...against bLog-spammers. ok, if those guys would at least spam cool URLs with awesome content, but it's just sh**. who's interested in mature women having sex with horses, swallowing cum, getting raped by big hung black men, drinking piss and getting spanked? NO ONE! it must be YOUNG women, not mature ones - but they don't get it. so, i've taken the step that hurts me pretty much. i included one of those "can you read these wiggly, crossed-out, skewed, and rotated characters?"-images, which tells you the ... uh ... secret code you can enter to get your comment posted on my site. in order to keep spammers out, it lacks a bit of user friendliness. so, if you accidentally enter the wrong code the first time you loaded the comment-page you have to copy your comment, reload the site and re-enter your comment. sorry for this inconvenience, but actually comments are pretty rare on this bLog, so who cares about user-friendliness? and hey, my characters are NOT wiggly, crossed-out, skewed or rotated - cool, isn't it? if no one comments on my boring stuff here, maybe i'll switch to the old system again, so i get at least some comments. well, feel free to try it out. i think it _should_ work (yes, in theory). tech-talk from now on: i used Image::Magick to annotate a string into the JPEG file and then compare some superly secretly calculated hash-sums of both the input-string and the original-string. if they match, it's either a cool comment by some cool reader of my cool boring log (which would be pretty cool), or some poor little child in india/china/russia that has to enter comments to super highly secured anti-botish blog-comment scripts (which is definitely extremely uncool) by hand, like the one i am using now. well, let's see if it helps. ps: tech-talk comment on my SE-k750i will be posted soon...

yow. on tuesday i got some presents from various people. first of all a cool remote-control for my canon eos350d from zombiequeen. this little helper definitely will come in handy. can't wait to use it and try it out. secondly, some office-coworkers bought a pretty ingenious present. a "hello kitty stamper set deluxe". hello kitty stamper set deluxe so on this tuesday (nearly) all co-workers were running around with hello kitty prints on their hands. some of them asked for it, some had to be persuaded; but in the end, i guess all of them liked it - if not, at least i definitely did. although the colour is declared as "non toxic" (at least it said so on the package) it is pretty non washable. so, even days later, we still have those prints on our hands (though already pretty paled). additionally i got a new mobile-phone on wednesday. a sony ericsson SE-K750i (there will be a tech-bLog entry within the next few days about accessing this device under linux). my first impression is, that it is a pretty smart phone with loads of nifty features i'll probably will never use. but it was reported to be easily accessible from linux via USB-cable. so i thought if bluetooth would fail, at least i have this alternative way to transfer data (calendar, SMS and phone book entries) and any other files like mp3s, camera images, themes, etc. so loads of new toys to keep me from being bored, yippieh!

it's the (first, second) third time zombiequeen and i have been to this small, but really lovely zoo close to linz, on the poestlingberg. they have a large amount of animals and the sizes of the cages seem to be very ok for the animals. according to the behaviour of the animals, they seem to live with that very well - no stimming, no signs of auto-aggressions. zombiequeen especially wanted to see the alpacas (she already fell in love with these animals in walding) and "garo", a little panda bear we saw for the first time (though i doubt this really is a panda-bear, but the sign said so, and it looks so absolutely damn cute). garo used to hide the other times we have been to the zoo, but today garo was a real poser - lucky us! alpaca // panda bear(?) "garo" i was specifically interested in getting good pictures of the lynx this time. and i'm glad i got what i was looking for. i guess it was the warm weather and the sunshine that almost all animals were in their outdoor cages instead of the indoor-cages, they usually stayed in when we visited the zoo. also we got to see apes delousing each other on spots where one normally wouldn't expect lice. but they all seemed to enjoy it, so i guess there's nothing wrong with that. lynx // delousing apes see more pics here.

last week was my graduation, and as a present from our "alma mater" (read: university of applied science hagenberg) we got an edimax ew-7317ldg - an absolute cool device. it is a wi-fi scanner and an usb-wlan adaptor for USB. the scanner works in stand-alone mode too, the wlan adaptor of course only when connected to a usb bus ;) edimax ew-7317ldg since i do not have any windows installed, and my laptop runs debian i tried to find out how to get the stick working. and here it is (ok, those that are not interested in tech-talk, skip this bLog-entry, there will be no non-tech info below this point): although there's support for zd1211 and zd1211rw in kernel 2.6.18 these versions did not work for me - there was a firmware-conflict. instead i used the debian package "zd1211-source", which installs the tarball (also available at the download-section at the zd1211 homepage) plus a few helper files that makes installation on debian easier (yeah, the "./debian/rules" stuff, for those familiar with debian). no matter in which you install the drivers, it is absolutely necessary to change a setting in the included Makefile! "ZD1211REV_B=0" has to be changed to "ZD1211REV_B=1" otherwise the driver wont work. after doing the change, run either "make && make install" or use the debian way, via "apt-get install zd1211-source; cd /usr/src/modules/zd1211; ./debian/rules binary-modules; dpkg -i ../../zd1211-module-2.bla.fasel-tralal_la; modprobe zd1211b;". after loading the module, dmesg or /var/log/message should show up this: if not, it's probably because some other zd1211-module version is loaded, like zd1211 or zd1211rw. unloading all zd1211-modules and reloading the correct module should solve it. next, a "ifconfig wlan0 up" should bring up this log-message. next, configure wlan0 as any other wlan device via iwconfig(8), like adding a specific essid via "iwconfig wlan0 essid nostromo". once done, output of "iwconfig wlan0" should look like this: voila, online! :)

today zombiequeen and i enjoyed a warm, sunny, and beautiful autumn-day in walding. they have a zoo there, unfortunately not as big as we both expected or were hoping. elephants, sheeps, goats, birds, monkeys, ocelot, cats, pigs, ducks, rabbits, alpacas, zebras, camels, llamas, and some others i forgot to mention here. we also wanted to see the tiger and the puma they had there, but unfortunately both of them died recently (december and november, most probably 2005?). afterwards we drove to aschach, drank a coffee and took a walk at the riverside of the danube. there we had fun skimming some stones, and doing some hobby ornithology. black-white llama // ocelot (purring) more pics are available here.

sue, i know her from an IRC-channel i hang in for quite a long time now, stayed at my flat for the weekend during the ars electronica festival. in return i got a very cool present from her. a poster from the giger-exhibition in vienna. the poster already is damn cool (i didn't buy one when i was at the exhibition myself - see the appropriate bLog-entry here), but even cooler is the signature on it, by hans ruedi giger himself! "f*** Nostromo HR Giger", it says. "f***" most probably stands for "fuer", but maybe it's also "fuck" - who knows. in any way, it's absolutely yammi! i still have to decide on which wall i will put it.

although we planned not to visit any LNdM in vienna again in 2005, we have been in vienna on this day. so we decided to visit only one museum since getting to other museums took us so long last year. therefore we drove to the city at 21:30 to meet with h4nni and "hoppelchen" (yop, that's the way h4nni calls her friend matthias). then we went to a pub to get some coffee (or beer, for the bavarian part of our crew). since the two were visiting museums since 18:00 they were already exhausted. they gave us their tickets (yippieh!), as they drove home afterwards. so, at about 00:00 we entered the natural history museum vienna. this year it was the first floor we had a closer look at, as last year we were in the basement. h4nni and h0ppelchen // natural history museum as usual, more pics are here. unfortunately there was not too much time left, so i have taken only a few pics.

here's the promised report from the holidays in crete with zombiequeen - i know a little late, but somehow i had no time to write it, up to now. day 1: unfortunately our flight had two and a half hours delay for departure. so we arrived at 01:30, local time, at the hotel. pretty exhausting so far. at the airport in vienna, waiting // the shuttle-bus to our hotel but fortunately we had plenty of time to relax for the rest of the day, as it was rainy, dull, and cloudy all day long. so we examined the surrounding area a bit and had a nice walk at the seaside, which was very close to our hotel (i think it was about 250m walk). the hotel was ok, the food they served - we had half-board - was excellent and about half of the stuff they offered at the buffet every evening was traditional food, which we both enjoyed. every day they served something different - yammi. we'd fatten up if we would have stayed longer. local specialities and... // ...parts of a traditional costume day 2: sunday was the first day with sunshine, beach, pool and a small trip to the next village, hersonissos - pronounced as "chersonnisos" by the locals, and "schersonnisoss" by the germans - h00ray for "mallorka" (mallorca), "sewilla" (sevilla), "schina" (china) and "schemieh" (chemistry). it took us about 10 minutes to get there. the funny thing about hersonnisos is, that i've already been there. in 2001, with my former colleagues from MTD97. it was our diploma trip. what a fortunate coincidence it was another diploma trip (though this time only with my girlfriend zombiequeen) that brought me to this village again. quite a few things had changed in hersonnisos, but most of the things still were familiar to me, like several shops, mcdonalds, the bars and pubs along the sea-side, the little church, etc. also the shop where i got my "/dev/nos" t-shirt printed, still existed - with the same dude behind the plotter. below you can see a picture of the hotel ("ilios"), we stayed at in 2001. hotel "ilios" and... // ...at the harbour of hersonnisos day 3: on monday we booked a guided tour through south crete. the bus fetched us at 07:20 from the hotel and brought us to the archaelogical site of faistos, an old excavation site which once belonged to ... ...uhm... ahm... actually i forgot all the exciting and cool stories the guide told us. anyway, ancient stones, ancient walls, ancient writings carved in stone (law code of gortyn - the eldest writing in... don't remember anymore). ah yeah, and the remains of some guy were burried there, but they were brought elsewhere because of... hm... some other guys who wanted the first guy to be forgotten (or so the story goes). pretty cool story, aeh? strike the pose... // ...at the archaeological excavation in faistos next stop was at the caves of matala, former tomb-caves and caves used for dwelling. later the caves hosted hippies that lived directly at the seashore in those caves, several meters above the sea. the caves themselves were quite low and small, i really had troubles to imagine the way they lived there. rumour has it, there's one last hippie in this area (but probably not living in one of those caves anymore, since they all seemed abandoned). he would have gone mad anyway, since nowadays matala is quite tourist-orientated. beach of matala, with the... // hippie-caves next to the shore next stop was in spili, a "typical crete village" (as all the other villages we took a break in, with each of our guided tours). in fact, they typically look like tourist ghettos. tons of busses, bringing tourists to buy all the "typical crete handcraft/food/etc". well, we've seen this one, we've seen it all - typically. a typical gas-station, and... // typical electricity equipment in spili day 4: tuesday was some kind of a guided catastrophy. we planned to hike the samaria gorge, an 18km long walk to the shore, where a boat is waiting for you at the exit to take you to the nearest bigger harbour. our bus trip started at 05:20 and it took us several hours to fetch all the others that wanted to take this tour too. but after about 5 hours of bus driving our guide told us we can not take the tour through the samaria gorge as it was too stormy for the boat to land at the gorge's exit. therefore we decided to drive to the imbros gorge instead. this gorge is only 11km long, and an easier variant of the gorge we originally planned to walk through. the estimated time to pass the gorge was 4 hours, we did it in 3 hours and the bavarian school-class that booked this tour too, finished it in about 2 hours. we both really enjoyed this hiking day, though it was a bit exhausting to sit in a bus for approximately 13 hours to get to your destinations. alternative ways to pass the gorge, and... // the exit on our way home we had stops in a typical crete village (of course), another excavation site (i unfortunately forgot the name), and another historic and important place (although it seemed more like they put a statue of some guy there just to make the bus stop at just another tavern to get tourists buy drinks, snacks and souvenirs). another ancient ruin // sunset in crete day 5: next day, wednesday, again ancient ruins, but this time of much bigger scale: knossos. i've already been there on my second holidays on crete back in 2002, but - as for the first time - it was impressive again, like the technology (e.g. sewage water system), the size, building houses with several floors and getting all the raw material there to build such a huge palace. pretty cool was a little cat that sat on a way where hundreds of tourists walked along. some ignoring, some petting the cat. i stopped in front of the cat, kneeled down to stroke the cat, as the cutie suddenly jumped on my knees, lying down, closing the eyes, purring and snoozing. no shyness at all - i was amazed. unfortunately the guide did not wait, so i had to drop the cat off again *sigh*. tourists, and... // cats in knossos although our trip to crete was post season hundreds of tourists were there. but gladly it was not too hot so waiting at all the high-lights was not too annoying. next stop where the caves of psychro. a quite big and impressive stalactite cave. i really enjoyed staying in the caves since the temperature inside was very pleasing - about 16° celsius. too cold for zombiequeen, who therefore left the cave pretty fast. the entrance, and... // inside the psychro cave afterwards we visited a typical tavern in a typical village to take a typical break. while most of the tour-members had some typical greek food, we had a typical greek coffee. the last station for this day was another region, famous for its windmills. i forgot the name. at this time of the year there are no active windmills anymore, so the bus stopped at some old windmill-ruins. again this trip was nice, and we both enjoyed it, just as all the other trips. that was it for the active part of this holiday. maybe i should mention that students have free entry to all museum, excavation sites and historical places. so the only thing we had to pay entry for was the imbros gorge - so studying SEC finally was profitable. day 6: our trips were done, so we only did smaller excursions to hersonnisos and malia, the two villages lying east and west from our hotel, both 10mins per foot away. beach impressions, part 1 and... // part 2 day 7: we left early in the morning to get the bus to the airport. at about 13:00 localtime we arrived in vienna again. to get more visual impressions, feel free to click here. thanks to my girlfriend, who made this holiday a really beautiful trip to crete. i really enjoyed every single second of it.

approximately on the 1st of october 1996 i attended my first lecture at the university of applied science in hagenberg. besides that, elections have been hold today, and i returned from my holiday from crete, greece (there will be a separate bLog-entry on this one within the next few days).

since i got this really great book, called "Katzen digital fotografieren" (publisher "Markt und Technik", ISBN 3-8272-4085-9) from zombiequeen, i got some inspiration to take some pics of lilo. and the book was worth its price! they said one needs patience, patience, and loads of... (guess what) patience! and i had patience. surprisingly, lilo was pretty patient too. although i saw she didn't really enjoy it, at least she admitted taking pics of her. lucky me! after the photo-session, lilo got some whiskas crunch, which she enjoys so much. meow. the book-cover on the left, a result of this first semi-professional "experiment" on the right. isn't she a real natural? at least a cutie... more pictures can be found here.

today was my first working day again after 16 days of absence in the office. since my life is boring, there's not too much to report, but just a few really boring things... firstly, while being at home, i finished some games i always wanted to play but never had the time to, either because i was writing my diploma-thesis, or there was no spare-time due to work overload in the company. so here's my list of games i did in approximately 2 weeks: + Unreal 2: the shooter basically is pretty ok, but i was grievously missing a real link to Unreal (aka as U99 or Unreal 1). + FarCry: not really my style of FPS, and at the end i actually got bored, so i somehow cheated by doing quick-saves and -loads. + Halflife 2: yes, that's my kind of shooter. i really enjoyed it. as much as i did HL1 back in the late 90s. i enjoyed every single level. + Halflife 2 - Episode 1: the sequel to HL2. same fun as with HL2. nice sequel, nice storyline. + Doom 3: YES! it's definitely the most tense, horrifying, and scary FPS i ever played. extremely dark, creating a great atmosphere by using sound- and lighting-effects. also the levels and monsters have a astonishing level of detail. definitely my favourite. also i like the main-menu title by chris vrenna, former drummer of NIN. maybe because it does sound like a tool-song... secondly my latest alien stuff i won on eBay arrived at the office in the meantime - yippieh... a cool alien watch on the left and some small alien figures (included with a predator-figure which i gave to lexx_ - hope he has loads of fun with it). i guess some eBay selling mum looted her son's nursery. yeah, so back to boring working-routine again. i like it - and yes, i really mean it!

while playing halflife2 - episode1 yesterday night, i suddenly heard a big bang and the ceiling was illuminated by a bright orange light. at first i thought it was a firework, or some kind of bengal fire. so i rushed to the window to have a closer look. well, it was a car that caught fire. strange enough the fire brigade was already there. so i grabbed my camera and took some pictures. a few more pictures can be seen here... oh, and by the way, i finished halflife2 - episode1. pretty nice sequel, and i can't wait to get the second episode. well, besides those two "events" nothing really unboring happened, so stay tuned for more boring stuff! i'm pretty sure there will be loads of it in the future...

well, nothing really worth to mention, but just to keep on writing my bLog, and since my sick leave will last for a few more days, here's another entry. staying at home, forced to do nothing is really enjoyable (let's see how long i will still enjoy it). i finished unreal 2, halflife 2, and bought halflife 2-episode 1 today to do a little gaming. additionally i bought an eskimo music-box (a box with 10 different ice flavours and a bonus CD) to get a cool CD by christina stuermer, "nie genug". the single-CD also includes the tv-spot for an eskimo advertising spot. another "high-lite" of this day was this police-duo (one man, one woman) in front of our flat. no clue why they had their guns with them, most probably a bank robbery took place somewhere. so, here's another proof for my really boring life, but these days it's really enjoyable and pleasing...

yeah, on the 29th of july i did my first bLog-entry. but since it was not based on the date itself, but rather on the celebration that was on this specific day, namely the "System Administrator Appreciation Day", which is on the 28th of july this year, i celebrate my bLog's first anniversary. yippieh! hooray! oh yeah, my colleagues sent me an eCard this year, showing a superman-like sysadmin fixing all the broken stuff. absolutely appropriate! just like my real life! amazing! i was moved to tears - honestly! now some stuff from yesterday... firstly, i paid a visit to c-na_ to see her little cat mona. since mona will move away from hagenberg, the last chance to see this cute little pussy for the last time. lucky me, i had my camera with me, so i took some pics... meow - what a cutie! for more pics of mona, follow this link. hm... yesterday some colleagues and me went to the whisky-museum (mind the missing "e"!) in steyregg. it was a birthday present to our boss primarily, and anyone interested could join. in the museum we saw loads of bottles of old whisky, whiskey, both blended and single-malted, and heard loads of facts and history. this was the theoretical part for warm-up in the beginning. took about half an hour, pretty interesting! then, for the practical part, six bottles of hand-picked whisky-flavours were offered from our "whisky-tour-guide" thomas neuhauser. starting from very mild to pretty hard stuff. i just smelled each of them, but didn't drink any, since i do not like the hard stuff. unfortunately my colleagues seem to be well trained, none of them tumbled or babbled - pretty impressive! get more visual impressions of this right here.

yesterday GangMan got a nice present from his girl- friend c-na_. she organised a quad-bike and a place to ride this thing. several other people from hagenberg, namely Eliza, Ro, cypher23, lexx_, marco1475, nipes, and y2uk, were invited to join them too. so was i, but i preferred to take pics of this event. yeah, so here they are... thanks to c-na_ for the invitation.

today DM04 had their graduations in the "redouten-saele" in lince. nice event but unfortunately it was way too hot. zombiequeen got her diploma and is now officially a Mistress of Science (MSc) - yippieh! oh... last week i finally handed in my diploma-thesis. my exam will be on the 13th or 14th of september, then my courses are over. so is my need for studying any longer. the two years were fine, and i had loads of fun and learned a lot, but for now it's enough. as usual, here are the pics from the graduation. some are unfortunately a bit blurry. it was pretty dark in the room, and i was too far away to use any flash-light. yet, they should give a good impression of how it was.

congratulations on your MSc exam, zombiequeen! also congrats to all the other students that passed their final exam and are now either "BSc", "DI(FH)", or "MSc".

the annual seminar from the RISC software company took place from the 29th of june to the first of july 2006. this year we did a trip to gosau. besides the usual stuff, like presenting the company's balance throughout the last years, and the assets it gained, we did some hiking too. the first tour on friday the 30th of june took us to the zwieselalm. the tour lasted about 4 hours and was slightly exhausting in the beginning and the end, since the path was pretty rampant. but the middle part was absolutely ok (see the picture below on the left). the weather was pretty ok too, since it was cloudy all the time, but unfortunately a bit rainy too from time to time. due to some heavy storms within the last few days some areas of the wood we were walking through were destroyed. it really looked like a battlefield (see the picture below on the right). the last hundred meters to the cablecar station we got a cow escort. funny somehow. they joined us, and walked along with us for quite a long time. the next day, the 1st of july, we had a trip to the koppenbrueller-hoehle, a stalactite cave. inside the cave it was dark, cold and very humid. we got a guided tour, which did not last too long since most parts of the cave were flodded anyway, again due to the heavy rainfalls within the last few days. so the tour lasted only about half an hour. but it was really wonderful inside (for those that are not so sensitive to chillness and dampness). all in all it was really a nice break to my daily routine on the diploma thesis writing. a little strengthening, fresh air, nice people (including zombiequeen) around, and loads of fun with my co-workers. more pics are available here.

today y2uk came and brought some stuff i ordered at eBay. since it saves a lot of post and package costs, and y2uk didn't mind to bring the stuff here it was delivered to his german address. yeah, so i got some more alien-stuff for my collection. one from halcyon, hand coloured (the one shown on the left picture), and another item from kenner, now called hasbro, i could not really identify by now (the one shown on the right picture). the only picture i found on the net is located here. besides that i got two more volumes of makoto kobayashi's comic "what's michael?". so i have volume one to four. i think that's all translated comics available by the time of writing. if you have a cat, get these comics. you'll find your cat described on every single page of these books. absolutely wonderful. absolutely recommendable.

as already boringly logged in this bLog-entry, some friends from hagenberg and i went to the helnwein exhibition at the lentos museum in lince. almost by accident i took a picture of a lady looking at "the golden age". taking a closer look at the picture at home, i found out that this was actually really a great shot. some might already know this picture, but for those who don't, here it is again... as i had concerns about copyright issues, since helnwein's picture was really taking up a lot of space on my picture, and at least i should and wanted give him credits, i sent an email to the address listed on the artist's website. a few days later i got a reply. it was written by g. helnwein's assistant named lorie. she said mr. helnwein gave his permission to publish this picture on the internet, but they would also like to have permission to put my photograph on their website too. wtf? permission to put my photograph on their website? i replied that it would be a great honour and pleasure for me if they would do so. and, well... they did so! take a look here.

yahoooo! today my little plush chestburster which i purchased by an eBay auction arrived. the replica is even bigger than i thought. it says "life-sized" - wow. actually if a being of this size was inside my ribcage my lungs would be compressed that much, that i would suffocate. or my heart would stop beating. but hey, it's just a film! even the third part of a quadrology, where the alien-queen chestburster appears for the first time (besides the dog-chestburster). it's cuddle-time! yippieh...

oh yes. i've seen it. i've been looking at it. i've been staring at it. i've been glaring at it. and i've been gazing at it. i was standing right in front of it. i was close to it. so close, i could almost touch it. i was as close as possible to it. and i've examined it. for minutes. and i enjoyed every single second. i've been surveying it from every possible angle. from top to bottom, from the front to the rear side, from the left to the right side. i admit, i almost drooled. i admit, i almost forgot about my environment. my eyes were fixated on it, and i admired it. the prop. the film prop. the film prop of alien 1. the original head of the ALIEN! unfortunately the years have afflicted it. but still one could see the wires and cables that were used to move the lips, the mouth, and the jaws. the coating was totally removed, either intentionally or because of decay - i don't know. it was pretty impressive (as one might guess from my words before). you can have a look at it yourself at the h.r.giger exhibition in the kunsthaus in vienna. loads of famous paintings are there. i was surprised of the seize some of the images have. again pretty impressive. oh, and you can also have a closer look at the harkonnen furniture. cool chairs actually, i had the honour to sit in one back in the 1980's, when i was on vacation via interrail and stayed a few days in zuerich. in chur there is the famous giger-bar where i drank a cafe. really nice cafe and nice inventory they have there. oh, and when i was in zuerich, i opened up the telephon-book, looked for "giger" and found his number. so i called there, if i could have a look at his garden, which i knew from television reports. unfortunately h.r.giger himself was not in zuerich at this time as his secretary told me, but i could have a look whenever i'd like to. that was really cool! unfortunately back in those days digital cameras were not affordable (maybe they even weren't produced yet - i don't know), but i have taken some analogue pictures, which i'm too lazy to scan right now. all in all i can really recommend this exhibition.

today the hagenberg beach masters 2006 took place. so zombiequeen and i drove to hagenberg to have a quick look at what was going on at this event. loads of beach volleyball players were there. all in all i guess it was about 16 teams. good music (yeah, i heard david hasselhoff two times within 2 hours), i guess good food and drinks (though both of us were either thirsty nor hungry) and nice people. well, nothing more to add, but of course the gallery, which you can see here.

zombiequeen and i decided to take a (half-)day off from our diploma thesis work and so we went to the zoo on the poestlingberg. a revisit actually, as we have already been there in october, 2003 (*). unfortunately we missed the panda "garo" again. its cage was a construction site. unlucky us. but we took comfort in all the other animals we saw. there were wallabies, monkeys, birds, lynxes, guinea pigs, roe deer, strange rodents, llamas, badgers, turtles, donkeys, snakes, geckos, fishes, rabbits, hamsters, coatis, and a puma(!). see all those cute animals here.

all right, once again a colourful(!), exciting(!!),and breath-taking(!!!) story will interrupt the boringness of this boring log, see (and read) yourself... once upon a time, ...some girl... brought some ...camels... to a outdoor area near the lentos museum in lince, close to the danube. ...cypher23,... ...nipes,... and i decided to go there to pay a visit to some girl and her camels. later, ...sina... and ...GangMan,... ...JG^,... and other ...cool people(?)... joined us. initially only two, namely sina and GangMan, were brave enough to climb and ...ride... those huge animals. only by putting on the appropriate ...protection suite... also JG^ accepted the dare and overcame the challenge. brave them! to celebrate the heroic deeds the fellowship went inside the lentos museum (since they had free entrance as camel-guides and -trainees) and took a closer look at various exhibits, like a painting by gottfried helnwen, showing a ...marilyn manson portrait, and other pictures... other stuff one could see was some arabic, nomadic related stuff like ...funny hats and hot chicks... oh before i forget to mention, of course they all lived happily ever after... see the whole story here...

oh well... seems this will be another tech-entry to my bLog. this time it's about the sigma lens i got today, delivered by the postman (ringing two times!) at 07:00 in the morning. brrrr.... so i got the pretty huge package with my sigma 70-300/F4-5.6 APO DG MACRO(*) lens for my eos inside. though low-cost equipment, i was told it is a good lens, and what i get is absolutely ok for the price i paid. here are some sample pics with my standard lens (18-55mm) and the new sigma (70-300mm) so one can get an impression of the zoom-factor. 018mm & 055mm 070mm & 300mm perfect. i really like it. additionally it's pretty light-weight (530g) and small (76.6x119.5mm). it perfectly fits into my bag along with the cam with the other lens applied to it. i'm sure this will be very useful in the future... oh... and of course the obligatory picture of lilo ;) the poor little cat didn't notice i was taking a picture of her, because otherwise she would have ran away. instead she was looking curious in my direction as i called her name. guess she wanted something to munch. thanks to the long distance i had, she was not suspecting anything unusual. meow, gotcha!

Well, two times a year the urfahraner fun fair takes place at the danube's riverside. this means lots of people, fewer parking lots, lots of closed roads, and fewer jogging routes for me. so, to summarise it, usually it sucks. big time. but i was - as nearly every year - persuaded to go there. this year it was foo^ and michele. but they did not trick me into doing any fun fair ride. no way. instead i was really lucky taking some pics of those two when having fun with "X-treme", some fun fair ride for the brave, fearless, and ... masochistic ones. the strange thing about it was, that michele really seemed to have fun and wanted to take another ride right away. well, foo^ was not so delighted about this idea and refused this proposal. days later michele and i decided to take some pics of the fireworks that are usually scheduled for thursday and saturday during the week of the fun fair. unfortunately it was not the second saturday as we assumed, but rather the first saturday. bad luck, no fireworks. ok, instead we were using the opportunity and took some pics of the fun fair from the other side of the danube. great fun. yow, not much to add, but the links to the picture galleries of course. so, here they are: gallery_01, and gallery_02.

ok, this is a linux and tech bLog-entry today. more or less a reminder for if i will ever be in a situation like i was several hours ago, and to help people to shorten the time wasted on debugging and fixing. for all those that are neither interested in a) technical stuff, b) being a ONE customer using umts, or c) linux shell-stuff i apologise, but good news for you: you can actually skip the rest of this article. still reading? yippah, let's get on... today i got to test a umts card by phone-/internet-service-provider ONE. i got the novatel wireless inc. merlin U630 card. the first (though unfortunately not working) setup was made as described to this site. most values do not work for a correct ONE setup, so they had to be adjusted. additionally i could not find any site that gave me a running config, so here is the guide which made this card work for me: at first make sure you have those tools installed (package-names are for a debian-system): remark: ping and minicom are optional and for debugging purpose. secondly check if the card was found and initialised correctly by the kernel (make sure module "serial_cs" is loaded...) here's a minicom session done initially for debugging purposes: the first script involved is called /etc/ppp/umts.chat: "<PIN>" is the pin as provided by ONE. the second script, "umts" contains these fine lines: "ttyXX" is the device the card gets assigned to. check dmesg(8) for more infos. and to put all the pieces together, finally my script combining all this stuff: and here is some output by the script... yeah, online! ;)

yow. due to really annoying, frequent spam entries to my bLog site, i decided to disable it a few months ago. now i had some time to patch the existing writeback plugin written by Rael Dornfest to do at least a little check for a bit of intelligence. the patch now requires to enter a random four-digit number into a text field. it's basically like the graphical version of blogger.de or other mainstream blog hosters. i think/hope this more simple version will do it's job, since i doubt spambot coders will adopt their bots to spam my little bLog. so i feel pretty safe now. aehm... yeah, of course comments are welcome on this development.

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 somewhere. 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 committed. 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 immediately 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. surprisingly cheap, actually, i thought it would cost much more. well, at least on this point i was lucky...

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 maintenance or power break- down, or a stupid bot-owner killed the wrong process). honestly, what would the irc-world be without bots? boring, unorganized, 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)

since this will be a longer bLog-entry, i will add some nice handpicked 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 unfortunately 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 promenade, glancing at the various shopping windows. you find everything there for a luxury shopping tour - perfumes, cars, disney, jewellery, expensive restaurants (amongs McDonald's 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 asymmetric 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 impressive 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 exhausting 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 metres 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 buried. 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 morrison (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 graffiti 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 instead 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 relaxing 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!

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!

yeah, since it seems to be quite in fashion to have a guest bLogging, i thought i offer this "privilege" to someone who is valuable for me too. so here it is, the first guest-bLog-entry, done by... lilo. and here is what she has to tell the world: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- b ngyb<F4><F3>jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj \ jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj \ jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjhnopppppppppppppppppppppppp \ ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp \ ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp \ ' l5.tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt6ö rf mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm \ mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm \ mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmpoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo \ oooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO \ OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO_Ä m ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,xy <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< \ <<<<<s6ewzwezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz'''''''''' \ '''''''''''''''''ööppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp fgvvvvvvvv \ vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv ü qa \ ß»ðððððððððððððððððððððððððððððdddddddddddddddddddd \ ddddddddddddddddhjnewöö<F7>67äzrxzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzäääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääääää66666bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb \ bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb \ bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb \ bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb \ bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb \ bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbbbbbb5b4r888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 \ 888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 \ 888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 \ 888888888888bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb \ bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb ppäääääää ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- line-breaks (marked with a back-slash) have been inserted by me arbitrary. thanks to lilo for this really unboring-log-entry. i feel lucky, at least my cat has something to tell the world...

a four day holiday trip to kirchberg in tyrol with zombiequeen, her sister and her sister's husband, from the 20th to the 24th of february 2006. day_01: we went to "wildbichl" to visit a zoo there, but unfortunately the zoo was closed this day. damn, we went there by car about an hour, just to see the lynxes. bad luck. instead we ended up shopping in kufstein, which was pretty ok. day_02: yippieh, snowboarding on the "pengelstein". it was quite exhaustive for all of us, since we all had a massive lack of endurance and power. but it was great fun. day_03: this time snowboarding in "westendorf", but unfortunately without zombiequeen, since she had to do some stuff for the university. this day i had two really bad falls, so (nearly) all my bones hurt. that's why i set the last ski-run aside and took the cable railway instead - much more comfortable. day_04: on our way home we stopped at the zoo in wildbichl again, this time it was really opened - yahooo, we saw the lynx! especially funny and cute were the coypus, the wild boars and the snowy owl. the zoo itself is not really big (see the map here), but it was definitely worth the little detouring. thanks to zombiequeen (her elder sissy and her elder sissie's husband) for all the fun and joy i had during these days.

it was my first time to the ITnT, that was merged from the exponet (and maybe some other exhibitions), which i had attended 3 times so far. well, the fair was not really very exciting - nor was there too much new stuff (or maybe i just didn't look close enough), except for a 3D-television that really had a great three dimensional image and effect. i didn't ask what this effect was based on, or what the used technology was, i just enjoyed the shown demos (only rendered CGI stuff, since it seems there are no cameras yet that can record in 3d, but as mentioned, i didn't ask for details). amongst the 280 exhibitors the big-players (in austria) were there too, like SAP, microsoft, 3, one, i-node, etc. but also loads of smaller companies. a pretty big area was occupied by the hagenberg delegation, like "Softwarepark Hagenberg", "FAW", "RISC Software GmbH", "FH Hagenberg", "SCCH", "Hagenberg Software GmbH", "BlueSource", etc. They all said it was a big success for them, so at least they had some profit from this fair. after i left the fair i took a walk through the prater to get to the metro station. in winter this is really a dreary place, especially if it's also rainy, foggy and windy - i really enjoyed it. visual impressions can be shared and enjoyed here.

since zombiequeen left for a trip to germany yesterday i had to spend valentine's day alone (*sigh*). but i got a really cool present - the guy from delivery service ringing the doorbell at 06:54 today in the morning handing out a big package. uh, that was the present zombiequeen was talking about already for days. so i unwrapped it and got this really cool book by hans ruedi giger - "necronomicon I & II"! wow, this book i always wanted to lay my hands on, but the hardcover version usually costs about 99EUR, so i always refused to buy one. now i have a paperback version - yippieh! thanks so much, zombiequeen for this really wonderful present - i hope you enjoy yours the same way as i do mine.

thursday: heading thursday afternoon to the railway-station, getting a train to vienna. afterwards going to a farewell-party of a friend of my girlfriend at the club2. enjoying the happy hour for cocktails, which ment i drank a lot of healthy stuff (virgins). friday: been to the SCS (large shopping mall) and bought some new miniatures from the alien movies quadrology (space jockey [01/02]; new alien [01/02]). saturday: been invited to a birthday party of a friend of ours. we met at the vegetasia, a chinese restaurant that offers traditional chinese food but all created with tofu only. so you have crispy chicken, duck, pork, ribs, etc. - and it really looks like real meat, but it actually doesn't taste like meat. instead it tastes like... hm... tofu. nonetheless a real delicious experience i can only recommend. yeah, there are some pics here. sunday: a concert i've been looking forward for such a long time: covenant + roter sand + client at the planet music. unfortunately i was not allowed to take my camera with me into the concert hall - really bad luck. another misfortune was the upcomming illness of my girlfriend which kept her from attending the concert - again really bad luck. the performance by covenant again was really superb. they played all tracks from their new album "Skyshaper" (shape it!) and loads of old fine stuff. Roter Sand was great too, although unfortunately a bit short - maybe too short. loads of well known songs too, and some (to me) unknown stuff too. Client was a bit strange and i'm still not sure what to make of this performance - maybe i just shouldn't try to. yow, this was an almost boring weekend. this is a rare occurrence, yet i thought i share it here. hope no one is disappointed... valentine's day greetings go out to zombiequeen!

^C: kosheen, intersport arena

damage hide u catch overkill chances avalanche slip & slide, suicide empty skies guilty hungry all in my head

oh yeah. there was kosheen at the posthof in linz. since zombiequeen asked me if i would like to see them too, i joined her, for i thought kosheen live would be cool. and somehow... yes, it was cool, but kosheen was quite... hm, let's say different from what i knew so far. there was the frontwoman and singer with her recognizable and unique voice and there were the two DJs. but what they performed was far from kosheen songs i knew. in fact, if would have not listened to the lyrics, i wouldn't have recognized any of their songs. pretty strange listening to songs you basically know, but don't recognize at first. on the other hand, what they made of those new versions was really enjoyable. it was more of a rave ("we're gonna raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave!", shouted by the vocalist) and was really pure techno. songs and smash hits like "Catch", "Hide U", "(Slip & Slide) Suicide", etc would have perfectly fit at any techno-parade/-party. the downside was, that after only about five or six songs one knows from their releases (and one yet unreleased song) this all really ended in a techno-party. the singer stopped singing and was merely dancing and from time to time shouting some slogans. honestly, i think she was pretty drunk - she drank one bottle of wine and had just opened another one when we left. but all in all i guess kosheen had as much fun as we had. it's an experience i can really recommend - to techno- and/or kosheen-fans. oh yeah, some pics. since i was too lazy to walk around (and the concert hall was crowded too) i had no good view to the stage. but i guess you get a slight impression of how it was (- besides all concert pics look the same if you're not in the first row, don't they?)

from the 16th to the 17th of january i had a very nice trip to graz. in the course of our tamperproof design lectures at the university of applied science in hagenberg an excursion to the philips plant in graz, gratkorn was planned. it was scheduled for the 17th of january (including an exam). so i thought it's a good idea to visit my brother and have a look at the house he and his wife are currently erecting. this is why i already left for graz on the 16th in the afternoon. unfortunately when i arrived it was already getting dark. nonetheless i got a good impression of how the completed house will look like. (in case you're interested, here are some pics of the house and the time we spent afterwards). the next day i had to get to gratkorn (which is about 20km distance from graz) to the philips plant. as i brought a colleague to the hotel the day before i already knew the way. the day at philips itself was pretty interesting and loads of fun. we got a good pizza, loads of coffee and soft-drinks, cookies, etc, etc, etc. of course i took some pics there. seing some stuff we heard about in the lectures in practice was pretty interesting. the atmosphere in the company was pretty relaxed and cosy. there are areas where people can meet to take a break. in these places taps for softdrinks (like ice-tea, orange juice, soda, apple juice, etc) are situated and every employee can get them for free. additionally you can find cookies, fruits, etc there too - and again for free. pretty impressive.

since this will be a really long (and of course boring) bLog-entry, i added some pix to spice it up and bring joy to your eyes... yow, as reported in my last boringLog-entry my girlfriend and i went to prague. the stay lasted from the 31st of december 2005 to the 03rd of january 2006. although it's the fourth time now for me (and the second time for zombiequeen) that i've been to prague, i still enjoyed this town so much. especially the gothic-style of the buildings, the statues, etc is what fascinates me most. this also includes decayed buildings and factories outside of prague. we went there by train which took us about four hours from vienna to prague. since we arrived on a smaller railway station and it was saturday the 31st of december, most shops were closed and not too many people were around. this turned out to be a problem since we didn't know how to get to our accomodation. fortunately some policemen helped us searching on a city-map hanging out at the station. it took them ages to find it, but they finally told us what metro to take, where to change to which bus-line and where to get off. they were actually the only friendly czech people we met at the station. the accomodation was fine and it took us about 30 minutes to get there from the center of prague, which is pretty ok for the "top-season", as it was announced by the booking-agency we used for our hotel (if you ever plan to go to prague, it's definitely a good site i can recommend. i used it twice to get a hotel/accomodation and the service was excellent!). later we drove back to the city again, had a good pizza, loads of impressions and loads of coffee and tee, since it was pretty cold. the turn of the year we celebrated like hundreds of other tourists and czech people near charles bridge and at the bank of river vltava. for hours the sky was lit by rockets and the streets were filled with sounds of firecrackers. after midnight we were walking around a bit to various places, all crowded with people, all happy (and maybe drunk). the atmosphere was friendly, nice and untroubled. later we tried to get home, which was more of a nightmare. although a bus was scheduled for 01:35 and 02:05 no bus arrived at the station. so we started walking and tried to get a taxi. after a very long while we finally got one that brought us home safely (there was loads of snow on the side roads). the next day (01.01.2006) we drove back to town had a really good "breakfast" (apple-pie and cappuchino) and then continued our tour through prague. although it was sunday and the 01st of january, surprisingly a lot of shops had opened. since we were pretty tired from walking all day long in the cold and still a little hangover from our "let's wait 1h for a bus that never showed up"-experience from the day before we went home pretty early and stayed in bed and enjoyed czech tv and a little reading. on the 02nd of january we planned a shopping tour through prague. zombiequeen knew a cool shop to get clothes and i wanted to get a bag for my camera. so we got up pretty early and drove to town where we arrived at about 10:15. unfortunately at this time no breakfast is served anymore - absolutely bad luck for us. there ain't even a breakfast at McDonald's - the guy looked at us in wonder when we asked for a breakfast... so we went to a normal shop, got us some pastry, some cheese, a yoghurt-drink and some sweets and had breakfast at the river vltava surrounded by seagulls. this in fact was more fun than staying in a coffee house, but also it was colder... we continued this trip and found some lovely shops, including this one with all sort of cat stuff. on the next day we had to get up early again - our train left at 10:25 from prague... all in all this was really a wonderful new year's eve and weekend. oh, and here's the link to the gallery with the pix included here and of course lots more... have fun.