Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Some observations while on an 8 hour (night) train ride to the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) in Berlin:

• DVB-T doesn't really work exceptionally well in a train that's moving at 200-300 km/h.
• I also had almost no GPS signal in the train either, not sure why. The speed should not be a problem as GPS is supposed to work at high speeds (unlike DVB-T). I intended to create a nice visualization of all wireless networks on the way to Berlin (using Kismet and GPSDrive), but... well, without GPS data that's not too funny.
• They have coffee in the train! Not exactly cheap, but it's there.
• Having a ticket for waggon 23 of the train is somewhat... fitting.

There's a lot of press coverage about the congress already, so I won't repeat all of that here. Just let me tell you that there's a tremendous amount of great lectures, many of which I have attended (and they're also streamed on the web, as well as broadcast via DVB-T locally here in Berlin, which is great!).

As you might know I publish some of my photos in my photoblog and on flickr under a Creative Commons license.

A very cool example of the so-called remix culture "happened to me" recently — one of the photos I posted on flickr was used as album art for a music CD, namely J. D. Warrick's "Going, a. The Leaving".

Btw., if you want to learn more about remix culture, Creative Commons etc. I can really recommend Larry Lessig's Wizards of OS 4 Keynote titled "The Read-Write Society" (OGG video: 144 MB, MP4 video: 224 MB).

Note: This is actually an entry for my music podcast, but I'm cross-posting this to my blog as well, as I think it deserves a broader exposure!

Now, here is a really special song I'd like you to listen to. This is a great song (aria!) by Improbulus which is about the Creative Commons movement. The song itself is Creative Commons licensed, of course, as well as the lyrics (the "libretto" is you want).

Quoting from the original site, the song is an

Operatic ode to Creative Commons, to the tune of Puccini's O Mio Babbino Caro!

The lyrics:

This is Creative Commons:
Something that you've created
Somebody else can copy
Spreading the word about you
You see, they're free to copy
But they must give you credit
And others then can copy
Giving you credit anew
And if they make some money so must you - you profit too!
Isn't that fair, and how?
So get Creative now...

It's a wonderful promotional song for Creative Commons, and it sure has the potential to become sort of the hymn of the Creative Commons movement/culture, if you ask me.

(found via consumingexperience.blogspot.com)

Update 2005-12-06: The song was taken down for now, as the legal situation of the background music is unclear.

Song: Improbulus - Creative Commons Song (2:33 min, 2.4 MB)
License: CC-by-nc-sa 2.5
Source: archive.org

OMG! I would have never believed this if I hadn't seen the videos with my own eyes: Richard M. Stallman of GNU and Free Software fame singing various songs, and Gilberto Gil, famous musician and currently Brazil's minister of culture, jamming on his guitar. Unbelievable.

(via Boing Boing and netzpolitik.org )