About me

I am a freelance musician in construction work again, made in 1978. I live near Berlin, in the beautiful Havelland, where I also was born. I play the bass and sometimes the guitar in some bands, so I spend much time on the road. Sometimes I record some demos...

My musical career

was kind of straight forward:
  • With the age of 5 (1983) everything started, with children's choir and recorder-lessons...
  • 1985 I started violin lessons at the municipal music school.
  • 1992 I stopped playing the violin, in favour of my first electrical guitar and Punk-Rock!
  • 1995 I learned to love the Blues. Thanks to "East Blues Experience" and "Pass Over Blues"!
  • 1997 I had my first paid gig with my blues band "Sky's crying" named after an Elmore James song.
  • 2005, after some personnel changes in "Major Tom and the Crash Pilots" Rockband I started to play the bass.
  • 2007 I bought an upright-bass, the beginnings of "Folkadelic Hobo Jamboree". I never would have guessed, that I would learn to love this instrument so much!
  • since then I played in various bands and styles with growing success. See my bands!

While I don't make music

I apply myself to web-development in my humble autodidactical way (e.g. this web-page) or to my GNU/Linux-obsessions. (I'm very proud, that I managed to switch all my computers to GNU/Linux meanwhile! Took me some time and learning, but I'm much happier than before.) At the moment I have running:

  • My desktop-pc at home with Debian
  • me ole laptop with Debian
  • a server at the studio with Debian (most fun!)
  • a RaspberryPi3 with Raspbian (also a lot of fun!)

Furthermore, I maintain some computers of my friends with Ubuntu LTS.

For relaxation I like to fly some patterns with FlightGear, an open-source flight-simulator. In the net I'm known as chris_blues. In an humble manner I also campaign for a free Internet without (governmental) espionage.

My history with computers

is a very long story. To make it as short as possible, I'll try to restrain myself to bring up only a few notes.

  • around 1990, I got my first computer! A C64 with a tape deck called "Datasette"! Lots of marvellous games (cue: Gianna Sisters, ACE), first experiments with BASIC!
  • maybe 1993 or so, I got my first 386 with Monochrome graphics, MS-Dos and TurboPascal! Phew!
  • sth like 1997 my 486 came around! With VGA graphics! Imagine that! 256 colors!!! And 1024kB RAM!!! A sound card!!! Civ and Doom on MS-Dos made my days! :D Does anybody remember Gorilla and Nibbles? Yay! I also switched from TP to TurboC++! This landmark also produced my first selfmade (usable) programs.
  • by 1999 I made first contact with that strange OS called windows95 on a PentiumI machine. Where the heck was the terminal gone??? An nearly empty "autoexec.bat"??? It took me a great deal of time, until I noticed, that this Start-button actually was clickable! :o) By that time, I left programming, music became more and more important! Few years later, I started to study architecture. After my first semester, I found, there's only time for music OR architecture. Guess where it lead me... :-P
  • Around 2004, I built my first website with MS-Frontpage. Without internet, I needed to bring my updates to a friend on a floppy for upload! Didn't take long to realize, how this UI messed up my existing code and over time killed my site! Time to learn, how to do it myself with a simple editor! HTML baby!
  • Must have been 2007, when I first managed to install a Linux (Ubuntu 7.04). A whole new world opened up! Thanks to ubuntuusers.de!!!
  • Not so sure, but I'd guess around 2011, I started to enhance my websites with PHP. It took me 'till 2013 to meet CSS and learn how to use it!
  • 2013 I wrote my first real PHP-application, a webshop for folkadelic.de! It'd cost me a lot of sleep, coffee and beer, to get this done! But I prevailed!
  • Nowadays, I strive to free computers of their Windows-pains, and soothe them with a nice Linux! Nothing like a clean system, with all the ressources free for your actual work, not for the OS to simply exist! Every now and then, I work on my websites, trying to enhance my knowledge about HTML, PHP, MySQL and CSS.
  • Since 2017 I'm also working as a web developer and am caring, maintaining and sometimes completely rewriting different websites. E.g. semmelhaack.de (including datatransfer from internal Backend to the website and from there to ImmoScout, Immowelt oder Klainanzeigen), DESSG or also Thalia Potsdam. Sadly, from July 2022 I had no more time for this gratifying activity.