Wednesday, October 15, 2008

update, water, video, tech

bonjour.
imagine the following: you go into your bathroom, at night, wanting to brush your teeth and go to sleep, when you notice a strange smell. you tilt your head upwards and find, to your amazement and horror, a huge dark patch of moisture has formed up on the ceiling, and several small ones on one of the walls.
the very sight i had last night. over the course of time until now, the patch has grown to occupy most of the ceiling, causing the wallpaper [why on earth must there be wallpaper on the ceiling?!] to ripple curiosly. the patches on the wall have more or less united to ...one big wet wall, which is, as i am writing this, beginning to turn yellow.
clearly coming from above, the cause of this doesn't seem to be found easily. in the flat above mine, nothing seems to indicate the water's source being there, were it not for the clear layout of the house making quite sure the source has to be there. in about half an hour, the plumber will be here and then, i hope, we'll sort things out.

good news:
i have updated a section of my website. in the course of this, the former unused and empty section music has been remade media to include not only music, but also video. as usual, you can access it via the navigation on the right side of this blog, or simply surf to the mainpage and make your way from there.
so far, two videos garnish the newly born section. one of them is tarüven karas, which i presented in my previous post, and the other is vochnahi, another poem i recorded yesterday. feel free to check them out and, of course, share your thoughts.

furthermore,
i have become an iPodBitch; thankyouverymuch. a few days ago, my shiny ipod touch 2G arrived and has since then become one of my best friends. well, unanimated friends. you know, i can be lonely here.
instead of loading crap music on it and flinging it around everywhere on the streets, i intend to use it as a pda to, among other things, help with translation. for that, it has already proven very useful. so far, i have a grand offline chinese dictionary and an online-fed dictionary that supports hindi. all i need now is sanskrit and tibetan; but of course, that'll be a bit more complicated to get. i am pondering the app wedict, but then i don't know of the availability of any tibetan or sanskrit dictionary files in the stardict format. so i'd have to gather and convert some. we'll see.
furthermore, obviously, i'm all for cool apps. meaning: innovative music creating and the likes. bloom has already given me a wonderful time, but obviously i'd love something more... substantial. rjdj is already on my radar, but so far isn't supporting the ipod touch 2G, but if you have any suggestions or news, not only regarding music apps but innovative ones in general, please share them here!

i guess that's it for now. have to get back to translating and preparing for tomorrow evening's poetry reading. moist greetings.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

tarüven karas

as may be obvious, i acquired a little camera and am having my first bits of fun with it these days.
inspired by the great hexocain's video performances of own poetry, i here try the same game myself.

also, classes have started again on monday, and that takes me deep down the rabbit hole again. amongst the usual classes of tibetology, tibetan, hindi, sanskrit, etc, i've begun chinese language classes at the department of sinology. my monday has already been blessed with a first language laboratory class. oh the fun of rows of students sitting with headphones and blabbering their first chinese sounds. sadly though, my two other chinese classes this week have been cancelled due to the teacher being ill...

moreover, there is even more poetry around the corner. next thursday, our institute blesses itself with an evening of sounds of love, presenting love related poetry in the languages of vedic sanskrit, classical sanskrit, malayalam, hindi, nepali, and maybe urdu.
obviously, every work will have a translation so the fun of the evening doesn't just consists of the tea and samosas afterwards. a dear friend of mine is going to present excerpts of a famous poem in your mother tongue, malayalam, and together we're preparing the german translation, which i'll be presenting.
would any of you be there, you might find the evening delightful and interesting, but since none of you can, there is actually no reason why i'm advertising this here.

cheers, more later.