Haven't uploaded in a while… Today is an exceptionally rainy and grey day so a colorful picture is needed! I took that 2 weeks ago, while walking to work. That’s still very close to my home, on Rivington street near Clinton street.

Back from one of our short trips to Germany, we learned or confirmed three things:

First, business class is the way to fly, if you don't have to pay the full price yourself, that is (thanks again, Christian!). It's not only the amenities, such as a much more comfortable seat, where you can actually sleep, but also that you're not being treated like cattle. Here you can still find something of the old glory of travel.

Second, business class or not, airlines loose, or better mislay your baggage and don't care too much. We waited three days for our suitcase to be delivered, right in time for having fresh clothes on the flight back. Next time we'll be better prepared, with bigger hand luggage and multiple pieces, which hopefully don't get all lost at once.

Third, as nice as it is to visit family and friends, we're always looking forward to get back home to New York. People have different preferences, but we like this city very much, for it's dynamic and its diversity and even for its insane weather.

This is the habour of Wismar at the Baltic Sea. We spent a nice day with family on the Island Poel, where my aunt owns a vacation home. For the night we had a room at a nice bed & breakfast and were woken up by bird song instead of fire truck sirens.
And then, finally our baggage arrived, so we have fresh clothing for the flight back to NYC.

We arrived in Hamburg yesterday to enjoy an nice spring day. But then our baggage didn't arrive, it went to Peking instead and will be delivered hopefully tonight. The airline Lufthansa is not especially embarrassed by it - after all millions of pieces of luggage are not delivered correctly, so it's just bad luck if you have to spend 2 days of a 3 day vacation without clothes. So we had to go shopping and buy stuff that's cheaper in dollars at home than in euros here.

Another one from this fantastic MoMA exhibit.

More pictures from the Olafur Eliasson exhibit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nydiscovery

And happily so!

I've just had the most amazing weekend in a really long time and the good times seem to continue...

It's funny, how sometimes nothing really exciting is going on for a couple of weeks and then all in a sudden all is cramped in in a couple of days!

The Tribeca Film Festival is in town again. Although I hate - yes, that strong feelings - their ticketing system and their way of doing things, I spent 90 minutes three Saturdays ago to snap the tickets to the movies I truly wanted to see.

And so we went to see THREE KINGDOMS: RESURRECTION OF THE DRAGON on Friday evening with a Q&A of the director and the very lovely heroine MAGGIE Q. She was sweet enough to take pictures with a couple of fans and I shot one of Oliver and her too. Both are smiling very nicely.

On Saturday, we first went to an exhibit opening down at the South Street Seaport, where the photographer BARBARA MENSCH is showing her fishmarket photos that she made during the 80ies. Awesome pictures - I surely will see them again since the exhibit lasts until January 2009.

Then, we quickly jumped into a taxi and went up near Union Square to see the World Premiere of the Erica Dunton movie THE 27 CLUB starring JOE ANDERSON. Before the movie started, out at the street, Joe was sweet enough to pose for pictures with fans and the result you see above. He was incredibly kind and friendly. And I absolutely LOVED the movie. Go watch it if you can: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0906783

On Sunday then, Oliver and I had tickets to the premiere of a play directed by MIKE NICHOLS: The Country Girl. Since it was opening night, the audience was filled with some stars like Julia Roberts, Amy Adams, Natalie Portman, Dennis Lerry. We had 2nd row seats in the orchestra section and could dig the atmosphere fully in. We enjoyed the play a lot even though the New York Times critic didn't.

Tonight I am off to do something more nostalgic, I am up to see THE VERVE.

What have you been up to lately? I am sure, you'd done something really, really cool yourself. Let me know about it :)

Ok, that was "The Country Girl" with Frances McDormand, Morgan Freeman and Peter Gallagher. Excellent play, we both thought and since it was opening night, many friends of the actors and director Mike Nichols were there, too: a couple of rows behind us sat Julia Roberts, Amy Adams and Natalie Portman and who knows who else was there.

Well, that was a nice final for our star-studded weekend, where we met more (Hollywood) celebrities than the last six years in New York altogether.

Anyway, it's raining now and we go back to our cubicles for our real lives :-)

That's the flagship Apple Store on Fifth Avenue - it's open 24/7 and one day I want to go in there in the middle of the night and spend an insane amount of money for shiny new toys.

Before we leave for a quick trip to Germany, we're determined to give ourselves a big fix of NYC culture - after all we need to have some stories to tell back home.

For example, the Tribeca Film Festival is in town and usually we take this opportunity to watch one of those movies that disappear after the festival circus, never to be seen again (such as the lovely romantic comedy "East Broadway"). This time, though, Elke spend an hour with the shaky online ordering system of the festival and secured first show tickets for Three Kingdoms and "The 27 Club". 

The first has been already released in Asia and stars Andy Lau and the lovely Maggie Q (pictured here with director David Lee before the show). Three Kingdoms kind of is in line with "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", "Hero" and the like, but is less stylish and less fantasy and in the battle scenes the opponents fight for killing each other instead for show. Maggie Q plays a incredibly cool female general (who fights herself, too, if she has to) and this time she wins in the end as opposed to in "Live Free or Die Hard", where she's quickly dispatched by Bruce Willis' McClane. Anyway, I'm hoping to see more from her.

The second movie yesterday was far more earnest: The 27 Club takes on the mythical age when a couple of musician died by drugs. It stars Joe Anderson who Elke and I liked very much in Across the Universe (more about that one in a bit). It is a road movie in the classical sense (a road trip from coast to coast), but the images are beautiful and the characters very likable. 

Both shows were surprisingly intimate and it was easy to get pictures of me with Maggie and Elke with Joe, which is - for whatever reason - somehow thrilling.

In between we went to the opening of Barbara Mensch's photo exhibition South Street at the Southstreet Seaport Museum. Barbara took pictures of the Fulton Fish Market during the last 30 years. Since the fish market moved to the Bronx last year, this is an opportunity to get some feeling of the old Manhattan, which fades more and more every day.

Tonight after a long time we're going to a play again, The Country Girl directed by Mike Nichols, the Oscar-winning director of movies like "The Graduate" or "Working Girls". Tuesday, then will be concert time The Verve at the Wamu Theater at the Garden - hopefully an opportunity to take some more cool concert pictures.

Another picture from busy Manhattan last Saturday. This one is shot on 5th Avenue near Central Park.

If you look around on Fotolog, then you'll see a lot of pictures similar to the style of this one. The best thing - I didn't take it myself and I didn't have to do any weird posing either.

Oliver took this photo at the MoMa (museum of modern art) of me while we were visiting the members only pre-opening of a new exhibit.

This was such a fantastic exhibition by the Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=3991
If you're in New York during the next 2 months, go and see it!

As for the picture - it's been made possible thanks to a fun effect with multiple mirrors. We'll be showing more pics from that event.

This was a busy weekend in NYC as everybody enjoyed the warm weather on Saturday. This is on 6th Avenue, near Bryant Park, where we had a coffee break, before we went off to the MoMA for the Olfaur Eliasson exhibition. More pictures from there will be posted here here and on http://www.nydiscovery.info.

That's a picture from my other way to work, through Chinatown along Grand Street. This one is taken in the early evening from the crossing of Grand St. and Bowery. It's always challenging to fix a street scene and the NYC skyline in the background in the same picture, because of the high contrast. But - with a little post processing - sometimes it's possible to get decent results.

Nope - I am not changing my favorite actors, if anything, I recently added JAMES MCAVOY and JOE ANDERSON to the mix - but I am very much looking forward to watching a promising romantic comedy. The trailers I've seen for MADE OF HONOR really looked fun and romantic and there's nothing wrong with Mr. MacDreamy starring. He's been able to make this difficult transition from successful TV star to believable male lead but he proved with ENCHANTED that he's capable and he will with his latest movie as well. I am pretty sure.
So, something to watch out for!

As for JOE ANDERSON, I'll see his latest movie at the TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL which starts next week. It's been quite some drama to get tickets - their ticketing system is THE WORST EVER!!! - after wasting 80 precious minutes on a Saturday morning, I finally got what I wanted that in the end is what counts, isn't it?

I'll have little firework of events coming up before I am flying for a long weekend to Hamburg, Germany. I'll keep you posted...

Are YOU going anywhere soon? Let me know - and don't forget to enjoy your weekend :)

... just good friends!

It's Friday, the sun is shining, the weather is finally nice, I walked to work and took lots and lots of new pictures and I am in an extremely good mood. Had to made up a little sillyness :D

You love GRAFFITI and I love OLIVER - so what better way to start into a sunny weekend?!

Have a good one :)

You need to have a KEY to this park and you would need to live in one of the buildings around it to actually have access to Gramercy Park! It's not exceptionally expensive to live around it - let's face it, it's nowhere "cheap" in Manhattan - but you just don't get an apartment here.

Luckily, the fence is broad enough for a lens to slip through and here we go with another Spring picture.

Storage is cheap. My first hard disk was 10 MB for maybe $2,500 (I actually didn't pay for it), so walking through the storage department of J&R is like a stroll though a wonderland. The terabyte is a $200 these days and prices are dropping. Of course file sizes went up - there was a time when a 100 KB file induced awe, while today a single RAW picture alone accounts for 10MB and I take easily a hundred or more on a day. But again storage is cheap.

Backup is not, however. Digital assets are precious and a single hard disk failure can wipe them out forever, so you need at least two copies of each file. DVDs cannot handle the amount of data, so the only practical way is to use multiple hard disks and copy files on each of them.

Here's what we do: for current data - means the media library, which does constantly change and pictures of the current year we have a hard disk attached to a Mac mini and backed up via Time Machine to a second hard disk. Works very well and we have a history to go back to in case some files get corrupted.

For all pictures taken before 2008 we have a hard disk in the network with read only access that is replicated to a second hard disk. Finding that network disk was not easy, though.

First try: For approximately $200 I bought a 500 GB LaCie Ethernet Disk mini Home Edition. "Home Edition" means that everything is pre-configured and you can't change anything - from the stupid network name "Hipserv" to the cheesy pre-defined shares like "FamilyPhotos" or "FamiliyDocuments". Worst of all, after copying 100 GB of pictures to "FamilyPhotos" it wouldn't stop working. For day and night its huge activity light was flickering, turning our apartment into a discotheque. Of course this was accompanied by the noise of a fan and the rattling of the hard disk itself. LaCie support (which is pretty good for a low-cost product) confirmed that this is not normal, but couldn't provide a solution. So the disk had to go.

Second Try:  I would have exchanged it against a standard edition version of the same model, but it was sold out. Western Digital somehow manages it to tie platform-independent technology to a Windows-only platform, so the alternative was a network-attached Iomega 500 GB disk, slightly more expensive that the LaCie, but with an included print server. This one can be configured as you like and it even has an option to turn the disk off after some time of inactivity. The disk, but not the fan and Iomega built in a heavy duty, server-grade fan that relentlessly blows mostly cold air out of the enclosure. It's louder than any desktop computer. Simply unacceptable.

Third Try: Now, our USB disks are pretty noiseless, so I decided to buy a simple USB disk and attach it to the AirPort Extreme. This setup is less flexible, but sufficient for what we need. USB disks are cheaper than Ethernet disks, so I could upgrade to 1 TB for the same price. Big mistake. Because the 1TB LaCie Desktop Hard Disk is again equipped with a fan. A smart one that only turns on if needed, but after a some time apparently it's needed every 30 seconds or so. This draws attention to the noise the same way a fire truck siren does. Again unacceptable. 

Of course I didn't want to go to J&R and return a disk for the third one, so we're using the Lacie for the offline backup disk.

Bottom line: if you care about noise, make sure the disk has no fan, which limits the capacity to 500 GB at this time. 

I have photos to share. I have stories to tell. Why did I stop photo-blogging? What would be better suited to kick-off things again than a photo for the upcoming SEX AND THE CITY movie?

Anticipation is high and it’ll come out on May 30th this year. I’ll surely be among the first ones to watch it even though I might be super busy with the preparations for my husband’s “milestone” birthday party! I think, we’re going to throw a theme party. Some of my most favorite artists turn the same age this year as there are Hugh Jackman (whom I “met” a few times at the stage door while he was starring on Broadway), Thom Yorke, Will Smith (whom I saw filming MIB2), Damon Albarn, Eric Bana, James Iha (whom I “met” in a bar) Daniel Craig, Aaron Eckhardt, Ashley Judd (whose starring together with Hugh Jackman in one of my fav movies). Now you know how old Oliver – and my former boss, hello to Paris! - will get.

That said, I am in the middle of planning something “hippie”, “psychedelic”, nothing sad (so much was going on that year!!!) for this special party.

If YOU happen to something cool, let me know please…

As for any cool movies – I have to admit, that I haven’t been to the movies in a long time, then again, Oliver and I are trying to go at least once a month. We’ve seen JUNO and ATONEMENT so far. As a result of the latter, I’ve been watching most of JAMES MCAVOY’s movies but I have to admit that I liked neither Juno nor Atonement especially much. The Dunkirk scene in Atonement was spectacular and maybe even the main reason why the movie made the Oscar cut but aside from that I didn’t really like it much. Silly, little girl!

However, I finally watched a move that got filmed in fall 2006 in my neighborhood and whose main actors used to hang out in my favorite neighborhood bar. I am referring to ACROSS THE UNIVERSE. Oh my! What took me so long? I love, love, LOVE that movie. It’s phenomenal. You either love or hate it. I am totally smitten. The Beatles reinvented.

This season’s AMERICAN IDOL contestants – yep, I am watching this addictive and time eating show for the very first time ever – did a poor job in interpreting their oevre. I was so much looking forward to yesterday’s show but the contestants simply didn’t deliver. Not even my favorite Michael Johns (yes, those of you who know the show might have guessed already who my fav singer would be).

That’s basically what’s going on here with me in New York City. And a little more but I’ll keep that for the private conversations 

Let me know how [b]YOU[/b] are doing – I hope you’re doing well. Cheers!

I've been looking for this a long time: a mobile device that I can carry with me all the time and that I can use to write. E-mails, blogs, stories, screenplays, notes, which means significant amounts of text. A laptop would be ideal, but is too heavy to carry around, just in case. A smart phone is too small to write more than a few lines in an e-mail. So I want something in between.

On New Years Day I stumbled over the Asus Eee PC, the "Surf" version, that is. This is a $299 ultra-portable that runs some version of Linux. It has almost no storage (some 300 MBytes are free), so it's more or less meant as a dumb Internet terminal. It's close to useless in that capacity, however: the WiFi client is ridiculous, forcing you to enter the WPA key every time it connects. It comes with Firefox, Skype and some other Internet apps, but the 7" screen doesn't make them fun to use. Firefox, for example, wastes almost half of the screen real estate with it's various tool and status bars. For a new class of device you need a new class of software - Asus is doing it on the cheap - literally - and the result sucks.

It can be a quite useful device nonetheless. It has the classic laptop form factor, with a real keyboard, a little smaller of course, but with a right look & feel. And I'm strongly convinced that ultra portable should have either a real keyboard or none at all. Nobody so far has figured how to do the latter right (guess we need to wait for Apple on this), so the Eee's conventional keyboard is the way to go. It also comes with OpenOffice installed, which contains a pro-grade word processor. Again, OpenOffice has its issues to fit in that small frame, but all in all it's usable for serious writing.

But how do I keep it in sync with my laptop? In theory, the Eee should connect to shared network drives, but while trying that I quickly ended up tweaking the Samba configuration files. Now I do know a thing about Linux configuration or two, but this isn't worth the effort. Fortunately there's an easier way: I use a SD card as primary storage on the Eee. With the help of ChronoSync on my MacBook it automatically syncs whenever I put it into the card reader. Sweet.

Remains the battery life, which is, as always, a bitter disappointment. The Eee gives you some 3 hours uptime, which is close to ridiculous, but apparently this is all you can get these days. My commute is around an hour each way, so I can live with that for now.

All in all I prefer the Eee much over other ultra portables, which I find far too expensive and lacking a real keyboard. But there's still an opportunity out there for the perfect mobile device that fits functionally a smartphone and a laptop.