I still miss those days…

It is even harder to explain to someone who never rode a skateboard what it actually feels like to really let go. To ride down the hill, the wind blowing past you as inch closer to the ground to get that little more speed to really take you somewhere else.

This video captures the pure essence of it:

And then there are people like Sloan who just tear up because they heard their own voice for the very first time after 29 years. She had used hearing aids before, this means she can understand words and articulate words herself, but never to the extent that you are about to see here with the new hearing aid…

Apart from some quite simple answers there are those that hit pretty close to home.

The woman who never started as an opera singer, the girl who didn’t spend enough time with her father/grandfather or the old man who fell in love with a girl and waited 50 years to get in touch with her again and marry her.

It’s the people’s stories that make this video and it’s heart warming to see how similar and yet how unique we all are at the same time.

The best experiences with music I ever had was when I was laying awake on my bed late at night with the windows  shut and the lights turned off, putting my headphones on and listening to the most amazing musical creations that are out there.

As I see it, there are two versions of “loud”:
The “volume all the way up and listen to it” kind and the one that you can barely hear and it still blows you out of the water. Some kind of an emotional loud.

The more stripped down and quiet it gets, the more I am being mesmerized by sound and voice. Let someone pick up an acoustic guitar and a person who can sing and I am spellbound.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are one of those bands that impress when they play their normal set and who leave me begging for more when they are going acoustic.

Just listen to this and for best effect, close your eyes…

“LIMBO” is exactly what I am expecting from a game developed to be played by an adult audience. On first glance it might look like a standard platform game, but it’s a bit more than that.

Weighing in at only 117MB and available on Steam for under 10€, Limbo was a quick grab for me after I had watched a trailer back when it was exclusively tied to the XBox.

Something that instantly caught my eye is the immensely minimalistic style of the game. But not just in a visual sense. Every aspect of the game is optimized to it’s bare minimum and I love it for that. After installing the game you are greeted with a simple “Press any key to start” which will be the first – and last – message you will read on screen until the credits. There is no introduction video, no backstory intro, no voiceover and no tutorial. You wake up as a little boy in a world of black and white and gray with no music and no other on-screen information. It’s just about you and the game. I love it.

The gritty, grainy, rainy, dark, and abandoned setting of Limbo is nothing short of perfect.
Sounds are helpful indicators to things happening in your surroundings and give clues in puzzles to help you get around. The only music used in the game is to underline some of the moments you come across while traveling through Limbo. You will never see a loading screen, a level break or anything that would represent a break of game flow. If you wanted, you could sit down and play through the game in one sitting, never letting go of your controller. 

Since there is no text or voiceover to illustrate the story it relies heavily on your own interpretation of the content of the game. The boy (you) is looking for his sister in Limbo, a place between Life and Death. Everything else after that can be left to your own imagination. I might share my view of the story at a later point in time, but so far it matches with most of other peoples’ interpretations.

The jump-and-run part of the game is not particularly hard, although it can be lacking a bit of precision if you are used to spot on controls like with Super Meat Boy. The riddles thrown at you all through the game are sometimes hard but always fair and feel incredibly rewarding. 

As for the ending, I would not want to spoil a single thing. I’ll just add that it made me feel like at the ending of Inception. A feeling of closure, yet still uncertainty.

Limbo is excellent value for 10€ and about 5 hours of game time. It’s visually groundbreaking, immersive and mature. The content is inappropriate for children and strictly adult oriented, although the premise of a boy searching for his sister might make it sound like a Super Mario clone.

It fits perfectly in a range of games that are trimmed for grown-ups who can handle a bad or open ending of a game and still appreciate it fully. If you liked the way Braid ended you will like Limbo – because it makes you think and it might even hurt.

Yesterday I was attending the shuvit “skate 4 Arne” Skateboard-Event at Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof to work on my skills in sports photography.

Many years ago I had been a skater myself, although my tricks weren’t anywhere near as good as most of the kids and guys did yesterday. So here is what I ended up with.

Most of you might be interested in how I took the first picture.
The principle behind it is very simple:

• using a tripod you take a couple of shots in rapid succession
• load them up in Lightroom
• correct the shots (be careful to apply the same changes to all pictures)
• export them as JPG
• open up Adobe Photoshop
• click on File>Scrips>Load Files into Stack
• pick all the exposures that you want to combine
• add black layer masks to all of the stacked images
• use a white brush on the layer mask to show the underlying exposure
• repeat until you have completed the whole stack
• flatten the image
• resize/sharpen
• export

That’s it.

My new iPad 2 arrived last week.
And it’s gorgeous in every single way.

The size is perfect for surfing, reading or watching videos, although a 16:9 form factor would have been better suited for feature films. While the screen resolution is only 1024×768 (4:3) it still delivers an extremely crisp picture – something that I wasn’t expecting from a screen resolution as low as this.

Movies encoded with Handbrake using the  Apple TV2 setting (720p HD Ready) look nothing short of spectacular, yet I would have wished for Full HD playback capability since the 720p resolution limitation means I have to reencode my movies and tv shows all over again.

The first thing I chose to set up was the “Find my iPad” option via www.me.com to remotely lock and wipe the iPad should it get lost or stolen. While doing that I also chose to use a screen lock which can use numbers or words – a quick and easy way to make sure no one plays around with it when you have to leave it alone for a minute.

The iPad 2 Screen Lock mechanism
(can be set to wipe the iPad 2 after n-unsuccessful tries)

The Apps that the iPad 2 ships with are pretty basic, but very useful nonetheless. You get an email-client called “Mail” that neatly integrates into an existing Microsoft Exchange 2003 environment that we use at work, also updating the built in Calendar and Contacts as well. Photos, the iPod app, Safari, Youtube and Facetime – nothing new here.
iBooks on the other hand is awesome. It might lack new books right now – but you can get all the public domain books like Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer or Moby Dick for free. And the app itself looks amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I love books, but this is pretty close to the real thing, even with animations when you flip the page. It looks and feels way, way better than the Amazon Kindle App. So – more books please!

A few organized apps

Something that my iPad Touch (1st generation) was also lacking – among a whole shit-ton of other, now basic, stuff – was multitasking.
Hit the Home-Button twice and you get a look at all the running apps that you can switch to or close. I always make sure that nothing is running in the background that might drain the battery which means after each sitting I close all the running apps to make sure nothing wakes it up all the time.

Tasks running in the background

It’s a technological masterpiece, albeit a quite limited one with no chance of adding additional storage capacity or attach an USB device. If you are looking for an very easy to use, lightweight, graphically stunning portable computer the iPad 2 fits the bill perfectly.

Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Karen O (The Yeah Yeah Yeahs) teamed up with David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network) to score the upcoming motion picture “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/thegirlwiththedragontattoo/

Click “Watch now” and turn up the volume.

I’ll be in my bunk – playing that song over and over and over.

Washington, DC Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007.

The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time over a thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later: the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes: a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: a 3 year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception,  forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: the musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour: he finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.

The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made…

How many other things are we missing?

I need more of this… <click>