Three posts in one day. It's like Christmas in March (although it did snow here in March). Gentle reader, I don't know if you remember this tale of highway robbery that I told way back in November, at the start of winter. In a random act of symmetry, this tale is now coming to a close at the end of winter. In the interim period, my fine for "fare evasion" actually rose from €40 to €47 as we had not made our complaints in the alotted timeframe of a fortnight. Well, that and we hoped they would be kind and forget it all, only to be sent gruesome reminder notices. On receipt of these notices, Aaron and I scribed an email to send to the Deutsche Bahn crew to explain our situation, making special note to be extremely polite. That email was sent at the end of January, and until today, I had not received any communications from them. Today I got a letter back from them - and my fine is now reduced to €17. Now it's still AU$28.50, but it's a lot better than the AU$60 that they were trying foist on me. I'd count that as a victory of sorts. Let this be proof conclusive that the German system is malleable, and there is actually some leeway in there for people to make mistakes. Especially ticket conductors who are massive Arschloch.

Update - 23/03/06
So you might recall that I was having a few problems with my Internet connection - detailed in a prologue, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6. Part 7 of the story goes a little something like this:

I finally managed to get a technician to come out today to fix the DSL. It now works. 7 months of stuffing around with Freenet. Now I have a sweet 2Mbit connection.

A brief mention of the cultural activities that I've been partaking in here for you guys. Back when I was in Berlin last year (!), I got the chance to take part in the Long Night of the museums and go around and look at massive temples shoehorned into smaller buildings. It's a bit like an Escher illustration really - I walked in expecting to find another building within that building settled at the top of the bottom of a set of stairs. Anyway, what was most interesting about the Lange Nacht in Berlin was that it was freezing cold, and it provided a free nights entertainment while I pretended to look all cultured. However, I've got to say that the most interesting exhibition I went to in Berlin was a Kubrik one.

Actually, the most interesting place that I went to in Berlin was an abandoned building which had been taken over by artists known as the Tacheles squat. I went there late at night with Martin and Mel, and it had a fantastic atmosphere about it. It's only appropriate then that I trekked up to Mannheim to go to the Lange Nacht this year. Although I love Heidelberg, the thought of hanging around the packing museum didn't sound too enticing (If you want to know about packaging, just by a Mac).

I'm pretty glad I went up there, as I got to see some very cool exhibitions. The first one we stumbled into was an artist's studio, which had been opened up and had a jazz band playing in it. Any time anyone sings "Light my Fire" in a bossa or jazz style - I just have to stop and listen. We followed that up by going down to the catacombs to check out an exhibition on cover art. Probably not that interesting really, but there were some classic bad vinyl covers (Battlefield Earth soundtrack).

The next stop however, was the jewel in the evening. The Schloss in Mannheim had a series of exhibits set up inside the rooms within the castle. So what you ended up having was a mix between ancient (or at least really old) architecture and modern exhibits. Things like exhibits on the Turkish influences in Mannheim (set up to look like a bazaar), or audiovisual presentations with images of tranquil gardens interrupted by IC trains roaring past. It was a very well presented set of exhibits, and I felt some relief that there's room for material like this in towns as small as Mannheim, and that it is in fact relatively mainstream.

It's actually getting warmer here. The snow I think has finally stopped, and now we're getting rain. According to my little weather widget, it's due to hit 19 degrees by the weekend. I don't know if that's going to happen, but I'm gunning for not using my thermal clothes at all in April.

It's been a little while since I last posted an update about what's been happening here in Heidelberg. It's not for lack of effort though, as I've been busy developing up a whole new section for the site. You might not have noticed it when you navigated your way here (or read this via your news-reader), but the music link now points to a new page.

Let's get the disclaimers out of the way first. I'm doing this for fun, and as such, I'm not too concerned that the page doesn't work on Internet Explorer. I don't even have access to a machine on which I can try to hack it to work with that godawful browser. The page does work with any Mozilla family browser, or with Safari. It might work with Opera too.

This whole idea for this sub-section was borne from a question which I kept getting asked, and I had no suitable answer for - "What do you listen to?". It's a deceptively hard question to answer. A few years ago, I'd just trot out some general genre names, and maybe some artists, but that only really corresponded to what I was listening to at that particular point of time. The time and mood nature of my listening habits were really the key to making things hard for me to answer the question. What I really needed was some way to keep track of what I was listening to.

A small digression here while I talk about my favourite company - Google. Google really know how to keep track of stuff. They have got the whole passive monitoring thing down to a fine art. They're collecting masses and masses of data from their users, and actually drawing some useful conclusions from their data (look at their Zeitgeists). It's a philosophy which I'd like to be able to extend a bit more to the rest of my life. I'd like to keep track of everything I do, and then at some undertermined point in the future, look back on my data and make some optimisations. Maybe realise that my bus timetables are somehow correlated with my eating habits, or some other result from data mining. It seems a little unfair that the companies you rely on for service (Telephone, power, internet) can collect this data about you - but you have no way of taking advantage of the data yourself.

Last.fm filled the needs that I had for music tracking quite nicely, but the stats on the charts were a bit lacking. Although it did provide some nice overall information, it quickly became obvious I needed to really do some analysis on the data myself. I kept waiting for more data, and by the start of March, I had 20,000 tracks played, and roughly a year of listening data ready to be analysed.

The basic technique for analysing the data was to take weekly artist data (the number of times an artist is listened to in a week), find the tags which best describe the artist, and use those tags to add to a weekly tally of tags. In the end I should have found out whether I had a clear preference for a genre during the week. To implement this, I used a whole bunch of Ruby (I did mention this was a hobby project right?) scripts combined with the Audioscrobbler web services provided by Last.fm. Tag data is notoriously messy, so all tag data goes through a normalisation process by looking up synonyms in a dictionary I created.

The front-end is a bit of XHTML (although it currently doesn't validate), combined with some nice JavaScript libraries from MochiKit, CanvasGraph (I think I shared a few uni courses with this guy!) and the WebFx Slider. The actual content is then generated through an XSLT transformation on the backend, integrating all the data together, and transforming things like RSS feeds into something which is a bit easier to handle.

The current plan is to add a bit more functionality to this, and then I'll add a sub-section of my Geek sub-section with source code and everything you'll need to get this up and running yourself. I'm hoping to eventually mutate the visualisation javascript into something which can be used to apply interactive visualisations (complete with controls) to any set of tabular data.

Did I actually manage to answer the question? Well, it turns out I listen to a bit of electronic, indie-rock, underground hip-hop and trip-hop. There's a more detailed analysis of it all in the music section.

Mein gott, leibe ich Karlstorbahnhof. It's probably the best place to go to in Heidelberg for a night out, next to Destille or Sonderbar on Untere Straße (You'll find out about these places when you come and visit). They've got a good indie scene there, which results in better than average track selection from the DJs (I haven't seen any technically brilliant DJs in Heidelberg!) and a good night out for all. I've been going there once a week for the past few weeks, and usually end up trying to catch the last bus home. I didn't quite make this last bus one evening, and so, in my infinite wisdom (My mind, as always, is clear and sharp at 4am on a Saturday night), I decided to walk home. On paper it's not really that far for me to walk home - the bus takes 10 minutes, and it's only a few kilometers. The whole journey ended up taking me 55 minutes - and it was windy, and I was walking by the river. Somehow the beer jacket managed to keep me warm for my little adventure.

I tried a similar escapade today, where the first signs of weather approaching spring-like were evident, with actual temperatures above zero, and some sun in the sky. After grabbing breakfast in Hemingways, discussing the exploits of the previous night in Karlstorbahnhof (The "Tighten up" evening - wall to wall James Brown, funk, soul and even some electro!), we went for a brief stroll around the Old City, trying to find something to do with a Sunday afternoon. Technically I should have been in the lab, but to be honest, they're not paying me enough to get me in there on a Sunday. When you've got something that even vaguely resembles good weather after 4 months of poor weather - you spend as much time as possible enjoying it. After getting stuck halfway up a ramp which hadn't been cleared of the ice and snow, I gave up exploring the city, and decided to do the walk home again. Now, I'm not sure how this works, but I somehow managed to take more time walking home today than I did in the middle of the night at just over an hour. Once the weather improves a bit (I have heard that it actually does happen), I'll get the bike out, and it should take only about 15 minutes to get home.

Now for some fraud: Here in Germany (and other places too I guess), you get a little token when you get a bottle in a pub/bar that you take back with the empty bottle, and get a little bit of your money back. It's basically there to encourage people to recycle their bottles. The reality of the situation for me is that it's usually too much trouble to go down to get the money back, and they kind of sit around in my apartment for ages. The system is called the Pfand - which is I guess comes from the same lexical tree as Fund. Somehow, you usually end up with more tokens than bottles when you're out somewhere. To solve this you just go on a little pfandnapping spree, and collect up as many empty bottles as possible from people who are too drunk to notice that you're nicking them. You then go up to the counter, slap down the bottles and tokens, and collect your 100% sweet profit. I made €10 like that on Saturday night.