USA Trip - Boston

Since yesterday I am in Boston. This town totally sucks. I wanna go back to New York!! It is sooooo boring here. It feels like Karlsfeld, haha. Anyways... Today, I attended the Digital Life sponsor meeting .

Some presentations were cool! The project "One laptop per child" was extremely inspiring. The vision is to provide every child (especially in third-world-countries) with a laptop, so they can educate themselves. The technical tricks used in this laptop are incredible... Its price (100$) is even more amazing. I wanna get one! :-)

Tomorrow, there will be demos to see.

USA Trip - New York - Roots concert

Last Thursday, I have attended one of the best events ever. In New York's famous Radio City Hall, The Roots were playing.
One of my favourite songs by them is this one.

It was unbelievable: apart from their new songs, they played several hip hop songs from the 80s, all with real instruments!
2 piano players, 2 trumpets, one sax, 2 drummers, erikah badu singing (the lady from the video above) and several special guests. they were improvising together... i have never seen anything like this!

They also had Rahzel on stage: this guy is insane: he can imitate 2 instruments and perform vocals at the same time...

The coolest moment of the concert was when they performed "If I ruled the world" by Nas. Erikah Baduh singing the part "We'll walk right up to the sun---hand in hand" was incredible beautiful.

10 minutes before departure

hehe, i found some time to blog! in 10 minutes i am departing to the USA for 3 weeks. it will be a busy time for me, but enjoyable :-) I visit and give presentations at Columbia University, MIT's Media Lab and UCSB.

I have also arranged meetings with my old friends from the US! It starts today (I hope I will not be too jet-lagged) with a nice
concert with the incredible Blaine.

I will try to post some pictures during my trip!

Mark's Visit

My brother Mark was visiting my for one week. It was his first visit to Japan. First, we have spent a few days in Kyoto to show him the classical Japan. Then, we returned to Tokyo and I showed him the funky, crazy city. It was a great time! I hope I will soon have other visitors :-)
Some pictures:


Posing in our Ryokan in Kyoto.


In the bamboo forrest.


Very interesting: Kyoto's Ryoanji temple has a miniature model of its famous stone garden. So blind people can experience the stone garden. (a UI researcher might say: a tangible world-in-minature :-)


In Tokyo, we could enjoy the crazy outfit of girls...


In Yoyogi Koen, once again we saw a techno party. The highlight of it was a 70 year old guy dancing on the stage next to the DJs. See the detail of the picture below.