General

"Dieses Weblog ist tot. Bereits den zweiten Tag. Libertad!"

Not this time, Mr. Bartolich.



For those who wonder why this blog was offline for a few days: the server where it is hosted moved from Vienna back to Linz. That's all. And nobody missed anything, everything that happened to me in the last few days was boring as hell.

I got a rather disturbing movie showing the recordings of an Apache helicopter's nightvision camera. What you can see is an Apache shooting 3 soldiers (I don't exactly know, but these pictures seem to be from Iraq, since one of the soldiers is waving with a typical scarf) with the Apache's 30 mm chain gun. This video even shows evidences of war crimes (I marked it bold in the transcript). Here my transcript of the radio communications you can here:



[can't understand] and roger.

laser range arm. outta range. fuck. range auto. right, got all the range on it.

roger. hit it.

good.

second one. hit the other one. the truck.

right, he was moving by the truck.

hit the truck, sir? is there anybody in the truck, waitin' (?) or moving?

not seein' any.

store that, auto range store.

oh, there's a guy moving right there.

firing. hit it.

target four. we'll take the other truck.

roger. wait [can't understand] by the truck.

right there.

roger.

he's wounded.

hit it.

hittin' the truck.

the truck and him! go forward and hit it.

roger.



They were shooting at a wounded enemy soldier. War is dirty, but does it have to be so dirty that US-american soldiers have to shoot at wounded soldiers using 30 mm bullets, literally letting them explode?

I'm getting forced into drawing Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams for the bubblesort algorithm. It somehow makes me feel like 15. About 5 years ago I had to do that the first time, and here in vocational school, it's not getting any better.

Currently I'm experiencing how a teacher can teach relational databases the wrong way. It's virtually impossible to explain how to bring a table into the first normal form without explaining what a primary key and a foreign key is. So nobody understood what it's actually about (except for those who knew what relational databases are all about), no, it confuses them more than it actually helps.


Her style of drawing entity relationship diagrams is also really strange, just like Access does it. That really sucks IMHO. I wish she'd use the style that I learned a few years ago at HTL Leonding. She also praises Visio to be the best tool around for drawing ERDs. I simply cannot agree. Unfortunately OmniGraffle only supports this strange "crow foot" notation for relations, which I don't like, either.

Today I had my first day at vocational school, and it totally sucked. Everything is totally boring, all the teachers are stating obvious things, and so on. The schedule is way to much (43 hrs per week!), and contains so many useless subjects. And the worst thing is that this goes on until April 23rd. But well, I have to go through that, and after that one more time for about 5 weeks, and then it's over. Forever.

On Saturday I was in the cinema, watching the new movie Underworld. Oh, well, it's 100 % trash. Actually, that's what I expected. But the plot is totally wicked: werewolves and vampires originate from one man who survived the plague in the 5th centuy (huh? wasn't the plague around the 12th century?), and who somehow absorbed genetic properties of the virus and thus got invincible (strange, eh? . So, at some point there was a big dispute between werewolves and vampires, because a (male) werewolf was in love with a (female) vampire, but wasn't allowed to marry her, because the vampires wanted to have their race pure. And that started a big war between werewolves and vampires that lasts for more than 600 years.



What is funny is what they use for fighting each other: the vampires try to kill the werewolves using silver bullets and silvernitrate bullets (which get liquid when they enter the werewolves' body, and thus can't be removed), and the werewolves fight the vampires using bullets that illuminate ultraviolet light as soon as they enter the vampires' bodies. Anyway, I don't want to spoil more, but so far, this is the background story, and as you can see, really strange.



The staging itself was relatively boring at some points, and the end was so open that a second part can be expected in case Underworld is a success (financially). A lot of shooting (why the heck can they shoot bullets after bullets from their fully automatic handgun for several minutes without any reloading?), a few really bad bullet-time-like effects, and a really bad story: this is really 100 % trash.



One highlight of the movie was the actor Erwin Leder, the Johann from the classic WW II submarine movie Das Boot. He played some kind of doctor or researcher werewolf, and I almost instantly recognized him, although he changed a lot compared to 1981. BTW: I can really recommend into having a look into Erwin Leder's filmography, it's really interesting (and sometimes funny) which roles he played so far.