Without further introduction, here is a list of my travel tips for Vienna (and especially for the area surrounding Karlsplatz):
- La Norma (authentic italian food and very friendly service. Another place worth visiting, Das Kleine Café is just around the corner on the Franziskanerplatz)
- First Floor (a smoky, dimly lit cocktail bar. rather classy, but also suitable for serious drinking.)
- Anton Heldwein (one of the best jewellers on Graben)
- Opera (don’t bother if you can’t get proper tickets for seats with good visibility though.. the peddlers near Stephansdom will usually try to sell you cheap ones in the back. you can get good tickets for the less popular operas online exactly one month before the show)
- Haus der Musik (a music museum)
- Sisi museum and royal apartments (consider skipping the silverware section and heading straight to the apartments.. they are much more interesting)
- Local Heurigens (take a tram and a long walk around the vineyards and then sit down for an hour or two to enjoy the wines. Try Zadowsky to see an authentic vineyard instead of a inner atrium only)
- Puma Store (on Mariahilferstrasse which is a good street for shopping in general)
- Brunch at Naschmarkt (it’s a bustling food market with many nice restaurants. gets very busy on Saturdays, also a flea market)
- Flakturms (there are three old air defense towers in the city. all of them are impressive sights to behold)
- Vintage fashion (right next to Babette’s)
- Specialty tea shops (it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a few around the city center)
- Palmhausen (it is run by the same people as Volksgarten)
- Fresh Soup and Salad (the name says it all, it’s a franchise, but the concept works well)
- Podium (an unhurried, relaxed and friendly atmosphere)
- Fratelli il Gelato (one of the many great ice cream bars in the city. fast service, the orders are transmitted wirelessly to the kitchen)
- Uhrenbörs (a store specializing in old and antique wrist watches)
- Babette’s (bookstore specializing in cooking books)
- Musik Kiosk (a must see club that can be summed up in three words: sausage, mustard, music)
- Tiberius (slightly less discreet souvenirs for that special someone)
- Volksgarten (an institution in the clubbing scene.. some say it’s one of the best in the world)
- Stadtpark (a pleasant restaurant pavillion right next to the u-bahn station. the park is rather compact, there is a grass field reserved for sun bathing and just lying around at the north part of the park)
- Aroma.at (a cozy little place suitable for chatting and drinking)
- Breakfast club (a restaurant that sells only breakfasts)
- Badeschiff (a floating restaurant around the very nice Schwedenplatz area)
- Sunday brunch at Marriott (lavish and expensive buffet, worth trying at least once in your life. we were lucky enough to get gift vouchers for it)
- Kunsthalle Wien Project Space (another great option for a brunch or a breakfast.. they are open until 2 am)
- Schloss Schönbrunn (there is a zoo and a nice palm house in the area. Plenty of walking opportunities)
- Belvedere (A Baroque residence complete with a nice park. there is also a botanical garden right next to it)
- Kohlmarkt (a shopping street with Chanel, Prada and other luxury brands)
- Museumsquartier (including museum of modern art)
- Donau Insel (rent a citybike or rollerskates, register your credit card on the internet site of citybikes before the rental)
- El Español (a members only tapas club on most night, but try making a reservation for Tuesday)
- TwinCity liner to Bratislava (it’s a nice way to see the river on a boat)
- Cafe Sperl (a great example of the highly refined cafe culture around here)
- Parndorf Outlet Park (Helly Hansen, Levi’s etc)
- Prater amusement park (the ferris wheel is worth visiting, so are some of the wilder rides, several outdoor restaurants in the area)
- Bergfuchs (mountain equipment store)
- Alte Donau area (a tv tower and a big field suitable for playing soccer, I didn’t try the huge chinese restaurant)
- Danube Trail (if you are fitness orientated, you could cycle up or down the river for a few days, we’ll be doing the trip with this company)
- Sababa (perfect for late night snacks, for a drink try the nana limo.. a type of non-alcoholic mojito)
- The public transport works like a dream. The easiest way to get around is the U-Bahn. Get a weekly ticket for 12,50 euros. Taxis are relatively cheap as well.
That’s all for now.. comments and corrections are welcome! I’ll be travelling in Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia for the next few weeks, so don’t expect too many updates to this blog in June.
P.S. If you are also going to Berlin, check out my travel tips fo Berlin
Posted by api at 12:08 - No Comments »
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked up a rental DVD of Terry Gilliam’s latest creation Tideland. I knew that the film hadn’t been a commercial success, but that was nothing new as far as his works are concerned. I had enjoyed Brothers Grimm and come to think of it, every other movie by Terry Gilliam as well, so I decided to give it a shot. The movie is a roller coaster ride through the life and inner universe of a junkie’s daughter. It is rated R for “bizarre and disturbing” content and I can’t blame the rating people for that decision. It is disturbing and provocative, but at the end of the day, it is a kind of movie that sadly very seldom gets financing. It must have been obvious to even some of the financers that this might be a commercial flop around the premiere, but like many other Gilliam’s movies, I’m sure that it will recognized as a masterpiece in the years to come.
The plot is not very important and I don’t want to give it away. If interested, have a quick peek at the user comments at IMDB. According to director’s own words, this is a movie about the resilience of children. He has mentioned that many people will hate the film and many people will love the film. In the DVD version he notes that he is 64 years old now and it took this long for him to find his own inner child. He ends the intro by thanking the audience (three times in a row!) for watching this film and it makes all the difference if you watch this plea before watching the actual movie, which can be quite a shocking experience if viewed mentally unprepared.
I saw Pan’s Labyrinth and read The Life of Pi last year. Tideland has a rather similar concept. It is not only about resilience of children, but also about innocence, which seem to go hand in hand in this beautiful, magical and yet very unsettling work.
Posted by api at 22:39 - 3 Comments »
American Chariot
… the American Chariot is a dynamic personal transportation vehicle that will significantly enhance productivity and increase profitability.
The Americans seem to be obsessed about not having to walk anywhere. The horizontal escalators at the airports, Segways, drive-in weddings… the list goes on and on.
I found this while browsing through a Strange vehicles gallery.
The American Chariot is powered by an electric motor. It is certainly a bit more.. uhh… bulky.. compared to say, the new 2007 line of Schwinn electric bikes. It is a pity that the European regulations limit the power of electric bikes to 200W. Some manufacturers used to make bikes that go up to 1000 Watts (See an earlier entry).
In the end of June we’ll be riding down the Donau river on one of Austria’s most popular bike routes with rental bikes. One of them will be an electric bike and the other one will be a regular touring bike.
Posted by api at 09:25 - 2 Comments »
Bruce Schneier, dubbed as a “security guru”, has written a great article draft about the psychology of security.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SECURITY
Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they’re not the same.
The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasures. We can calculate how secure your home is from burglary, based on such factors as the crime rate in the neighborhood you live in and your door-locking habits. We can calculate how likely it is for you to be murdered, either on the streets by a stranger or in your home by a family member. Or how likely you are to be the victim of identity theft. Given a large enough set of statistics on criminal acts, it’s not even hard; insurance companies do it all the time.
…
You might feel that you’re at high risk of burglary, medium risk of murder, and low risk of identity theft. And your neighbor, in the exact same situation, might feel that he’s at high risk of identity theft, medium risk of burglary, and low risk of murder.
Or, more generally, you can be secure even though you don’t feel secure. And you can feel secure even though you’re not. The feeling and reality of security are certainly related to each other, but they’re just as certainly not the same as each other. We’d probably be better off if we had two different words for them.
This essay is my initial attempt to explore the feeling of security: where it comes from, how it works, and why it diverges from the reality of security.
I am a very security conscious person. I’ve had a few accidents with motorized and non-motorized vehicles and they were real eye openers in both literal and metaphoric sense. These days I always wear a helmet while snowboarding or riding a bike. I also spend extra cash on insurance, fire extinguishers, floatation devices and all kinds of gear and practices.
But this article did make me think… Am I investing all this time and money and effort just to increase the feeling of security or is it for a real, tangible, mathematical increase in safety? Like Mr. Schneier notes, it is true that people often exaggarate rare, but spectacular risk and downplay common risks.
One of the reasons that I’ve been pondering this theme is that I’ve recently been considering about getting a mortgage for the second time in my life.
The photograph above is of a Japanese “capsule hotel”.
Posted by api at 10:36 - 2 Comments »
Life Ball
Life Ball is Europe’s largest AIDS charity event. Begun in 1993, it takes place annually at the city hall in Vienna, Austria. The event is organized by Gery Keszler and it is the only AIDS charity event that takes place in a political building.
Life Ball consists of two parts: a grand opening ceremony including a fashion show performed on a giant catwalk at Rathausplatz, the square in front of the city hall, which is free for everyone, and a fancy dress party inside the city hall hosted by Vienna’s mayor, Michael Häupl, for which a limited number of tickets (c. 4,000) is available.
Check out the Style Bible for the event. The medieval robocop pictured above is from that site. It’s like Eurovision on acid.
EDIT: Sharon Stone and Bill Clinton appeared at the party to thank for the donations. Ms. Stone had troubles articulating correctly. It is my theory that it was due to recently injected botox which may cause slight facial paralyzation. We didn’t make it to the actual ball, but we did manage to get to the party at Volksgarten. See my bodyguard impression. We were not quite as well dressed up as most of the others over there. The after-party started at 6 am.
Posted by api at 09:15 - No Comments »
I just found out that Donald Duck magazine is the biggest periodical in Finland. It is read weekly by 1.3 million people in a country with a population of 5 million. In the 90’s a version of the finnish national epic poem - Kalevala - was published in the magazine. Kalevala has had a rather extensive influence on many different fields of art and culture… Beginning with the paintings of Akseli Gallen-Kallela a century ago and finishing with the lyrics of the modern heavy metal bands, not to speak of all the various contemporary art pieces that deal with the concept of Sampo - a magical mill that perpetually generates three important commodities out of thin air - flour, salt and gold.
During my first years at school, I was immediately casted as Joukahainen (the skinny and impulsive rival of the main character Väinämöinen) to act in the following scene for the school’s end of year party. It was a somewhat traumatic experience to be magically sank into the swamp year after year, but these days I see Kalevala as a great source of inspiration and pride just like it bolstered the self-confidence of a new nation to be 150 years ago. I much prefer a national epic with magic, spirits and interdimensional travel to actual historical stories about kings, monarchies and endless wars with actual neighbouring countries.
I think that there is a tremendous amount of untapped creative potential just waiting to be unleashed in works based on Kalevala.
Kalevala
Vainamoinen chanted and the coat of Joukahainen became a cloud
in the sky. His hat turned to a water lily on the lake, his belt to a
snake among the reeds.
Vainamoinen chanted and Joukahainen sank in the marshy ground,
up to his waist in the swallowing earth.
Cried Joukahainen,
JOUKAHAINEN: (desperately) Reverse your words, undo your spells!
I will give you a hat full of silver, a helmet full of gold!
VAINAMOINEN: (disdainfully) Keep your wealth. My coffers overflow.
He chanted again, and Joukahainen sank to his chest.
JOUKAHAINEN: Reverse your words, undo your spells! I will give
you fields for plowing, meadows for pasture!
VAINAMOINEN: Keep your land. My farm stretches beyond sight.
He chanted again, and Joukahainen sank to his chin.
JOUKAHAINEN: Reverse your words, undo your spells! I will tell
you of the fairest woman, the finest maiden!
Vainamoinen stopped his chant.
JOUKAHAINEN: She is lovely Aino, maiden of Northland, daughter
of age-old Louhi. She’s called a blossom sweet to smell, a fruit ripe
to pluck. Her fame spreads far, the suitors gather. But no proposal
has she smiled on, no suitor given the nod.
Then Vainamoinen chanted again. He reversed his words, undid his
spells. Joukahainen rose from the marshy ground, up from the
swallowing earth.
The cloud became again his coat. The water lily turned back to a
hat, the snake to a belt.
The log became again his sleigh. The boulder turned back to a horse,
the reed to a whip.
The lightning became again his sword. The rainbow turned back to a crossbow,
the hawks to arrows.
The young man wept in shame. The old man raced for home.
Posted by api at 14:31 - No Comments »
Kapuzinerberg
The oldest indications of walls on the Kapuzinerberg Mountain date back to the 13th century. The “Trompeterschlössl Castle” was the base for the Capuchin Church and extended walls down the mountain to the Inneres Steintor in the Steingasse. On the other side, the spread to the Ostertor in the Linzergasse (house number 12), which is not preserved anymore.
However, these walls proved to be insufficient for Salzburg during the Thirty Years War and Prince Archbishop Paris Lodron decided to include all of the Kapuzinerberg into Salzburg’s fortifications.
Between 1629 and 1632, the Southern side of the mountain was heavily fortified, whereas the Northern side was secured naturally by steep rock walls and cliffs.
On the Kapuzinerberg mountain there lives a few homeless people who have made the old guard towers their home. It was surprising to find people who were collecting firewood and living a rather primitive life compared to the glitz of the totally over-commercialized city center closeby. Salzburg is one of the wealthiest, and some say snobbiest, areas in Austria. It is very difficult to integrate in the community unless you were born over there. I talked about these homeless people with someone who had worked with the social service in the area and he mentioned that the city much prefers to keep the homeless people out of the sight of tourists. As far as the city officials are concerned, they are apparently free to live the life of “forest men” up there on the mountain. Some of them had built wooden shelters out of the branches and fallen tree trunks. I assume there must be a quite a few more of them within the big woods of the mountains. We stumbled upon a muscular and long haired fellow who looked more like a native american indian than a typical immaculately dressed austrian city person.
Other than that, my main recollection about Salzburg is that the Sound of Music is almost as big over there as the Lord of the Rings is in New Zealand. They played the movie non-stop on one of the hotel tv channels.
P.S. To help the homeless people, a student has come up with a concept of a collapsible cardboard shelter. Read all about it at shellhouse.org.
Posted by api at 12:05 - No Comments »
A few days ago I spotted a poster for Levi’s “Road trip from the Original” club tour featuring Felix Da Housecat. The poster was at a huge local store specializing in water pipes and hydrophonic cultivation systems. The original venue was a small artsy joint called Loft 16, but they had to relocate to a bigger space apparently because they had pre-sold too many tickets. The new venue turned out to be the prestigious Zeiss Planetarium right by one of Vienna’s landmarks, the giant ferris wheel at Prater.
His style has been classified with terms such as Neo-Electro and Left-Field House
Left-Field House
Left-field house producers tend to ignore at least one major chapter of the traditional deep-house production playbook, whether doing away with the 4/4 rhythmic structure, the need for hand percussion, or the emphasis on the beat. If the deviation in the production can’t be pinned down to a specific quality, there remains something certifiably askew. There’s no single sound that typifies left-field house. It can be abstract and grimy like Theo Parrish, whose productions often favor low BPMs and samples from obscure jazz recordings, all the while retaining a pronounced 4/4 rhythm. It can come from house’s back door, through post-disco R&B and Italo disco influences, like Metro Area — a duo who regularly bypasses the relentless 4/4 thump completely. Or it can be equally experimental and contemporary like Herbert, whose concepts and methodologies (sampling sources that range from kitchen utensils to biological functions) occasionally overshadow his accomplishments.
Well, I’ve been a fan of the Housecat for several years now and I just knew that I couldn’t forgive myself if I let this opportunity pass. I wasn’t sure when he would start his set, so I showed up early at 11 pm. There was some trouble with the dryness of eyes at the home base, so I was clubbing solo this time. The location was very atmospheric (no pun intended) and there was even a spacious garden with beach chairs and all. I chit chatted with the locals and met someone who had cured his impending tinnitus with some type of ultra low frequency sound therapy. I decided to find out more about that even though I haven’t problems with tinnitus yet. As far as I could tell, I was the only person among about a thousand clubbers wearing ear plugs! The sound system was pumping a steady bass line at about at least 110 db, so it is practically certain that some of the speaker hugging crowd will have some high frequency hearing loss and/or tinnitus in the decades to come. Don’t lose the music, my friends.
After one or two Vodka Smirnoffs and an energetic show by the French Cassius, I decided to chill out the actual planetarium while waiting for the DJ set to start. According to their web site, the planetarium is one of the most advanced ones in the world (aren’t they all). I can’t remember if I’ve been to one earlier, but I found the huge revolving optical Zeiss “Universium” projector a very intriguing device by itself. The projected stars were visibly vibrating to the bass line of the music. I observed this interesting phenomen on the comfy seats for hours before returning to the main hall to find out that it had been invaded by literally hundreds of clubbers. There was no need for smoke machine since around here people will smoke their cancer butts just about anywhere no matter what the signs or laws dictate. They must have some sort of built-in reflex to avoid cigarette burns in other people and their clothes even in extremely crowded situations. Unfortunately there was almost no room to dance at all and dancing was mostly about maintaining your own 200 square centimeters of floor space with your feet while rhythmically shaking your hands at various directions to ward of the bottle wielding floor space invaders.
Well, soon after the Cassius act, they announced “DJ Felix da Housecat” and his instantly recognizable envelope twitching, aggressive and dirty Chicago house sound started flowing. I slowly worked my way closer to the DJ table over the course of an hour or so and finally saw the master of the wheels of steel himself. He was totally grooving to his own sonic creation in his little Pioneer/Apple branded techno altar and so was the crowd. I don’t know if it was the limited space or just the general politiness of austrians, but I didn’t see too much wild and out of control dancing. The club scene in Berlin for example is generally much wilder and expressive. The VJ work was stupendously dull and uncreative, but there were pleasant whiffs of herbal aroma in the air and the music was also pulsating and vibrating in a most enjoyable manner. I really like his style with the use of vocal samples and the seemingly endless variations with envelope modulations. There is no doubt in my mind that mixing music and sounds with this degree of proficiency is no less admirable than the work of master concert violinist for example.
Just listen to the “Buy Now For Sale” sample on his myspace page to get an idea what I am talking about. This is the kind of music that only works like it’s intended if you have the dynamics of a big sound system and a roomful of people jumping up and down to it. Isolated from it’s context, hearing it by itself on a small computer speaker it sounds like broken record player, but at the planetarium it felt like the universe itself was shaking.
I didn’t have the camera with me so I had to borrow the picture above from a Mysteryland 2005 gig. He is still wearing a similar t-shirt, shades and earphones and looked pretty much the same last night. He had a bright yellow helmet with a big number 3 on it as a type of an amulet or idol on the mixing table. A female member of the crowd had apparently placed blue panties on it and this caused much amusement among the technical crew and the DJ himself.
To conclude this slightly incoherent and rambling entry with even more irrelevant trivia, I’ll remind you about another type of musical event that is approaching with great inevitability. The Eurovision song contest is held in Helsinki on the 12th of May. For once they have managed to pull together a decent web site to showcase the host city. Check out www.helsinkihostcity.fi. I can’t comprehend why they haven’t been able to produce a tourism promotion web site of this quality before the excuse of this contest. Budgetary reasons perhaps. Anyway, two thumbs up for the creative use of photographs and soundtrack.
Posted by api at 12:38 - No Comments »
Although I am not playing DAOC anymore, I was shocked to hear that Sanya Thomas is leaving EA/Mythic. There is an exclusive interview with her on WarCry Network. It is an interesting read although she doesn’t reveal much about the reasons for her departure. Good community management is indeed an incredibly important ingredient in creating a succesful MMORPG. I agree with her that her biggest contribution to the game industry was to demonstrate that you can be friendly, transparent and truthful while still maintaining a completely professional and official attitude. She is a great creative writer too. It’s a pity she doesn’t tell the names of her characters in the game, because I am sure that many of the players have talked with her in-game in incognito as well and would die to know who she really was.
Interview with Sanya Thomas
WarCry: When you began at Mythic, prior to Dark Age of Camelot’s launch, you were one of the - if not the - first community managers. Now it’s a full blown profession people can get an education for. Tell us about how you see community management, its evolution and your role in it.
Sanya Thomas: Oh, I wasn’t the first. Jon Hanna was the Ur-CM. And Gordon Wrinn was already famous before anyone ever heard of me. But I definitely have the title of longest-lasting. It would have been six years in June.
Somewhere, I have a copy of a message board post that says “she won’t last six months.”
Originally, community work was reactive. Something happened, and some poor schmuck was assigned to hit the boards and respond. Or worse, it was considered marketing, and not even GOOD marketing - carefully controlled information leached of all life by someone who wants to “control the message.” And either way, the community manager was to blame if players didn’t like what they heard. At a lot of companies, it’s still no different. Even companies that start well sometimes morph into a more marketing/reactive pose.
I think my greatest contribution was I demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be that way. I used my real name, and shared actual information. I felt that a community is a living entity that cannot be controlled, and deserves respect.
If you hire someone off the board who “seems really nice” and pay him minimum wage, you will get what you deserve. Community work is a professional specialty, with standards of communication, turnaround time, media responsiveness, and more. There are known benchmarks for message board personnel requirements, beta cycles, and professional behavior. There are techniques that can be mastered, assuming the basic skills are in place.
Good community is a little marketing, a little CS, and a little old-fashioned mud-wrestling on behalf of your players. It’s important to work with the whole team to achieve a consistent message, of course, but at the end of the day, it is the responsibility of the community weenie to stand up for players, for player feedback, and for realistic expectations. If that means a few bruises (from all sides), so be it.
Posted by api at 12:40 - 1 Comment »
A Greener Apple
It is generally not Apple’s policy to trumpet our plans for the future; we tend to talk about the things we have just accomplished. Unfortunately this policy has left our customers, shareholders, employees and the industry in the dark about Apple’s desires and plans to become greener. Our stakeholders deserve and expect more from us, and they’re right to do so. They want us to be a leader in this area, just as we are in the other areas of our business. So today we’re changing our policy.
I’ve been following Greenpeace’s Green My Apple campaign with great interest. I’m the first one to admit that I’m a real Apple fan boy and that fact can make it difficult to judge the effectiveness of Apple’s environmental efforts with objectivity. However, after reading both sides of the story, I couldn’t help but to re-position Greenpeace as a somewhat hypocritical organization in my personal mind map. They chose Apple as a high profile target and a type of a scapegoat to serve as an example to other companies that refuse to co-operate and communicate with Greenpeace’s activists in a manner that is seen proper by Greenpeace.
To me it is obvious that Apple has been doing a much better job (all in all) with their environmental policy than many of their competitors. The Greenpeace campaign was targeting a very specific part of the policy: toxic substances and recycling practices. One of the goals of this campaign is to make all computer products 100% PVC free. PVC is commonly used as a shielding material for ethernet cables for example. I discussed this matter with one of Greenpeace’s charity muggers on the street and found out that even their own offices still use PVC-shielded cable. Sure the PVC free cabling is more expensive and difficult to obtain, but if 90% of your income goes to a “fund raising and expenses” one would expect that you could use at least part of the remaining 10% to clean up your own act and show a good example to others by phasing out PVC in your own organization. And yes, PVC free cabling is available today. Not speak of feeding electricity from the land lines instead of running the engines of Rainbow Warrior to generate electricity while moored at a port!
It is also obvious that today’s announcement will put Apple to the top end of Greenpeace’s score card and after this they will proudly tout their campaign as a great success. I wonder what they will do with the domain name though.. perhaps they could spend a few thousand euros to rename and repurpose it as “greenmyhp.org” or “greenmydell.org”.
Well, part of my disgust with this particular dirt throwing campaign has something to do with the charity monging practices that Greenpeace and many other non-profit organizations are so aggressively using these days. Although financially extremely lucrative, I am certain that the shameless “face to face” guilt trip marketing strategy will really hurt their reputation in the long run. Unobjective scoring and grading of companies and data for publicity stunt reasons in campaigns like “Green my Apple” will only exacerbate the process.
Ahh, there… I’m glad I got that out of my system! Peace, love and understanding to all of my treehugging brothers and sisters… and the rest of you eco-conscious gadget-freaks and code monkeys as well. And to any Greenpeace activists that might stumble upon here: no offense intended, just please clean up your own act while you are saving the world.
Posted by api at 23:00 - No Comments »
