With the whole world connected the internet brings us many interesting possibilities in cultural exchange. There are many platforms to experience things from places away in written, visual or acoustic ways. Especially music is nice during working as it does not steal your concentration while working like videos and texts do.
For some time I was listening to pandora.com which allowed you to enter keywords and interprets which musical style you liked and the platform would create a playlist containing similar music. Sadly due to the stupid american licensing and copyright issues which hopefully may end one day the site was forced to restrict their service to US users only.
When moving on I encountered this fabulous service which I want to recommend to everybody who is looking for new music: last.fm There exists the audioscrobbler.net plugin which gathers data from users hearing habits and which transmits the data to a statistics server. All this collected data is then analyzed and a huge relational database is available. Last.fm is using this data and other technologies (such as tagging, etc.) to make it easy for users to find new music. You will also find an endless number of free available MP3s. What I like best is the very good collection of japanese music (even very cool indie bands).

Just uploaded a first version of my tribute to Tokyo… My head is still full of additional features which will be implemented soon. But you can already enjoy the images at http://tokyo.desu.at

Short update: obviously I am back from Japan. We stayed more than twice as long as last year and it was fun from the first until the last second. We saw so many fascinating places and got to know many people; natives… not tourists V(^_^)V
In the next days I am trying to reduce the images we took (about 2000) to an amount which is web-presentable. Come again in two weeks or so to get a visual impression of our trip. Sorry… it will take that long because our company is keeping me busy since the first day of our return. But it is so good at work. Just a bit less time to hang out on my blog.

So many things to do and so few time.
One of the main events of this year is coming closer very very fast.

We will head for Tokyo (and the rest of Japan) around the 20th of July. About two and a half weeks will give us enough space to discover the still very unkown culture. Looking forward to get to know my wife’s dynasty and to experience new customs and rites. Our route is well planned (but of course leaves some gaps for spontaneous decisions) and it will bring us to locations (apart from Tokyo) ranging from Iwate in the north to Miyajima in the south of Japan. Sadly I am not going to see Witvogel and The telephones at the motion livehouse in shinjuku at the 6th of August as that is the day of our return. Nevertheless this journey should be the best thing ever. No matter what we are doing… Walking through the big cities and getting to know the country and the people is pleasure enough.

But I have to be patient. As I said there are some things to occur first and there are some events which might even arise to the same level of excitement than this year’s trip to Japan (which is very very hard to achieve). Starting with one minor but very amusing event this weekend - the annual reunion with my colleagues from university at a lake in the mid-distance neighbourhood.