Whew…. some mean downtime yesterday. Strange voodoo. There I am minding my own buisness, juggling essential system components, when my sudo fails. You can image the suspense. Next thing I know, I can’t login via ssh. So I messed around with the strange Virtuozzo Power Panel thingy my host offers for web-based server maintenance but no banana. It was late so I decided to let it be. Next morning same picture. Once again, in between attempting to repair the tweeter of one of my speakers, and the usual work hours, I repeated the mojo with the online interface without success. Right. I figured it was time to call in the professionals. I wrote them friendly techs at my host and they got back to me in due time. A support ticket here, an email later, and my VPS was back on its own feet. Won’t go into any details (their part of the details were not shared anyways… only know that the host system had to be restarted). Back into control, I c…read more

The Christmas season essentially ends, in my family, with a smash party and an oversized roast bird. We are talking a 18kg turkey that remains motionless in the oven for roughly 10 hours. This year, 33 people were planed, something like 30 showed up and we had food and drinks all the way into the night. Always works. The following days are colored, food-wise, by clubhouse sandwiches, and the usual routine ends (and the year, for that matter) on the 31st with a good dinner, in friendly environment, and massive fireworking. In summary, this year was not really different from the last but was marked with a handful of new things: new pages, new languages, a degree, spatial loss of friends, new knifes, new cuts, deaths, births, new (old) friends, new responsibilities, new books, new music, new shows, new projects, new offices,… All in all positive enough. So how about this: lets all at…read more

I just finished The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright over a long weekend in Hamburg (of all places). It was a good read, a page turner, which was able to put some perspective on a couple of things (as the New York Times Book Review says “(…) A thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11”.) Despite the topics depth, the war of the cultures, radical belief, Wrights (historical) storytelling remains demure and to the point. Beyond the style, the amount of material that he has brought together is mind boggling; he must of plowed through thousands of interviews and transcripts which are all listed in a separate chapter ordered by pages in which the source was used. In summary, his book is less about the philosophical landscape in which such radical thoughts as 9/11 were formed. …read more