i’ll be giving a talk at re:publica on friday here in berlin, come hang out and see what projects are on my life-long to do list. it’s nice to be back in town, somehow home is not just where the bandwidth is. i have plenty of stuff to blog about and a plethora of pics to share from my last three weeks of travels, more on that later. hardhack has a sign-up form, and the workshop list is shaping up to be incredible. in the meantime, come say hi on friday at re:publica.
so first of all it’s not really spelunking because most of it was above ground, but it sounds better than “exploring abandoned buildings”. i think that february activities can best be summed up as adventuresome. first i had the chance to tour a mostly-empty-for-a-long-time building on unter den linden which used to house various embassies and ddr offices. i snagged the green version of the adding machine shown above, which does plug into the wall but uses a system of rotors to do calculations. when you multiply the rotors go “clunk clunk clunk chunka clunk” for a long time because it is just iterating over addition. the building also featured a huge phone switch complete with hand soldered circuits and ddr era manuals with circuit board layouts so you can clone the whole switch. in other parts of the building there were abandoned piles of keys, holes in the floor, parallel ports in the walls, interflug rotary phones and bullet proof doors. you can see where some electronics were hastily ripped out of the wall, ah to think what sorts of spying was going on in that building.
next up on the docket of urban exploration comes der Flaschenturm, the bottle tower. it is a testament to the power of the graffiti and street artists who reside and travel through this fine city. (photos here). the entire inside is completely blanketed in spray art. the guys i went with were there to do some urban rappelling, who was i to say no? i brought along my climbing harness but as the light was fading fast the photos of the rope stuff were not as well documented as the street art.
i would venture to say that you haven’t really seen berlin unless you’ve been inside at least a few abandoned buildings — that doesn’t even include the squats, converted factories, and spontaneous parties. berlin is rife with left-over structures begging to be reanimated.
comments are finally enabled. yes they are a bit crude (everyone is labeled anonymous so leave your name if you do want me to actually know who you might be).
oh and if you already knew about this before i posted, either i told you or you are more in the know than most. *cough* twitterers *cough*.
the pic above is a vintage one, of pre-camera-owning me in april of 2001. at the time i was in great shape, and i still considered myself a long distance runner. seven years later, it’s a different story. a little over two weeks ago i calculated my bmi and my bfp. the scary thing is, for the first time (i think), i am officially in the overweight category for both measurements. as weird al says, You know I’m fat, I’m fat, you know it. i freaked out and in my pudgy haze i signed up for a 10k race in may here in berlin complete with an order for a championchip timing thingy. next i checked out the nike running online training tools that i had been meaning to try for over a year (a friend of mine helped design the site, warning: coded in flash). i put in my desired pace, my running level, and my race day and out popped a training plan. (note: keep the interface with weeks starting on sunday otherwise it is kind of wonky.) so has it worked? has my auto-generated training schedule and the fact that i signed up for a race in may helped? the answer is: so far so good. it has been two weeks now and i haven’t missed a run and have logged all the mileage on the training schedule. (16 miles/25.5 km the first week, 18 miles/29 km the second).
i have blogged before about running tips and such, but there are a few more “mods” that i use when i run. i hate it when keys or zippers clank and jangle during a run. i use a hair rubber band on my keys and electrical tape on the zipper pulls to dampen the sound. secondly, i safety pin the rubber-banded keys to the inside of a pocket so they won’t accidentally fall out when i run. in the summer i tie the keys into the tie on my shorts and some of my shorts have built in key pockets. i also hand-sew some mini pockets into the inside bottom corner of my zip hoodies near the zipper. one mini pocket is for paper money, the other is for the keys. i use spring loaded toggles on my shoe laces, and then tie the ends to the front of my laces and tuck in the excess. i hate having shoes come untied (once my cross country team lost the qualifying race to go to california all-state by 2 points because one girl on my team had her laces come undone, ever since then i only do toggles), and it’s much faster to shoe-up and get the lace tension right with the toggles. more recently i have had the need to calculate distance, and someone asked me how i know how far i’ve run. i’m waiting on the garmin forerunner 405 to come out this summer, and i’ve ordered the forerunner 50 (no gps, just pace and distance from a foot pod pedometer). in the meantime, there are a bunch of google maps / click-the-route-calculate-distance mashups, this one is fairly intuitive (here is my 5 miler from this week, the park is the one pictured here below: volkspark am friedrichshain).
so my goals are to get out of the obese category and to beat my last 10k race time (my last race was in 2002, ouch! it’s been a while). as of this week, i am just out of the overweight category with regards to bfp, but for my bmi i have about three kilos left to go. (my overall goal is to lose 15.5 pounds/7 kilos and lower my body fat percentage by six percent). i am considering starting a separate fitness log/blog, but that will have to wait until april i’m afraid. other soldering matters are at hand.
[pictured above: elisa installing fiber at a colo in a’dam, shot by me]
i was reminded last night as i went dressed as kaylee from firefly that not everyone is a sci fi fangirl. only one person at the fete had seen firefly (he had only seen the first three episodes) and no one could recall having seen serenity the movie. i found myself having to explain that a female engine mechanic from the 25th century was a relevant costume choice. but it got me thinking, who else would i dress up as from the future? probably the major from gits in her combat uniform and purple hair (even though most of the series doesn’t take place in space, the tech and twisted hack plots are reason enough). also a more recent addition, i would dress as cassie the pilot of icarus II from the movie sunshine. she is a tinkerer as well, someone who not only is the pilot of a crazy huge ship, but is also someone who isn’t hesistant to use manual overide to bypass the mainframe a.i.. i guess i’m more drawn to these geeky women than the guy characters, and yet i’m more into the realistic and very human ones (though the major is out of that scope, but she just rocks). i wouldn’t go as anyone from star wars or star trek or stargate, none of those really resonate with me. the question is, can women today be those main characters in their own lives without being reduced to a hollow cliche? i know they can, i know plenty of them personally. kaylee frye isn’t a stretch as a character, she is very real even in the 21st century.
i like it when cities have a theme. in copenhagen they have a symbol for the city, rome has framed portraits on the building facades, and in a’dam i kept seeing the xxx logo everywhere when i was there last month. the sun was fleeting, only two days out of my two week stay, but the city is quite photogenic. i still have a few photo shoots to sort through from my time there, but in the meantime feel free to peruse what i have posted so far.
i started knitting again on january 24th of last year, and since then have knit 15 pairs of adult sized socks, and a ton of baby sized socks as well. two pairs were completed this past week. one was a pair i started to have some airplane friendly knitting on bamboo double pointed needles, here shown below still on the needles. full info on this pair here.
the other pair were a pair that gave me a bit of a headache in more ways than one. they were first started october 13th, and thusly are the slowest pair of socks i have knit as i finished them today. i don’t think i love this pattern, mostly because it kicked my butt not in a friendly way, but in more of an annoying older sibling way. i don’t think i will ever knit this pattern again, but dang they sure look good when they are finished! here are my Thelonius socks in all their glory (ravelry page here):
ten of the fifteen pairs (and all of the baby pairs) have gone to homes other than mine. i like to think people have some happy feet. also it pains me to say that all the pairs i knit for other people went 10 times faster than the pairs for myself! it just goes to show that i am definitely a knitter, not just a scarf knitter, but a full-fledged knitting obsessed wool addict. that, and i will never have cold feet.
tonight (monday jan 28th starting at 20uhr) i’ll be giving a presentation at dorkbot in berlin called “future fabrics: construction techniques for wearables with flexible and washable circuitry”.
i’ll show some felted led fabrics, knitting and spinning with electronics and i’ll show some step-by-step ways to build your own circuits into wearables and washables. entrance is 5 euros, but the c-base (where the event is being held) is always a good place to support. hope to see you there.
just a quick note to say that if you wrote to me in the last two days and i haven’t replied, please write again. a bunch of email was lost after the server went back up again (after two days of down time) and it seems that it hasn’t made it through to me. i have just gone through and replied to all the email i did receive, so if you haven’t heard back, i’m not ignoring you, just please write again.
i’ve wanted a t-shirt that has subtitles (either in the same language or with semi-simultaneous translation). eliot brought a bunch of fun stuff with him including an lcd kit (which was a pain to interface because cu on netbsd wasn’t cooperating and neither was winblows, but eventually got it working with both hyperterm and a 3rd party mac app, though with two different usb to serial converters). right now i’m fighting sphinx to get it to work (on anything. seriously. a-n-y-thing.) the instructions for getting the training sets going is thorough, but why isn’t there any info showing how to use one of their example programs like sphinx_continuous? i feel like i’m stabbing in the dark with the flags settings, but i am determined.
i also took apart a pcmcia / compact flash adapter and confirmed that the wiring is in fact just straight through with no extra components (one side pictured below). the next step is to cannibalize a pcmcia slot from a pci card and a cheap cf card. before anyone writes to tell me that a cf to pcmcia adapter and a pcmcia to cf adapter both exist, yes i know but i need one that is folded so that it is compact for a zaurus.
fabienne.us 