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! ;)