Thank you for all the links and welcome wishes I received for the new blog. Here are all the ones I spotted:

[P.S. Two more links I saw a day later. The first description really made me blush and I can assure TMFL that the blog hopefully only changed name, software and layout.]

The Minor Fall, The Major Lift Tuesday, October 15, 2002 CLOSE YOUR EYES. The successor to sax and sunshine, this is the weblog of one of I Love Music's smartest contributors. We're not sure if he's trying to do something different with the new site, so we'll refrain from comment except to say that we really enjoyed the old one and expect nothing less from him now. posted by TMFTML | 3:44 PM | link

No Rock&Roll Fun ~ 15.10.02 SUNSHINE BECOMES EYES: Sex and sunshine has moved home and re-invented itself as close your eyes. Obviously, you already know this. But just in case you didn't... posted by simon b at 3:31 PM

the monkey puzzle October 13, 2002 movements Alex has revitalized and moved to close your eyes. Welcome back ! The Buzzcocks thing made interesting reading... 11:14

Wisdom Goof October 13, 2002 - Sax and Sunshine has transformed itself into Close Your Eyes. posted by graham c | 5:10 PM

Douze Lunes Close your eyes remplace Sax & Sunshine... Thanks Alex! JR (13:04)

Eyes That Can See In The Dark Date: 04:08:51 A.M., October 13, 2002 Name: Phil (from the comments to the Kramnik-Deep Fritz game) Your new site looks nice!

IokanaaN Bookmarking: Close your eyes remplace Sex&Sunshine [10/13/2002 01:35:12 AM - comments(0) ajouter un commentaire]

parallax view Saturday, October 12, 2002 Ah, the autumn. Time to say goodbye to Sax and Sunshine. And then to Close Your Eyes. posted by Dead Kenny @ 1:43 PM

the rub FRI 11 OCT | 22:00 CDT Sex & Sunshine had a long and respected run, but it's now just a memory. Fortunately, Alex has picked up where S&S left off with Close Your Eyes, a rather stylish and much more organized template for his daily blogging. It's hosted by Antville. Is that something new? Looks like a nice operation.

strange fruit Thursday, October 10, 2002 The Sunshine State Reset your links: Alex has folded Sax and Sunshine and started Close Your Eyes at Antville. The page certainly does take less time to load, but even so, I'll miss the yellow screen and the deliriously happy children.

largehearted boy October 10, 2002 Moving To Close Your Eyes Sax and Sunshine closed its doors today, but the wonderful music weblog reopened at Close Your Eyes, so get over there and enjoy Alexander's critical ear! Posted by David at 08:04 PM | Comments (1)

Many people, especially the older generation, say that the internet is full of rubbish. That it is more about misinformation and rumours than information.

In a way this is true. As anybody can write something on the internet the average quality of pages published on the internet is inferior to articles in classic media like newspapers and magazines which are written by professionals.

On the other hand the upside of the internet is that it is a democratic medium which assembles much more knowledge than all of the old media together.

The biggest advantage of the internet in my point of view is nevertheless the freshness and the interactivity which manifests itself most in the discussions taking place in the newsgroups and forums. Everything written in one of these discussion groups can immediately be questioned by potentially all internet users. There is a self-correcting mechanism at work which usually separates the wheat from the chaff quite soon.

More or less starting from 9-11 I have been relying a lot on Metafilter for up-to-date information. MeFi is an online community or collective weblog with currently 16,549 members. As you have to register to participate it is quite easy to evaluate contributions by other members based on their past contributions.

On Tuesday Metafilter pointed me to an article in The Weekly Standard about a punk rock festival in California. This article was also referenced by the OpinionJournal, a part of the Wall Street Journal family. The author, a certain Larry Miller, wrote about a friend of his named Jack Burditt who went to the festival with his daughter. The relevant bit started with Miller stating to his friend that he had never heard of a band called Buzzcocks and goes on:

The strange thing after that post is that the people just continued posting as if nothing had happened but after another comment by a festival goer it became obvious that the story was totally false:

So that is why I trust 16,549 people online more than any newspaper or tv station in the world.

There is no one here anymore My new blog is called close your eyes. I hope it loads faster than this page.

(last post from old blog)

A sign of life I am about to move to antville. Please stay tuned. Details and link later.

(from old blog)

Referral faking According to my Sitemeter people came visiting my site via Cornered Whispers and (title pending). What leaves me puzzled is that none of these sites has a link to mine, not even a random link like via the Indieblogs webring or via Blogsnob textads. I can really live without these fake referrers. They are worse than spam. I look at them, search for the link to my blog with no avail and usually can't refrain from reading a little to see if they are interesting. Needless to say most of them aren't. What a waste of time. Actually wouldn't it be a good promotion for my weblog to link to hundreds of others weblogs, to click on all the links and then to remove them again? The titleless blog from above had at least a nice motto by Aldous Huxley: "Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."

Why I don't post right now Regular readers of this blog must have realised that I got a little bit tired of writing here. One reason is (I have to admit) that I don't really have to say anything. Another is that a lot of my energy in the last couple of weeks got into (you won't believe it) trying to learn inline skating. I must be the worst skater in the world. When Catherine, me and some friends skate around Frankfurt I am always the slowest and last. I sweat like hell and I think it is not because of the exercise but because of the fear to fall. I never did roller skating, downhill skiing or ice skating when I was young. I am fascinated by the challenge to roll on eight wheels. It is like starting to walk the only difference being that I didn't realise how difficult it was to walk on two feet when I was one or two years old. What else did I do recently? I started the following two threads at I Love Music:

• Free music for music webloggers (an interesting but I think doomed idea, applications are closed for now)
• Ministry. S&D. And I participated in the following discussions at ILM (because right now I prefer to talk to others than to blog for myself):
• The The: C/D, S&D
• What Do US Pop Musicians Have That UK Ones Don't?
• ABBA: Classic Or Dud?
• Jacques Dutronc
• Satie's Trois Gymnopedies: Classic or Dud?
• ILM Snapshot: The Last Five records you bought pt 2 (The one-year anniversary edition!)
• Interpol - Ian Curtis reincarnated?
• neneh cherry's homebrew: isn't it better than overrated raw like sushi?
• After The Goldrush And some others which I don't want to remember now.

Tired of the internet Somehow I am suffering from information overload these days. I don't know how many blogs I am following but I suppose it must be more than a hundred. Then I read a couple of news sites and my extensive weekly paper. And a Sunday paper. It is all too much. Sometimes I would just like to shut myself in without any connection whatsoever to any media. I don't find the time to blog and to think about myself and my life. Though I have a lot of ideas of themes I could write about. But blogging seems to be such a futile exercise in the moment. In the last weeks I forced myself to post something every two days but I usually posted links as I didn't feel like writing something. The strange thing is that finding worthy links takes much more time than writing something yourself. And it is much more frustrating as you have to go through such a lot of boring stuff, you don't have the satisfaction of creating something yourself and there is hardly any feedback. Yes, feedback is the magical word. I didn't get too much in the past weeks and I would be grateful to know if anyone cares for this weblog. There are almost one thousand visitors per day but how many readers are there and how many people are regulars? Sorry for this boring and depressive post. Tonight I will see Do Make Say Think (thanks for the tip Wortmetz) from Toronto who are on the same label as Godspeed YBE! at the university and tomorrow Sonic Youth who will play in Cologne. And I am very much looking forward to those concerts. So I guess I will have something to write about soon.

Clevere Geschäftsleute Gestern beim Aufruf der Seite eines nicht ganz unbedeutenden Onlinehändlers, bei dem ich gelegentlich schon eingekauft habe, traute ich meinen Augen kaum, ob dieses genialen Vorschlags: "Alexander F****, verdienen Sie EUR 217,70 Verkaufen Sie Ihre Amazon.de-Käufe bei Amazon.de. " Wollen die sich jetzt zur stark überteuerten Onlinebücherei entwickeln, oder was? Einmal an einem Kunden verdienen, reicht wohl nicht mehr, um bei der Bilanz in die schwarzen Zahlen zu kommen. Aber immer noch besser als Bilanz fälschen, oder? P.S. Au weia, um so viel Geld für Secondhandzeugs zu kriegen, muss ich aber schon ganz schön Kohle bei denen gelassen haben.

Meta

• People who read my blog using a weblog monitor like blo.gs or weblogs.com should update their weblog list in case they want to continue reading me. From now on I ping the weblog name "sax and sunshine" to weblogs.com instead of "sx and sunshine" with the "" standing for the most common letter in the alphabet.
• Google has finished its' monthly crawl. Unfortunately my page rank went down from six to five and I am now no. 4 (not counting websites twice) for the infamous "s*x"-query. I can't believe it. I suppose the number of visitors per day will exceed the one thousand mark soon. The measures I took to repel people looking for smudgy stuff will probably only take effect after the next crawl.