General

Yes, finally, vocational school is over. While I was ranting about it in the beginning, because it sucked, I had quite some fun there. What I especially liked it when I had the chance to expose a teacher. *evilgrin*

What I also miss are the endless hours of playing Simcity 2000. I have to admit, I never played that game before, but at school, I really had a lot of time having fun with it instead of doing work assignments.


But even while I played more than I actually took part in the educational part of the school, I finished this class with a perfect report, i.e. perfect grades (= 1) in all subjects. I hope this is something that I can complete next year, too, where it would be more important.


Another thing I will miss are the breaks, that we spent with drinking yummy yummy ice tea from the vending machine, yummy yummy Schnitzelsemmerl with mayonnaise, yummy yummy donuts with chocolate icing and lots of chatting, doing stupid jokes and simple fun.

I will also miss some of my classmates I had a lot of fun with in the last 10 weeks. I hope I will see them again next year, with this year's insider jokes ("Host an Kaugummi?", "Droooogeeeen!" aka Lord of the Weed imitations, and the ever-going "hah?!?!?") all returning then.


Anyway, when school was over, we went to Linz, had a few beers, and then went to Donaulaende, to enjoy the great weather there. Later then, I met with Paula, and the others went home, while we stayed there until it got extremely windy. And because I had taken painkillers in the morning, I decided not to drink anything until the afternoon, that means I survived this day without being too drunk.

Look here. It's really stupid to auction a picture of a (valid) Diablo II CD key and then show the picture itself in the auction description. Too funny.

Right now, I'm testing NetNewsWire together with b2, but it doesn't look too sexy. Especially the category stuff doesn't seem to work. I wish I would be able to select the category manually, and enter the title into NetNewsWire's title field, and not the body. But well, I have to dig a bit more into b2's XML-RPC interface, then I will probably find out which weblog type I have to configure in NetNewsWire, since b2 isn't supported natively.

So far, everything was pretty smooth. About one hour after my lower right wisdom tooth was removed, I took one of those painkillers, and so far, I'm totally pain-free (probably the excellent Schilcher wine prolongates the effect of the painkiller ;-), and that's pretty good. What I didn't write in my last postings was that my dentist explained all details about the wisdom tooth removal, including some kind of disclaimer that he told me what he's going to do and what the risks are. He doesn't like these US-american "traditions", but he has to say it since a few months or so.

Fortunately not. My lower right wisdoom tooth was removed, and the doctor prescribed me painkillers. Fortunately, my dentist is pretty good, so he did a good local anesthesia: the right side of my lower lip and the chin is totally dumb, and so far, I don't feel any pain.

Tomorrow (no, actually today, April 21st that is), I will have a nice visit at my dentist, where I will mount his "torture rack". I already fear it, since my teeth are not in the greatest state (well, most of them are, except for the wisdom teeth, which are partially caries-afflicted), and my lower right row of teeth is hurting so badly that I feel the pain in my right ear, which pretty much sucks. So, I already feel that this is going to be a big mess tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then in a few weeks. Well, at least my dentist is humane, and gives me a local anesthesia, unlike those butcher-like sadistic dentists you usually find in public hospitals.

According to the GCC 3.4 ChangeLog, UnixWare support in GCC has been obsoleted. This is really great news. Totally unrelated, SCOX's stocks are going down the drain. Yahoo! Finance has a nice overview over the last 5 days, while NASDAQ gives you a nice 3-month overview.

Last Chaos Communication Congress, Harald Welte of netfilter fame presented a number of methods to find out and prove GPL violations in Linux-based firmware images that today can be found in a number of end-user hardware. Today, I found his new page gpl-violations.org, which currently only houses a few mailing lists related to GPL violations, but which will (IMHO) become an authority for GPL violation reports and how to fight them.

...use Latin or Greek salutations and closings. This page names a few and shows examples on how to use them. I especially like the "salutem plurimam dicit" and the "cura ut valeas" phrases, since they're even elite within Latin, where "salve""and "vale" are commonly used (well, at least when I had to learn latin in school).

I found this really funny piece of email scam: the author of this email claims to be the brother of a Nigerian astronaut, who was on a secret Soviet space station when Soviet Union broke down, and his seat in the return capsule was used for cargo instead of him. Since then (i.e. 14 years), he's being supported by Progrez support flights. And then comes the usual "lots of money on bank account, need to transfer it blablabla" stuff. But the first part is really funny.

As announced on Indymedia, the VolxTheaterKarawane took part in a competition about finding a good slogan for Benita Ferrero-Waldner for the current election campaign for the Austrian president, and 5 of their slogans got into the top 10. And today, they met Benita and asked her a number of unpleasing questions.



For those who don't know: the VolxTheaterKarawane is a group of Austrian performance artists. During their journey to the protests in Genua 2001, they were arrested by the Italian police and arrested for 3 weeks for having bats with them (those "bats" were juggle sticks, actually). After they were arrested, Benita Ferrero-Waldner called them "well-known trouble-makers", which is, to be honest, pure bullshit. She also asserted that the arrested people refused to take the lawyer that was provided by the Austrian consulate. The truth: there was no lawyer. And while the people from all the other European countries came free because the country's politicians intervened, Benita Ferrero-Waldner did absolutely nothing.



So, people, please don't vote for her. During the election campaign, she always asserted that she cared about all Austrians in foreign countries when they were in trouble. Well, she did care about the Austrian tourists that were kept as hostages in Algeria, but she absolutely didn't care about the VolxTheaterKarawane in Genua, she even accused them to be trouble-makers.

Iraq is going to be America's second Vietnam, at least I predict it. US forces is getting into more and more heavy clashes with guerilla-like groups, and all the fights are getting heavier and heavier. They even need Apache helicopters for air support, in a fight inside of Baghdad. The Iraqi guerilla forces aren't necessarily well-equipped (nor was the Viet-Cong), but they are in their ten-thousands, everyone with a gun, and extremely motivated to drive the Americans out of their country.



That is the connection to Vietnam, IMHO. The enemy is highly motivated, and the (thought to be superior) US-Americans aren't really able to smash them down. The moral is getting lower and lower every day, and I predict that the point is not too far where the war against the Iraqi guerilla forces will be basically unwinnable (just like after the Tet offensive). Even Ted Kennedy shares a similar opinion, as he today called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam".

John Hargrave was annoyed by all the Viagra spam, so he decided to try ordering Viagra online. For the complete article, see here. One part of the article that I really enjoyed reading was about banners showing people who look like doctors trying to make some guarantee about the medicament's quality:

Here's Dr. Alec Broers from the renowned medical journal s95forcheapmeds.nepzzz.com, who claims "This product is 100% SAFE medically tested in labs, and by myself personally." Which means that Dr. Broers is impotent. Ha ha! "I happen to know this drug will work," went the second (and more revealing) part of Dr. Broers' endorsement, "because I myself have a limp, sagging penis." You'll notice they don't mention what kind of doctor he is. That's because he is a doctor of love.

See here. Some quotes from the comic:

"You are huge. That means you have huge guts!"

"Berserker pack - gone. Feelings of invincibility - over."

"Aaah! Chainsaw! The great communicator!"

I just came back from watching "Gothika". First of all, its genre is both horror and, well, thriller. But every (good) horror movie has its very own style on how to be frightening. Just like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining uses the sinister music and The Exorcist tries to be frightening by letting the obsessed girl use a lot of swearwords (which makes it no frightening at all, but more like boring, or at the best, funny, or are you frightened by "your mother sucks cocks in hell"? )), Gothika uses the element of surprise, and that makes it extremely frightening and gray. In fact, this is the very first time in a horror movie that I actually heard people (not just women, but also men) scream out loud because they were so frightened.



I'm not going to tell anything about the movie's content, I can only recommend to watch it for yourself and be frightened by yourself.



Besides the horror part, Gothika also tells an important lessons on how repressive asylums are, and that it's virtually impossible to escape from system as soon as you are marked as "lunatic". The following quote from the movie expresses this really well: "You can't trust a person who thinks you are insane." (rough translation, I saw the movie in German).