In the last year, I’ve learned about Zoll, the Customs agency, and have learned to work the system to my advantage (or to at least steer clear of them). Tip #1: Never, and I mean never, ship anything to Germany from the USA using FedEx. Not personal items, anyway. FedEx doesn’t seem to know what this is.

Also this last year, I’ve experienced the German health care system a couple times. The first time was when I broke my toe, and this second time was recently when having my vision checked. Aside from the taxes I pay, the total cost out-of-pocket for all my health services the last year: 20€.

My 5th floor apartment with a view costs less than a shithole in East LA with a view of a wall through barred windows. If this place did have a view of a wall, it would be the Berlin Wall which used to be right out front. This building is only 10 years old and has concrete walls, ceilings, and floors. I don’t hear my neighbors and they don’t hear me, even when playing music well past midnight.

I have not placed my foot on an accelerator pedal since arriving here. The only pedals I work these days are the cranks on my bike. My bike ride to work is shorter than my drive from Altadena to Irwindale. Total cost for transportation per month: 74€ in the winter or only a few Euros during the summer.

I have two grocery stores within walking distance of my apartment. They’re so close, it wouldn’t even be worth the effort to drive to either of them if I had a car. Also within walking distance are a Thai restaurant, a café on the water, a döner kebab stand, and a baked good shop. My bank is up at the end of the block. Simple and convenient.

I’m healthier as a result of just living my daily life.

60MBit Internet access for roughly 26€ per month. Faster and cheaper than the US.

I actually prefer Schuko and Europlugs now. They look funky but stuff never falls out of the socket, not even massive wall-wart power supplies. And thanks to the 230VAC here, the electric kettle boils water in a snap.

I have tons of new friends and most of them coworkers. Even if we didn’t work together, they’re still just the type of people I’d want as friends. This is evidently what happens when you work for a young and hip company in a city that values and encourages arts.

Out of the 365 days that just passed, only 3 would have benefited from the presence of air conditioning. I think I’ve become sufficiently acclimated to the humidity.

Contrary to the stereotypes, German does not sound like a rough, abrupt, and angry language. It actually sounds quite smooth to me now, almost French if you can believe it. There was one guy at the Berlin Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie that did have the Hollywood German voice, but he is evidently an exception to the rule.

And finally: Club-Mate Cola and Spezi. Nuff said.

Of course, there are some downsides to this relocation. They go something like this:

Missing friends that I’ve known for years and trying to maintain ties through Facebook. Not so easy.

Where the hell can a guy get a decent burrito around here?!?!

Levi’s jeans start at 99€ and go up from there. No, that wasn’t a typo. Convert that to US Dollars and you’re spending at least $140 for one frickin’ pair of jeans.

Whatever the price is in Dollars is how much Apple charges in Euros. If it’s $99 in the US, it’s 99€ here.

Not being automatically eligible for a German Driver’s License since I moved here from California instead of Colorado. No way I’m paying 2,000€ for someone to teach me what I already know.

Stores are closed on Sundays. And I really miss Target.

19% VAT.

GEZ.

Yes, it snows here.

Nevertheless, I’m in for the long-haul. When I consider how out-of-water I felt when arriving here a year ago, I must admit that I’ve made remarkable progress since then. I’m no master of the German language, but I’m not an idiot, either. I have a rough idea of where things are in this city and don’t have to rely on a map much anymore. It will be really interesting to see what happens over the upcoming year now that I’m settled in and can truly call this city my home…

Burning Man is not as gentle. Yes, it is multitudes of fun, but it also requires hard work. Not just in preparation, traveling, and setup, but toiling through nearly every day. The dry playa that transforms into Black Rock City is barren–at night it is like the surface of the moon. It offers you with nothing but gravity and dust. Yet in this otherwise inhospitable nook of our planet, a culture teams with energy and joy for a brief flash every year. It is here where you can let everything go–your reality and yourself–for a week. It is here you become in touch with who you are–and who your neighbors are–as you attempt to sustain yourself through days and nights of heat, cold, wind, dust, and a complete lack of water or other resources. Everything must be brought in, and everything must be taken out at the end. It is at this time that you discover what you really need and what/whom you appreciate the most.

It is for this discovery, and to be witness to some of the most off-the-wall, outside-the-box, and challenging arts ever seen or heard, that people make this pilgrimage every year. Even in this desolate place, they feel safe. In a place that offers nothing, they can take in the essence of humanity’s potential.

I’ve been to Burning Man three times now, and it didn’t take long for me to appreciate the awesomeness of the invention known as “EL Wire.” Short for “Electroluminescent Wire,” this stuff, for me, brought the imagery and possibilities visualized in the movie “Tron” into reality. Most of you know I’m a Tron geek, so you can surely imagine how this stuff makes me as happy as a little girl. Never seen it before? Here is a picture of some EL Wire costumes from Burning Man:

Some elaborate friends at Burning Man

EL Wire is flexible and generates no heat, yet emits a vivid and almost-eerie glow when powered. EL Wire can be driven with nothing more than a few AA batteries, so it’s easy to conceal the electronics in a costume. It’s also cheap. While I don’t remember the American prices, I know it’s about 3€ per meter in Germany.

Despite it’s instant association with the visuals of Tron, EL Wire technology didn’t exist in 1981 when Tron was being made. The circuitry costumes were simply black and white spandex outfits. When the films were processed, the post production crew was able to illuminate the film from behind with colors like blue and red to give the characters their signature look. Obviously this sort of thing was impossible to do in the real world.

In the new movie “Tron: Legacy”, the production decided to make use of EL materials instead of using the complicated and expensive methods used in the original movie. Instead of wire, EL strips were used to create bold lines and angles on the actors’ costumes. While not as intricate or circuit-like as the original movie (much to my dismay), it offered a cleaner visual impact that matched the hyper-real computer-generated scenes of the new movie. Unlike the original Tron, you can actually see the faces of the actors being illuminated by the suits since the lighting was real:

See them glow...

The second time I went to Burning Man, I decided to get into the EL Wire scene myself. No other costume I could imagine would be a more accurate representation of my inner child. I purchased some wires and proceeded to sew them onto an Ableton hoodie and a pair of shiny denim jeans I’d bought on Hollywood Blvd. I also took a purple wire and affixed it to my Camel Pack including wrapping the wire up the drinking tube. The effect was good, but the clothes were so permeated with playa dust that it wasn’t a good idea to wear them for any other occasion. Incidentally, they did not come with me to Berlin. It’s been at least 5 years since I wore any EL Wire at all.

As many of you have seen in blog posts and on Facebook, I have recently acquired a new hobby of playing with microcontrollers, specifically the Arduino platform. I used it to make my TB-303 swing and to control my MIDI instruments via my iPad (without using my computers). I’m currently working on an Arduino-powered synthesizer made from four Commodore 64 8580 SID chips. But once I discovered that there was an EL Wire Sequencer board for the Arduino, I had the idea to apply this to a new costume for Fusion Festival. Being in Berlin, I would not be in a position to go to Burning Man, and it sounded like Fusion Festival would be the closest thing possible here in Europe.

With this in mind, I constructed an Arduino-controlled EL Wire costume that is capable of flashing the various wires based on music it hears. I have a small Electret microphone sewn into the hood of a black sweatshirt. It goes down to a pack at my waist which houses an Arduino with two shields on top: the EL Escudo (an EL Wire control board) and a Spectrum Shield (a board that can split audio into 7 preset frequency bands). The Spectrum board splits the audio from the microphone into 7 values which I process in the Arduino. When I see sharp, quick peaks in values, the Arduino sends a signal to the EL Escudo that makes it flash one of the wires. The program incorporates auto-gain control such that the flashing works at a wide range of volumes without needing any manual adjustment, and I also added a fade-out when a wire is turned off so that it would look more natural instead of being abrupt. In all, the whole assembled unit is probably no larger than two packs of cigarettes. But it must be powered by 8 AA batteries to generate 12 volts as required by the power inverter. As it turns out, EL Wire needs something like 100+ volts AC in order to work, so the inverter must step-up the power from the batteries. Nonetheless, batteries last a long time because the current drain is slow. With wires connected to the hoodie, the whole contraption looks like this:

The EL Wire Hoodie

Click the following link for a video demonstration: EL-Wire

Yes, it’s not as elaborate as the costumes shown above in terms of complexity and use of color, but it brings a new level of techno-geek that isn’t present in most thanks to the audio sensitivity. And even though it’s not really an homage to Tron at all, it does echo the more minimal approach of the latest movie. And from far away in the middle of the night, I’m sure it looks really bizarre.

So with my costume in hand, I headed out to Fusion Festival this last Thursday with a bunch of friends from work. Our plan was to arrive Thursday evening and leave Sunday evening (some of us had to work on Monday). During the week leading up to the festival, while I was spending my evenings soldering, programming, and sewing, I was keeping an eye on the weather. It became quite clear to me that Fusion was going to take place on one of the worst weekends possible this year. The days leading up to Fusion were beautiful–the Wednesday before was 29?C in Berlin–super warm! Yet the following day was supposed to hit 16? as a daytime high. And it was supposed to rain. In fact, it looked like it was going to rain the entire 4 days of the festival.

Sure enough, Thursday morning was cold an rainy. It was raining when we arrived and, much to our dismay, they would not let us take our van up to our camping site. So we had to hump all our gear from the van up to the campsite which took about 15 minutes each way. In the rain. In the mud. Fortunately, I’d “prepared” and bought a huge poncho at the Trendy Army Store which kept me dry during the trek.

Thankfully, the rain ended Thursday night and we were able to go out and about. I had my EL Wire hoodie on and we quickly discovered that we could not get to to any destination in good time if I had it on. Too many people kept coming up and asking me about it. For, you see, I was the only person out of the tens-of-thousands that were there that had an EL Wire costume. Somehow, the visual magic that was the norm at Burning Man had not made it across the Atlantic. People wore costumes–usually just weird combinations of random things–but they were all dark in the night.

This all turned out to be a benefit on Friday  night when our group split up to get food. When we arrived at the rendezvous point and we didn’t see the other part of our group, I switched on my hoodie and we were found within 5 minutes. By this time, I’d also sewn some EL Wire down the sides of some black army pants so I was now more like a glowing stick-figure or astronaut.

And this is where things started going downhill.

I can’t really hold it against Fusion Festival that it rained nearly the whole time and ruined the fun. They can’t control the weather better than anyone else. But I was absolutely flabbergasted by the fact that they turn all the music down at night. That’s right: A massive 4-day multi-stage event at a privately-owned piece of land 2 hours north of Berlin that used to be a Russian airbase has to turn the music down at night. There was evidently a village 4km away which must have complained about the noise in previous years.

Now, some of you may have just done some quick math in your head and may be asking “What? This festival is loud enough to cause complaints from people 4km away? Doesn’t that mean it was ridiculously loud to begin with?” Answer: Yes, but now. Indeed, these stages are equipped with massive Funktion One sound systems which, when run at full bore, could shake the shit right out of your body. Thankfully, they never turned them up that loud, but they do crank them up to the point where you are totally enveloped by the sound and are experiencing it physically rather than only with your ears. It is this total envelopment of the music that makes it so good, and that was completely lacking at night…right when I wanted to be experiencing that the most with my costume flashing away. Evidently, this reduction of volume is known to people who have gone to Fusion before and I really wish someone would have told me about it beforehand. I swear, the music was SO quiet that I’m not going to be bothering to go to Fusion again for I feel ripped off. In fact, even if someone told me beforehand, I probably wouldn’t have believed the magnitude of quietness they were describing. No joke: we could stand right in center of the dancefloor and talk to each other in a normal speaking voice. So shouting–no effort. It was as if the DJs were just background music at a house party. If I had been playing at the event, I would have been pissed off at the lack of sound.

But, no, this was not the ultimate fail of the trip. The music being quiet was lame, the rain was unfortunate, but the last item was inexcusable. Here we were dancing at the Turmbrühne (Tower Stage) with thousands of others:

Massive fire from the top of the tower at the Turmbrühne dancefloor.

While down in this mass of people, while having a good time dancing with friends–my costume flashing to the beat–I hear a loud explosion behind me. Directly behind me. I see the flash in my peripherals. And I feel it. I feel it most on my right pinky finger. We all look around to see what happened–only to see nothing–when I then look a look at my hand. Four fingers were OK, but my pinky was covered in blood. Between the friends that were with me, we were able to wipe it up and clean it off with wet wipes, dry it off with a tissue, and bandage it up.

For you see, someone at this “festival” of arts and music–and whatever other message they may profess–had brought fireworks and decided to ignite them in the middle of the dance floor. Yes, that very same dance floor you see above–with all those people. Some complete psychopath figured it would be appropriate to bring violence to the event and cause distress, discomfort, damage and potentially worse to a group of people just trying to have fun. I was the unlucky one caught in the crossfire.

After I sat down due to the adrenaline coursing through my veins (which were filled with ice-cold blood at this point), I came to realize just how lucky we all were. How did that firecracker get there? Without anyone standing there to set it off, the only explanation I have is that someone lit the firework and threw it into the crowd of dancers. We are all fortunate that I was standing the way I was when that thing went off. Had I been slightly more in one direction or the other, the firework could have exploded right beside me, potentially deafening me in one ear, could have sent shrapnel into the side of my face, or could have even blinded me. It could have exploded closer to someone else–it could have even landed on one of our heads and exploded there! The more I think of what had narrowly been avoided, the more sick I become thinking of this slime of a person who shares the same Earth as I do. And this is the best thought that I have.

The worst thought that I have was that this was done with malice. Here I am at this festival, the only person in EL Wire–essentially standing out like a sore thumb–and I am the only person within the destructive blast radius of a firecracker. Did someone see me and hate me so much that they chose to do this to me? While I suffered a would to my pinky, did this really represent a botched attack? Were they hoping for something more destructive?

No matter what the answer is to any of these questions, the answer still remains the same: This is an occurrence that never would have happened at Burning Man. I’m not saying that nobody gets hurt at Burning Man–people do get hurt there. But when injuries occur, it’s because someone did something stupid or accidental to hurt themselves, or was simply in the area when an unintentional accident occurred. Never would someone drive into the waste of the Nevada desert just to ruin the fun for other people. Yet someone here had the pre-meditated idea to do this, for there were no fireworks for sale at Fusion Festival. These were bought beforehand, carefully packed and transported to the festival. Someone carried them with them out on the fields with a lighter. Someone did this intentionally.

Therefore, in conclusion, Fusion Festival is an absolute failure. It is nothing. It does not even deserve to be described in the same breath as Burning Man except when illustrating what Burning Man is not.

For now, I have resolved that the only event such as this that I would possibly attend in the future is Burning Man itself. There’s no point in looking for a substitute–such a thing does not exist and those that try come in a far second to the real thing. I’ll save myself the trouble. I’ll save myself the vacation hours. I’ll save my limbs.

Perhaps the weather was a warning sign. I did, honestly, consider not going when I learned of the forecast. Nevertheless, it did provide the impetus for our group to leave the festival a day early. Had I had my own car, I would have been gone that very night. I’m glad I didn’t have to twist anybody’s arm to go–I surely didn’t want to ruin the fun for anyone else. And for those that did stay behind, I hope their experience turns out better than mine.

My pinky with a fresh coating of Neosporin.

Since I already had my passport, the most important thing was the work visa. Without a work visa, I would have only been able to stay in the EU for three months like any other tourist, so it was essential that I get the visa to extend my stay. Aside from some letters that Native Instruments needed to prepare, I needed to supply some passport photos. I went to the local Post Office to have a pair taken which I then provided to the NI HR department upon my arrival. Piece of cake.

Fast-forward one year, and I’m now at the point where my work visa needs to be renewed. That means another passport photo. I’ve seen lots of “Photoautomat” machines around Berlin…these are those standalone photo boxes into which tons of kids will smash themselves in order to take goofy pictures. I was told these machines would also be capable of doing a passport photo, but I was a little wary since there’d be no guarantee the dimensions, contrast, or sharpness would be correct. I decided it would be better to go to a professional photo center to have them taken.

As it turns out, I probably could have gone to any photo store to have them done but, wanting to be sure, I did a Google search for passport photos in Berlin. The best result I found was for a place over in Wilmersdorf which is on the southwest side of the city. I hopped onto the U-Bahn and headed out. The process was quick and I left with 4 photos for 12,95€. Painless, and they’re much better quality than what I got at the Post Office a year before.

Curious, I dug up the remaining photo I had from a year ago for a comparison. Take a look at this–it’s fairly surprising:

America (left) and Germany (right)

A friend of mine, Timo Chen, was recently in Europe and was remarking about his weight loss in spite of all the wonderful French food he was gorging himself with multiple times a day. I can say, as well, that I’ve been enjoying all the food I can find here: Döner Kebap, Burgermeister, Schawarma mit Hollumi, Dolores burritos, Toros pizza, Club-Mate Cola, Spezi, and Holunder Bionade, to name a few. Yet look at the difference! While I don’t own a scale to check my weight, you can already see a difference in my face. Though I’m a year older in the image on the right, I look younger. It looks like some of the fat has disappeared from my cheeks and chin, and it has done so all on its own. I haven’t engaged in any forced exercise or cutbacks in caloric intake. This all seems to be the result of a little more walking, a few bike rides, and eating the healthier foods which are the norm here. The picture on the right seems to be a natural result of the European lifestyle.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the picture on the left is the result of the unnatural American lifestyle. Hmm…

Yesterday was getting a bit warm, too, and I started to realize that the heat may be inescapable this summer. I knew apartments didn’t have air conditioning (I haven’t even seen any window-units anywhere) and I also knew NI’s offices don’t have A/C, either. However, I assumed that large businesses would have A/C. It now appears my assumption was wrong. Either that or someone is just waiting for it to get really hot before they start the A/C running. I was quite surprised that there was no A/C at Conrad Electronics when I was there yesterday. Even the McDonalds nearby didn’t have A/C!

Considering how things are now, I have one prediction for the summer: it’s gonna stink. I have a feeling I will be encountering smelly, sweaty human bodies everywhere I go. The U-Bahn was already getting a bit ripe yesterday. In a month, it could be overwhelming. Is it that people don’t use deodorant or simply don’t shower daily? Is it that people like this smell? I guess it’s possible: after millennia of evolution, our bodies still stink and maybe that serves some purpose we don’t realize consciously.

Thankfully, like Southern California, Berlin appears to cool off fairly well at night. I’ve visited other places (like Miami) where it’s the same temperature during the night as it is during the day. Talk about never getting a break! Nevertheless, I think I’m going fan-shopping this weekend. Gotta get them before they’re gone!

The next chapter in the Arduino saga begins with a verification of MIDI Input and Output functions. After all, if I can’t get MIDI In and Out to work, I can just pack all this stuff up right now.

Fortunately, my tests today were also a success. Arduino seems to be living up to its promise of a problem-free experience. Indeed, none of the glitches I experienced during my experiences were due to the Arduino hardware or MIDI Shield. The interconnections between those two devices appears to be spot on. Instead, the glitches I encountered were on the programming side. My fault, obviously, but I was happy with how quickly I was able to diagnose and fix my problems. I guess my programming skills aren’t as rusty as I thought.

However, I am afraid I’m in for some challenges coming up. One of the cornerstones of this device is that it reads MIDI Clock so it can synchronize its operations and also provide 5V DIN Sync to some of my old machines. While I did succeed in getting the Arduino to read and react to incoming MIDI Clock pulses (it would flash a little LED every time the Clock message was received), I can see that I’m going to have to be very careful with how I read the incoming MIDI data. Though the Arduino can supposedly buffer at least 80 bytes coming in on the serial port, I can’t have my program running that slow. As is the essential problem with MIDI Clock, all of its meaning and significance is derived from when the message is received. The message itself, a simple byte equal to F8h, doesn’t tell tempo or when it was sent. The receiving device must therefore check the serial port extremely often so it can react the moment the pulse arrives.

I’m not a hardcore programmer, but I think this is where the concept of “threading” comes into play. It would allow me to split up the functions in my program into separate “sub-programs” that run somewhat independently from each other. I could, I believe, create a thread that runs at high speed and constantly checks the serial port. I could make a second thread that is triggered when a Clock message is received in the first thread. The second thread would run slower than the first–it would have its process paused while the first thread operates–which is OK since the first thread was able to identify the exact time the MIDI Clock arrived. The second thread can use that captured information to respond accordingly.

This is all great if my theory is correct, but I’m pretty sure the ATmega chip on this board doesn’t support multiple threads. It’s classified as a microcontroller which isn’t as hardcore as a “CPU” that you’d find in a typical computer. Threading could be one of the things left out. If that’s the case, I’m going to have to somehow program a time-management system into my program. Anybody know how to do that?

Arduino, you see, is the name of an “open-source electronics prototyping platform” designed and manufactured in Italy. It is a series of microcontrollers mounted onto PCBs with a common pinout for marrying daughterboards (known as Shields). If those last two sentences sounded like jibberish, then here’s the layman’s description: Arduino turns electronics and computing into LEGOs.

Yay! LEGOs! Everyone knows I love LEGOs, and I spent many years of my childhood toiling over those plastic bricks, girders, axels, and gears to build all sorts of mechanical contraptions. The game is the same with Arduino, except the plastic bricks and gears are replaced with soldering irons, PCBs, and computer code.

The Arduino Mega 2560 board is the larger one at the bottom.

In essence, Arduino lets you build your own special-purpose computer. The board itself has no physical controls (buttons, knobs, faders, etc.) so all interface items must be connected by hand. A pain? Possibly. But it does allow you to select the specific interaction elements you want (including blinking lights, buzzers, and spinning motors) so that your device works exactly as you want.

Because of its simple approach, Arduino is a favorite amongst artists and interaction designers as it allows you to harness the power of computers and other electronic circuitry to make robots, interactive art displays, weather stations, or, as I will be attempting, musical tools.

Too many years have been spent waiting for someone to make the tools and instruments I need. I have grown tired of waiting for someone else to create the solution so it’s time to do it myself. My ambitions are, well, ambitious. I’m not sure if I will be able to accomplish everything I’ve set out to do, possibly due to my own limited knowledge of electronics, my amateur coding skills, or I may be faced with the fact that the 16MHz provided by the Arduino aren’t enough to do what I need.

But the nice thing about this is that, due to its low cost, I don’t need to know for sure at this point. Arduino was designed for tinkering around and that’s exactly what I’ll be doing as I search for my solutions.

So what exactly is in store here? Well, I am going to be building a Swiss Army Knife, of sorts, that performs numerous tasks in the context of my MIDI hardware studio. This device will be one of the core components, though it won’t actually create any noise itself. This device is all about control. I will be receiving basic input (twisting knobs and pushing buttons) and then generating numerous outputs from them. I can push a button and trigger 5 different events simultaneously, for example. I’ll also be able to quantize various actions in real-time so that, for example, crash cymbals can be triggered by me but forced to line up perfectly on a downbeat.

Big deal? Well, I’m not telling you what my bigger plans are yet…that’s a secret! But I will tell you that I’ve got a Wi-Fi board here so I’ll be able to create a Wi-Fi hot spot with the Arduino board and connect to it with Touch OSC on my iPad. Oh, snap! This is gonna be great!

Today, I have succeeded in my first initial tasks and experiments. All the parts arrived today including the Arduino Mega 2560 board which is the heart of everything. The Arduino board was already assembled, but the MIDI Shield I order came in pieces so my first task was to break out the new soldering iron and get busy attaching components. A few minutes later, I had the MIDI Shield together and I must say I did a fine soldering job. Thanks to Jim Swanson and Henry Dang at M-Audio for schooling me on soldering technique!

Here's the assembled MIDI Shield. Looks pro!

Once assembled, I confirmed my ability to upload new firmware to the Arduino from my computer over a USB cable. Indeed, I was able to upload a program which controlled the blinking rate of an LED attached to a few pins on the board. I then attached the MIDI Shield to the Arduino and began programming to receive and display the positions of the two knobs and three buttons on the Shield. After a bit of experimentation, I had a beautiful data readout on my computer being streamed from the Arduino. I could see the knob positions reported with 10-bit precision and 0/1 status indicators for the buttons. The buttons were a bit tricky to get working but, in the process, I think I finally understood what pull-up resistors are for! Success feels great.

A marriage made in MIDI-geek heaven

With basic input and serial output working, tomorrow’s task will be to begin reading and writing data to the MIDI Ports. I’ll start by reading and triggering some notes, converting the knob positions into MIDI CCs, and then attempt to read and write MIDI Clock. MIDI Clock is key for this project as it will be keeping all of the instruments locked together. It will also keep my device in lockstep with all the drum machines so I can actually record automation sequences on my device and play them out to the rest of the machines! If I can’t get MIDI Clock to work reliably, then I’ll be in trouble. But I’m going to keep thinking positive on this one and anticipate no problems. That is the goal of Arduino, after all: remove the technical challenges so you can spend your time experimenting with interactions (“Do I really want that note to be triggered when I press this button?”) rather than debugging (“Why the hell can’t I get this stupid LED to turn on???”). We’ll see if my experience matches their intentions…

Here in Germany, Easter is apparently a big deal. And why shouldn’t it be? We celebrate and take days off for Jesus’ birth, so why not celebrate with the same gusto for his resurrection? (Ah, that’s what makes me a heathen: I forgot to capitalize “his” in the previous sentence…) This appears to be the mindset of the Germans as Easter brings with it a four day weekend. What you got on that, America! Easter doesn’t even show up on the list of Federal holidays!

So why am I complaining? Answer: I should have used this excellent freebie weekend to travel somewhere! Had I checked the German holiday calendar months ago, I would have seen this prime weekend coming and could have put a trip together.

But maybe I’m just using that as an excuse. There are many people who can pick up their stuff on a whim and head out the door with only a general sense of where they want to go. Sorry, ladies–perhaps that kind of spontaneity is sexy, but I’ve got to have a little bit of planning before I go somewhere, especially when I don’t have a car to take me where I want to go when I want to be there.

The good news is that the weather is going to be stellar this weekend. There’s the possibility this weekend will surpass the temperature on my birthday (which is still barely holding on to the record for 2011). So this means I’ll be vacationing in…Berlin! And why not? If any one of you readers were to be here this weekend, you’d feel like you were on vacation, so why shouldn’t I feel the same? If vacation is just a state of mind, then consider me already there.

Merry Easter!

When Randy was here, we discovered that it takes about 30 minutes to walk from my place to Native Instruments. So, I’m actually saving no time at all by taking the train to work…I’m just saving myself some footsteps.

One day last month when it was über-cold, I found myself standing on a street corner waiting to cross over to the Schlesisches Tor train station when Bus 265 arrived in front of me. On a whim, I decided to get on to compare the travel time. Holy shit—using the bus, it’s less than 15 minutes door-to-door. Gah! I’d been taking the train for months when I could have been saving tons of time using the bus.

So I now take the bus to and from work. The only bummer is that I now have to stick to a schedule in the morning. The trains would come every 5 minutes so it didn’t really matter when I left the house. The bus, on the other hand, only runs every 20 minutes. So if I miss my desired bus at 9:57 in the morning, I’ll be over 20 minutes late for work. This has happened a few times already. And as I discovered, it takes 20 minutes to walk from the bus station all the way to work, so I have no recourse if I miss the bus other than going back home and grabbing my bike.

The story of the bike will come in the next post…