Berlin and Beyond Film Festival

Yay !
It's time for the annual "Berlin & Beyond" Film Festival in San Francisco screening films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Today I went to see "DIE ENTDECKUNG DER CURRYWURST" (The Invention of the Curry Sausage). Despite the title, it really wasn't about the invention of the Curry Sausage (though that did take place). It was the touching tale of a passionate but ill-fated love affair taking place in final weeks of WWII Hamburg. Nicely done. The hostess introduced the movie noting that 'many cities in Germany claim to be the birthplace of the Curry Sausage, in this version, the Curry Sausage was invented in Hamburg, even though the movie isn't really about that'.

As an added plus, the star, Barbara Sukowa was present for the screening (see photo, Sukowa is on the left).

If it shows up in your local video store (or Netflix), "Invention of the Curry Sausage" gets the thumbs up from me !

I'll probably catch some more flicks tomorrow...

http://www.berlinandbeyond.com/

24 Hour Watches

I like 24 Hour Watches, watches that measure the passing of 24 hours with a single complete sweep of its hour hand. One can look at the watch face and see one day divided up like a pie. This slice for sleep plus that slice for work. etc.. all adding up to make a day.

The watch shown here is a low-buck Russian made Raketa (new specimens can be had from Russian watch specialty sites or from ebay for less than $50). This watch has a time zone ring around its outer edge. Since it's a 24 hour watch, the entire earth surrounds the watch face demarcated by hourly timezones (we'll forget about the odd-ball 1/2 hour and 1/4 hour time zones).

It's quite graphic to realize the expanse of the Russian Federation land mass by reading off the indicators on the dial (starting at hour 0 at the top of the watch):
Hour 0: Moscow
Hour 1: Saratov
Hour 2: Ekaterinburg
Hour 3: Tashkent
Hour 4: Novosibirsk
Hour 5: Irkutsk
Hour 6: Yakutsk
Hour 7: Vladivostok
Hour 8: Magadan
Hour 9: Petropavlovk-Kamchatsk (P-Kamchatsky)

Wow.. that's 10 time zones of contiguous land !

While not all land, the US indicators show:
Hour 12 Honolulu
Hour 13 Alaska
Hour 14 San Francisco
Hour 15 Denver
Hour 16 Chicago
Hour 17 New York

6 time zones.

Every other country on the dial gets only 1 :-)

Don't buy VISTA

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UPDATE ! January 17, 2011

I've stumbled on a post describing which XP/NT Backup binaries and what Vista feature to enable so that the more user friendly XP/NT Backup utility can be run on Vista OS.. yay !

http://www.petri.co.il/installing_windows_xp_ntbackup_on_windows_vista.htm


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You know that PC vs MAC commercial in which the PC guy is deciding where to spend his pile of money ? "Marketing, Marketing, Marketing... (fix vista), Marketing, Marketing, Marketing...".

I now wish they'd done a better job on Vista.. forget about the 2 days it took me upgrade from Windows XP, re-installing apps and tracking down all the new Drivers required to get my applications to run on Vista..

Yesterday I really got bitten...

Windows update informed me that Vista Service Pack 1 was available and would I like to install it ?
I naively said 'yes'.. then all the trouble began (if I had bothered to check the web about 'Vista Service Pack 1', I would never have agreed to load it !).

After the download succeeded, the installation aborted and left me with an unbootable system. No repair modes, no safe boots, no nothing was going to get the thing going. OK, I have the original install disks, I just have to take the 6 hours it takes to install from scratch, then I'll do a restore from my full system backup from a few weeks ago..

6 hours later, with a bare system, I go to restore my system from my backups.
DING.. Vista will NOT recognize the backup files ! The restore User Interface gives you basically NO OPTIONS.. It's 'trust us, we know what to do'.. (apparently you DON'T know what to do, you can't even see your own backup files !)
Some poking around on the net and I see that I'm not the only one that has found out that their VISTA backups were invisible to the VISTA restore program. I find a command line tool 'wbadmin'.
Ah ha !
wbadmin is able to lookup the backup files. Now all I have to do is use 'wbadmin' options to find and restore from backups and I'm set.

WRONG !

While 'wbadmin' can find the backups, the restore functions are only enabled if you are running Windows Server 2008, you don't get to use them on Vista (because WE know what's best for you, and you don't need to know about this on VISTA) !

I'm completely hosed. The backups that I naively thought were protecting me from this situation are now sitting there useless and completely locked up.

This is all a shame really. Windows XP backups, for all their clunkiness at least allowed me to specify where the backups were and what I wanted to save/restore. I've successfully used XP backups after a disk crash and gotten my digital life back. VISTA has taken away all options with a simpler interface that is almost a binary 'do you want it or not' ? Taking away backup options is unpleasing to those of us that WANT the control. I can live with the loss of control if the feature basically worked, but it doesn't.

Luckily, most of my really important stuff is kept on an external portable drive that I backup separately (using Windows XP backup, BTW). It was a good move not to commit the really important stuff to be under the control of VISTA, or I'd really be in trouble.

OK. I've wasted a day occupied with this already...

A word of advice: Check around on the net before deciding to install VISTA Service Pack 1, and have your important stuff reliably backed up before you do install it. (I'm not going to install Service Pack 1.. BTW, now that I've started with a fresh install of old VISTA, Windows update informs me that I have 147 updates to download and install... fun !)

Radio Romania

I've recently subscribed to podcasts from Radio Romania.

A decade (+) ago a favorite pastime of mine was picking up foreign shortwave radio broadcasts. It was a minor thrill knowing that you were listening to radio waves from the other side of the globe that had reached you by bouncing off of the ionosphere.

In 1995 I heard the Russian side of the WWII story as 'Radio Moscow'/'Voice of Russia' broadcast many historical/propoganda programs honoring the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII.

Now that there are foreign radio station podcasts available, I no longer have to set aside time to search frequencies and hope for good reception to get a listen to Deutsche Welle, Australian Broadcasting Corp etc..

Romania was one of those broadcast countries that I was never able to pull in over the air so I was pleased to be able to get regular podcasts of 'Living Romania' in English.

It's a nice show with a balance of News, History (mostly about the former Dictatorship), Cooking (!) and a short feature 'Learn Romanian'.

'Learn Romanian', that's great ! I had learned a few Russian phrases from Radio Moscow's 'Learn Russian' series.. things like
"so, we'll sign the (business) contract tomorrow".

Getting used to the sound of the Romanian language will be something new...

So the lesson began:

"Today we will learn a few words and phrases that will help you when you are driving in Romania"

"Driver's License"

"Speed Limit"

"Felony"

(ha ha ha !! "Felony ???" I need to be aware of this word ? )


The lesson dialogue went along the lines of:

"May I see your Driver's License"

"You were traveling faster than the speed limit"

"THAT IS A FELONY"


That's so funny (or is it scary) ?

I was expecting the next line to be:

"How much can I pay you right now to forget all about this incident"

(but it wasn't)


The 'Living Romania' Podcast RSS feed is: wrn.org/listeners/stations/rss.php?id=32&s=eu

Highly recommended !

Farewell, Zafra !

I've been enjoying Jazz Dance classes taught by Zafra Miriam at
Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley .
The class is heavy on development of a strong technical foundation. I don't have a strong technical foundation (perhaps I should say that I don't/didn't have ANY technical foundation !) so the class has been both challenging and perfect for me.
Tonight was my last class with her as she's moving away to far flung landzzz. Thanks Zafra for sharing your passion and feeling for dance with us !

Yet Another Dance Student Showcase

Hot on the heels of yesterday's Showcase at ODC came tonight's 'City Dance Showcase' at the Cowell Theater on the Bay. A great show with: HipHop, BBoying (Breaking), Jazz, Contemporary, Samba, Belly Dance (more about that in a minute !), Tap and Locking. One of the Belly Dancer's showed some amazing midriff control: she had a thin elastic band around her waist and made it jump between her waist and ribcage solely through the actions of her body in time to the music (look, no hands !). The picture shows the Tap dance group dancing to (live !) piano and vocalist. It was a very entertaining evening.
I really enjoy living in the Bay Area. There is so much going on in Arts and Entertainment that the question often isn't 'what should we do', but 'what things will we have to miss out on'.

Dance Student Showcase

Tonight I went to see the 'Rhythm and Motion Student Dance Showcase'. Great show with a variety of different dance styles present: Ballet, HipHop, Hula, Salsa, Belly Dance, House, Tango, Swing and Afro-Haitian. Something for everyone !
For anyone that's interested in learning dance in the San Francisco Area the Rhythm and Motion program based at the ODC Dance Commons in SF is a nice place to learn at (I take a couple of HipHop classes there every week.. great stuff)