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new licence number

yesterday in the morning i got to my car as everyday. but i noticed that
my licence number at the front of my car was missing. at first i thought
maybe i lost it somwhere. so i went to the rear side of the car. the second
plate was missing too. damn. so i went to the next police station to make
a report. the officer there told me that most probably the plates were
stolen to be put onto a stolen car and then a crime (whatever sort of)
will be commited.
additionally the licence number itself will be unavailable for the next
five years. damn once more. i owned this number for over eight years now,
and it was a heirloom from my grandfather (along with the car, a honda
accord). farewell to my beloved "L @ 4727J"...
oh, if you ever encounter a car with that number, feel free to report to
the police immediatly or punch that bastard behind the wheel until s/he
is losing consciousness. then be so kind and call me please - tia.
after being to the police station and having great fun with the officer
there (i was really pleasantly surprised!) i called my insurance agent. he
said i need my factory specifications, my registration and the last positive
inspection report. ok, finding the first and second item was not too hard,
i had them in a folder at home. but the last item was hard to dig up, since
i lost the original sheet, as i never care about the piece of paper once i
get the annual inspection (MOT test) approved. so i had to call the
automobile facilities to get a copy. the problem was, i didn't remember what
facility exactly i visited for the last inspection. fortunately there were
only three possibilities. so i called each of them. of course it was the
facility that was most far away - about 25km. yuhu!
thanks to zombiequeen i could use her car to get there and back again.
today i met my insurance agent, gave him all the papers, and about three
hours later i got my new licence number. let's see if someone will steal
this one too.

all in all this crap took me about eight hours on the job and 20EUR.
suprisingly cheap, actually, i thought it would cost much more. well, at
least on this point i was lucky...

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IRCBOT-DAY

yeah, there's mother's day, valentine's day, father's day, new year's eve,
women's day, sysadmin's day, beer & blowjob day, etc.
so i decided to dedicate one day of the year to ircbots - this day, today!
the spirits that keep us informed and scheduled all year long. they are
good, never complaining about invalid input by stupid users, always patient,
always providing correct information, giving their best to serve us. every
single day of the year (except when there's a maintainance or power break-
down, or a stupid bot-owner killed the wrong process). honestly, what would
the irc-world be without bots? boring, unorganised, chaotic.

so let's worship the bots, today - for it's IRCBOT-DAY!

credits go out to those special bots:

* Bender256 (on IRC-net, owner: cypher23)
* Ro-Bot (on IRC-net, owner: Ro)
* S3B0t4Ge (on IRC-net, owner: nostromo)
* nickserv (on almost all irc-nets, except IRC-net)
* chanserv (on almost all irc-nets, except IRC-net)

* special Kudos to Carambol (ex-bot on IRC-net, owner: GangMan)

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trip to paris, from the 05th to the 09th of march 2006

since this will be a longer bLog-entry, i will add some nice hand-
picked pictures for your viewing pleasure.

a x-mess present from zombiequeen back in december 2005: a trip to
paris, france. so she booked us a hotel room from the 05th to the
09th of march 2006. and so, after a nice weekend in gumpoldskirchen,
we left for the airport in schwechat, vienna.

day_01: we left vienna airport at 18:20 and arrived at the "charles de
gaulle" airport in paris at 20:15. the first thing we saw when leaving
the plane was a hilton hotel - funny somehow. we took the RER ("reseau
express regional" - a train connecting suburbs with paris) to the 
capital. finding the hotel was pretty easy since we had a good map of
metro stations and streets. after we put our luggage into our hotel
room we took a walk through the area close to the hotel. it was very
nice.

 
 

day_02: eiffel tower. since only one pillar was opened we had to queue
for nearly about 20 minutes to get a ticket and a lift to the second
floor. i was told it usually takes much longer but it was not top season
so not too many tourists were around. one could also walk upstairs to
the second platform - but the prices for a comfortable ascent was not
much higher than the entrance for the sporty way. but we decided to go
up as high as possible - that was the third platform, which cost us
11EUR per person - i guess the price is pretty ok for what we got: an
impressive panoramic view of paris.

 
 

heading towards les champs elysees we came by the trocadero, a big place
with a nice view to the eiffel tower. but we enjoyed the nice spectacle
some japanese people gave us. see the pics...

 
 

notice the two japanese people on the lower left picture next to the
lady in white. they were posing the same way as the other two, but un-
fortunately i was too slow to take a pic of that since i needed to get
the right angle to have them lined up in a row - damn.

on the one end of the champs elysees the arc de triomphe is located,
our next stop. impressive statues and reliefs can be seen there.

 
 

afterwards we walked down les champs elysees, the famous shopping pro-
menade, glancing at the various shopping windows. you find everything
there for a luxury shopping tour - parfumes, cars, disney, jewellery,
expensive restaurants (amongs McDonalds and the french pendant called
Quick), etc. pretty amusing was the disney shop one can find there too.
they had fairy costumes for kids, plush disney figures from all films,
from aristocats to stitch. pretty weird, but people seem to like it.

 
 

next and last station for this days tourist tour was the basilica of
sacre coeur, situated on a small hill with a nice view over paris.
when we entered the church there was a mass, so we left again since
we didn't want to disturb. instead we put our focus on the gargoyles
on the outside walls. one might recognize the place from the film
"the fabulous destiny of amelie poulain".

 
 

day_03: we started our tour at the cemetery of mont parnasse. it seems
the cemeteries in france are much more beautiful than the ones we
have (except the central cemetery in vienna which has beautiful old
graves too). the layout of the graves is pretty unsymetric and seems
to be random of some sort. nonetheless a very nice place, i enjoyed
the walk.

 
 

we left the cemetery and drove to notre dame de paris the pretty famous
church (remember the hunchback and the disney films?). i mainly wanted
to see the gargoyles since i find those "creatures" so beautiful and most
of them are elegant - a bit weird since they actually were put there to
scare daemons (and also people i guess). but maybe it's because they are
somewhat similar to aliens - who knows...  the church itself was very im-
pressive inside, but again loads of other tourists.

 
 

on our way to the shopping center galleries lafayette we saw striking
students, the quartier latin and the sorbonne university. pretty ex-
hausting day, so we spent the rest of the day in our hotel room and
enjoyed some french television (and "good bye lenin" on arte in 
german with french subtitles).

 
 

day_04: last day. the louvre, the biggest museum in the world (according
to wikipedia). since it is _really_ big we decided to look at the
egyptian exhibitions and have a look at the more famous stuff like the
mona lisa, nike of samothrace, venus de milo, etc. of course no pictures
were allowed to be taken from the mona lisa. the painting itself is
actually not that impressive and i assumed the canvas itself to be a
little larger. one could get as close as approximately three meters to
it and there was an additional bulletproof glass put right in front of
it. pretty impressive for a painting i consider to be far from the most
"beautiful" one in this museum - but for sure it is the most famous one.
the egyptian exhibition was also very big and it took us several hours
to skim all the exhibits (and i'm pretty sure we missed some pieces since
the louvre is also an impressive maze). as one can see in the gallery i
took loads of cat related pix, since the cat was a holy animal to the
egyptians. i also found the mummified cats really impressive.

 
 
 

after about three and a half hours we left the museum - looking at all
this stuff makes tired too. we got a coffee at the cat cafe - though we
both wondered why it was called that way, since there was not a single
object that somehow related to a cat - maybe it's for baiting cat
lovers? success.
afterwards we went to the cemetery pere lachaise. yeah, right, the one
where jim morrison, edith piaf, moliere, frederic chopin, etc are burried.
btw, the homepage of the cemetery is really cute. have a look yourself
here. stupidly we didn't buy a map of this really big cemetery so
searching for graves of famous people was more a game of pure chance.
but at least we finally found jim morisson (by the help of a bunch of
fans i guess) and frederic chopin. honestly jim morrison's grave really
is not that impressive. i saw some pictures of smeared up gravestones
next to jim's grave. but it turned out to be a locked grave surrounded
by clean stones. well, maybe once a year they remove all the grafitis
from the nearby graves.

 
 
 
 

this cemetery was even more impressive than the one we saw in mont
parnasse. i really enjoyed this place a lot. unfortunately it started to
rain, so we gave up our search for more famous people's graves and in-
stead went on to the next tourist feature, la grande arche. a wide open,
vast area with lots of skyscrapers and buildings with glass claddings.

 
 

again very tired after all this sightseeing we drove home, had a nice re-
laxing evening, enjoyed the free (but impressively slow) WLAN access and
went to bed early, since the next day we had to check out the hotel room
early and get to the airport again to get our flight back home to austria.


thanks to zombiequeen for this really fantastic and great holiday trip to
paris. i really enjoyed the time with you in paris - every single second!

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Upgraded FreeBSD_5.3 -> FreeBSD_6.0

yow, after nearly 200 days of uptime i decided to upgrade my server to
FreeBSD-6.0. The entire procedure took several hours on my 650Mhz AMD
"Duron". the steps were as follows:
* get sources ("/usr/src") via "cvs checkout" for 6.0
* "make buildworld"            - building the world
* "make buildkernel"           - building a kernel
* "make installkernel"         - installing the new kernel
* reboot into single-user-mode - rebooting ("boot -s")
* "mergemaster -p"             - pre-merging new and old (config) files
* "make installworld"          - installing the new world
* "mergemaster"                - final merging of files
* "reboot"                     - final reboot to activate the new release

the whole procedure was pretty straight-forward and described into
detail in the handbook at the FreeBSD homepage. the custom kernel has
been altered to include quota-support now too.
after the upgrade there was a little inconsistency concerning the OpenSSH and
OpenSSL version which was fixed by using the ports version of the application
and the library.

thanks to cjm (IPv6-support), geekU (general support on the upgrade-procedure)
and laemodost (OpenSSH/OpenSSL issues) for support during the upgrade process.

a lot of fun with the new FreeBSD-6.0 to all my users!

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