Dyepot, Teapot

Haus Der Wolle
Originally uploaded by totalnerd.

Er, yes. The photo’s description is true. Nice sock yarn by Lana Grossa, though. One I hadn’t seen before, and it was much more affordable than their yarns are at home.

England may have more sheep, but in Germany the yarn shops were far easier to find. I came across two in central shopping areas when I wasn’t even looking.

I’m back home but I don’t want to be here yet. The World Cup is still going, I want to speak and hear more German, I want to be moving and seeing new places and learning new songs.

Tags: travel

Deustchland is am schönsten! Wir haben viel spass hier. Aber ich hasse die Italienischspieler. Sie sind sehr schlimm. Ich hoffe alles ist gut mit euch. Sehen ihr viel Fußball an?

Tschüss!
Audrey

Tags: deutschland, germany

Early tomorrow morning Lucas and I leave for Germany. This will be my second visit there. The first was almost exactly ten years ago. Last time, a high school exchange group. This time, the World Cup. Look for me as a tiny speck in the crowd at the US/Italy game on Saturday.

I scanned my pictures from that first trip as a prelude to the many more I hope to return with this time.

See the full set here.

Tags: germany, travel, 1996

Yesterday I took a break from watching World Cup games to go to the Rose Festival’s Grand Floral Parade. I’ve seen a lot of whining online about how the festival has nothing to offer hip young 20-somethings, and I find this pretty irritating, because there are some very entertaining things going on if you’re looking. I’m a little surprised that irony-seeking hipsters don’t get a kick out of strange things like the Rosarians.

They have no apparent duties other than wearing white suits during June. New Rosarians participate in a knighting ceremony. I bet they have a secret handshake too.

Parades always have at least a few odd sights, like Indian warriors sucking on lollypops. Or how about an ox the size of a small car?

I thought most of this year’s floats were less creative than usual. All decorations have to be made from plants and flowers, which sometimes leads to really neat designs, like wolves with fur made of cedar bark, or a cobblestone path made of potatoes. None of the sculptures really caught my eye this time. Most of my pictures ended up being marching bands and drill teams.

Our seats were on a corner, so I was able to watch the bands do different formations for turning, and see the groups from both front and side. I’ll have to remember this the next time I want to photograph a parade.

Last but not least, rodeo princesses and their horses decked out in shiny pink fabric.

You can see the rest of my parade photos on Flickr.

Tags: parade, Rose Festival

I’ve been scanning old pictures from my big box of disorganized photo envelopes, and decided that the first priority would be the photos I took of the WTO protests during their meeting in Seattle in late November/early December 1999. I lived just across the freeway from the convention center at the time, so a lot of the disturbance was iin places I normally walked through on a daily basis. When I looked up the article for the event on Wikipedia, I was struck by how off the account there seemed compared to how I remembered things. The broken windows, anarchists, that’s what people remember. And I probably contribute to that when the main story I tell from that week is about tear gas and riot cops in front of my apartment building. But a lot of other things happened, and it was really an interesting (if infuriating and sometimes scary) thing to experience.

There was a big union sponsored protest march the first day, and afterward people encircled the convention center, trying to disrupt the WTO talks by making it hard to get inside. I think by early afternoon when I started taking pictures, the police were already using pepper spray and tear gas to try to break up the line.

I don’t remember thinking anything was getting too out of hand while I was down there. There was grafitti, overturned dumpsters, but the police were watching, so it seemed okay, if chaotic. I went home when it started to get too dark to take pictures. Afterward on the evening news it was broken windows, more tear gas, more pepper spray, everyone getting aggressive, the police forcing everyone who was still downtown up Capitol Hill and past my front door. Was it that night or the one after I spent at a friend’s apartment because I didn’t want to find out whether things were calming down or getting worse?

The next day they declared a “No protest zone”, called in the National Guard, and replaced the ring of protesters with riot cops. It didn’t stop people from going downtown, of course. A lot of people who didn’t care that much about the WTO but were offended by the new restrictions (the mayor banned gas masks in addition to the limits on activity downtown) came out to protest that. And all of the reports of broken things and violence attracted a certain number of wannabe hooligans.

Everyone who was still downtown after dark was pushed out and up Capitol Hill again the second day. It was ugly. People in my neighborhood were angry at the cops for treating us like a dumping ground and assuming anyone still outside was causing trouble. I let my curiousity get the better of me, went out to see what was happening, and ended up in the middle of the community college campus lawn when riot cops circled the block and started lobbing stun and pepper spray grenades into the middle to break up the crowd. We couldn’t see which way to go, making it hard to follow their directions and get out of there. The friend I was with and I ran blindly down the hill, and across the street to another friend’s apartment where we stuck our heads under the faucet until our eyes were clear again.

I think this was the night with the police standoff, riot cops on one side and a group of angry neighbors (including a city council member) on the other. It continued on for hours.

The thing that sticks most in my head is how angry I was with the city and the police for not planning how to handle potential problems in a reasonable way. They were unprepared for the sheer number of people on the streets, for the need to separate troublemakers from peaceful bystanders, and seemed completely indifferent to the idea that their heavy-handed approached to crowd control was harmful to anyone who lived or worked in the areas affected. Downtown businesses were furious to be practically shut down for a whole week during the Christmas shopping season.

There’s never going to be another event like this in Seattle. Not at the convention center, which straddles I-5, not anywhere near downtown, stricken by traffic jams even on a good day. Too risky in the “post 9/11 world”. I think the WTO has been changed by it too. To go with the protests, there was a big push from NGOs working on behalf of poorer countries many people feared would be overwhelmed by demands for trade arrangements favorable to the developed world. It seems to be coming out better than I expected. The organization has been deadlocked over agricultural issues for the last couple of years, because developing countries stepped up and asked for changes that would benefit them as well.

Tags: Seattle, protest, WTO, World Trade Organization, 1999

And so does Windows Media, but I’ll get to that second.

#1: I have now received two “Thank you for signing up!!!” emails from YouTube, which is rather funny, because I haven’t done anything of the sort. Some fucking moron with the username rothers (and rotini, on the second try) is trying to use my UW email account on there. And YouTube does not require that you validate your email address in order to create an account, but only if you want to post videos. On top of that, the sign up email comes from service@youtube.com, which is a completely fake address–all mail sent there bounces. I’ve filled in their online web comment form twice now, reporting that someone else is using my email address and asking for them to remove the account(s). No response yet. I’m pissed off that they didn’t set up their site to prevent this. It’s a big popular service, the least they can do is take care of basic user issues correctly and prevent junk logins.

#2: There’s a Timbers game in Seattle today, and the only way to observe the game remotely is a web broadcast through sportsjuice.com. And lucky me, they’re using a streaming Windows Media format. But I want to listen in from home, so I thought I’d suck it up and download Windows Media player anyhow. (Which apparently Microsoft no longer supports on the Mac. What, they’re hoping that the one thing that will drive Mac users back to Windows is their media player?) Except there’s something seriously wrong with the installer from Microsoft’s own site: it thinks it’s an Excel file, and my free trial of Office expired last November. Then I try the recommended alternative, some Quicktime plugins called Flip4Mac. Open Firefox, click on the broadcast link, and nothing happens. After several minutes of frustration, I decide to try Safari. And then I have to find a game on the site that’s already going. Finally, audio comes through. So the Timbers game should work.

But #!@#$%&^ stupid companies that invest all their time into making media files incompatible and broken (let’s see, there’s Real, Microsoft, even Apple is not good on this one, as a starting list). Seriously, fuck you. I am fed up with everything being a proprietary format. I just want to listen to the game, or watch the news broadcast, or whatever it is that you’ve posted online for the public to see, and instead of being concerned about whether your potential customers have access (and will still have access in the future as formats change), you’ve locked it down so we can’t try to steal anything. That’s the mentality that drives online media formats, and it’s so completely counterproductive and insulting I want to yell at someone.

Posting anything online in a Windows-only format is completely lazy and shortsighted. You know why tv works so well? To get the basic channels, all you need is an antenna. Any brand. Any brand of tv set. It’s all compatible.

End rant.

Tags: bad companies, Windows Media, Microsoft, YouTube, dumb, tech,