-think it. I keep having to remind myself that software is different. There's zero cost to such an explosion, if you have a backup copy of everything of course. It's quite easy to try, try and try again.

The best software products are applications that do things users care about.

Back in the 80s it was Wordstar, dBASE and then Superbase/Access. Lotus 1-2-3 had a macro language, it was weak, but it was widely used because 1-2-3 was so popular with users. Today it's WordPress.

The best one of all of course is JavaScript, a very bizarre language in a totally underpowered environment that reaches into every nook and cranny of the modern world. It's not an easy environment to work with, you'd never design one that worked that way, but the draw of all the users makes up for its sins. It's just amazing to see the collective energy and ambition of the JavaScript community. I've been programming a long time, on a lot of platforms, and have never seen anything like this. See fotodesignarri for an example.

AWS Enterprise Summit, Frankfurt

Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple ...

How would you define the amazing companies that are so often quoted in presentations? Those companies that innovate and create and make great products… What do they have in common?

They all share a lot of small things done right. Everything matters, and everything adds up. That’s the message of this paragraph: there are no shortcuts.

What' s different about the above companies is that they are learning machines. They have an intense bias to action and a high tolerance for risk, expressed through frequent experimentation and product iteration. They hack together products and services, test them and improve them, while their legacy competetion edits project plans in Powerpoint.

Now that we know, we just need to leave our own mark in the world. In the Cloud.

Zum Beispiel hier in Deutschland: Cliqz in Offenburg.

(Die Cliqz GmbH ist ein Münchner Startup mit 62 kreativen Köpfen aus 26 Ländern. Unsere Motivation ist es, dich schneller und sicherer durch das Internet zu navigieren. Die Cliqz GmbH ist eine Mehrheitsbeteiligung der Burda GmbH.)

Und hier die Presentationen der AWS Summit.

Siehe insbesondere die von Marc Al-Hames, Co-CEO, cliqz.com (Burda) und Timo-Klaus Barthelmes, Head of Digital Innovation, Aesculap AG.

Thirsty fish

The central problem is not that...

You think too highly of yourself

Nor is it that you think too lowly of yourself

Instead, it is that you think constantly 

of yourself.

-From "Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish" by Wu Hsin.

Written 2,500 years ago, and yet, it feels like it could’ve been written yesterday. 

Happy St. Patrick's day Joyce!

 

Sportlerehrung in Trossingen

Es ist ein kleines Jubiläum gewesen: Zum 25. Mal haben die Stadt Trossingen und die Sportvereine ihre erfolgreichsten Sportler ausgezeichnet. Und jeder, der herausgestochen ist mit seiner beeindruckenden Leistung erhielt als Dankeschön und Anerkennung neben der Urkunde noch einen Gutschein für den Eintritt wahlweise in die Troase, ins Auberlehaus oder ins Harmonikamuseum.

„Es ist schön, dass so viele aktiv Sport treiben“, erklärte Bürgermeister Dr. Clemens Meier. "Die Stadt gebe jedes Jahr fast eine Million Euro für den Sport aus, für Vereinszuschüsse und für die Sanierung der Hallen. Trossingen sei „auch eine Sport-Stadt“.

Ob Ringer, Läufer, Fechter, Kegler, Handballer, Reiter, Karateka oder Leichtathlet – sie alle haben wieder Großes geleistet und durften nun den Beifall des großen Publikums in vollen Zügen genießen. Denn sie verhelfen mit ihren großartigen Leistungen der Stadt Trossingen auch zu Aufmerksamkeit über die Kreisgrenzen hinaus und standen deshalb zu Recht im Mittelpunkt.

Mr. Spock

I was sad to read of the passing of Leonard Nimoy, Spock in Star Trek. In the hands of a lesser actor, Spock could easily have been a shallow nerd. But Leonard Nimoy played him as a character who was logical, sophisticated and intelligent.

In so doing, Spock in particular was an inspiration to programmers in the 1970's when it was fashionable for science fiction on TV to be mainly silly and confused. He was a good antidote to that before the hichhikers guide.

I was not a committed Star Trek fan then, simply because I was in Germany and didn't see much english TV. Star Trek was however the only TV show that was free to present ideas about humanity and society and in spite of that it was unpretentious, it did not present itself as a highbrow philosophy program.

That, of course, is part of the point of being intelligent. If you are intelligent, you can say things that ordinary people understand. If you can't, maybe you aren't.

Kicking and Screaming ..

Unfair things happen in life. You might be diagnosed with a disease, demoted for a mistake you didn't make, the ref might make a bad call, an agreement might be broken, a partner might let you down.

Our instinct is to fight these unfairnesses, to give in if there's no choice, but to go down kicking and screaming! We want to make it clear that we won't accept injustice easily, we want to teach the system a lesson, we want them to know that we're not a pushover.

But will it change the situation? Will the diagnosis be changed, the outcome of the situation be any different?

What if, instead, we went at it happy and smiling? What if we walked into our four-year prison sentence determined to learn more, do more and contribute more? What if we saw the derailment of one path as the opportunity to grow or to invent or to find another path?

This is very difficult work, but it seems far better than the alternative.
-thanks to Seth Godin once again!

Mofo remembered

"[Mofo] . . . became the heaviest song maybe we've ever written. I feel like my whole life is in that one tune."
- Bono.




"Is it, isn't it?" Yes, it is the smoothest badass entrance I've ever seen, they could not possibly open a show in any better way!

Coming in through the audience, no other band can do that, just U2.
Those who criticize U2 just haven't seen this live! (I was there, not Mexico city but Mannheim in the rain, Sommer 1997).

Fotodesignarri 2015

Wer wird meine Fotos kaufen? Who will buy my Photos this year?

Strange Noise Festival 1996

"Almost no one" is going to buy your photos. Almost no one is going to become a true fan. Almost no one is going to tell someone else about your work.

Almost no one is going to push you to make your work ever better.

But if 1% of the people in Trossingen (15177) does decide to buy, that's 151 people in the category of "almost no one."

If only 1 out of 10,000 internet users finds your photos, that's still hundreds of thousands of people.

The chances that everyone is going to applaud you, never mind even become aware you exist, are virtually zero. Most products and individuals that fail make the mistake trying to please everyone, and end up reaching no one.

So that's the wrong thing to focus on. Better to focus on making almost no one happy and proud.