AK's weblog

OK, please don't laugh at me, but I'm currently in the following situation: on the last two weekends, I had planned to meet a really nice girl (that I've learnt to know via the Internet) on a blind date, but in both cases, we missed each other: the first time, I was a bit late, and she wasn't there, and last time, I was there on time (we even negotiated a distinctive mark, the sign saying "going out is silly" was my idea ;-), but she didn't appear (although she said that she was there, but only a little bit late, whatever). The problem is: both of us actually want this date. So: does anybody of my readers know a reliable way to make the next "hand-shake" (to use an analogy from the IT world happen more likely? One constraint: no other communication channels (i.e. no exchange of phone numbers). Probably, simply setting the time-out to a higher value would solve the problem, but who knows...

As reported here, the preliminary version 0.9 of the conference schedule on the 21C3, the "Fahrplan", is finally available. A number of really interesting talks are on the schedule, so I'm already happily looking forward to the conference.

After the torture scandal in the German Bundeswehr, Austrian Bundesheer also has its own torture scandal. And the sad thing is: I knew about that already a few months ago. :-/

The parents of one the tortured soldiers (who is so much traumatized that he's in psychiatric treatment now) talked to my father (who does a lot of organizational stuff for Stellung and Einberufung for Upper Austria), and he advised them to report this, but they didn't want to get into any troubles, and just wanted to be left alone. He told me about that case afterwards, with the two of us totally unaware that this could get a scandal a few months later. Anyway: screw those bastard instructors. I know why I decided against going to the army and chose civil service, instead.

Try a search for "Die Roten Rosen Weihnachten" on amazon.de. Right now, you receive this result (actually, I was searching for this CD as a reply to this blog posting).

Today I saw the movie The Motorcycle Diaries, a movie about Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (better known as "[[Che Guevara]]" or "el Che"), travelling through South America together with his friend Alberto Granado in 1951/1952. The movie portrays a young and happy man who gets confronted with the social realities in South America. That makes him believe in a united South America, with no racial or monetarial differences. Many of today's kids having Che Guevara on their T-shirts do not know about his intentions, ideals and visions, they all should go and watch this movie.

From the authentic perspective, this movie is really good, showing the authenticity of the movie using original photos taken from young el Che and Alberto. Also, unlike unlike some other movie, the language is quite authentic: Ernesto is from Buenos Aires, and speaks authentic dialect, while Alberto comes from Cordoba (yes, the 1978 one), and speaks their local dialect.

I can only recommend "The Motorcycle Diaries", as it showed el Che's honesty, his social attitude, and his good side.

On a side note: the movie features yerba mate, which is pretty cool.

See here:

The head on the mill looks exactly like the Ogre picture as painted by Shrek himself in the movie of the same name, doesn't it?

I found this out when I saw Max und Moritz from 1956 on KIKA. For those who are reminded of their childhood (like me), here you can find an online version of this wonderful book.

Why the heck does MySQL have a bigint data type, which then only supports value ranges like an integral 32bit data type (it does here) although it should support more? That's on MySQL 4.0.17-nt, at least (yes, MySQL on Windows...). And that sucks big times.

Tocotronic, one of the greatest German bands ever, is going to release a new album on January 17th, 2005, named "Pure Vernunft wird niemals siegen". So, that's the next big thing to look forward to (after Christmas and 21C3...). They also go on tour, and will play e.g. in Linz on March, 26th.

Update: what I just found out is that the Tocotronic website now contains technical notes about the used technologies. What I find cool is that they use XHTML 1.0 Strict (and it validates!), that they provide an RSS feed, that it's design barrier-free and that they ensured that the page also works on alternative web browsers. The people of rockITbaby do the technical part. Many thanks to them!

Since there was absolutely nothing to eat at home, my brother and I decided to go to the supermarket, and do some shopping. So we bought some meat ("Beiried"), chestnuts, some buns and beer. Since my brother works as a cook in a restaurant neither of us wants to disclose, he knows quite a lot about cooking, and so we improvized beefsteak with chestnut sauce. And this is (IMHO) the thing that makes the difference between hobby cooks and really good, professional ones: the latter ones can just start cooking, without a recipe, and they will most likely not mess it up.

The first step was to roast the chestnuts, since we would need them for the sauce. Then, we prepared the meat, we salted it, and spiced it up with some pepper and dried chilli. When the chestnuts were done, we chopped them. Then the meat: we put up a hot pan with some oil, and put the meat pieces into it. According to my brother, the most important thing is not to sting anything into the meat, so do not use a fork or anything similar to pick up the meat and/or turn it around. We roasted the beef on both sides, and put them on a plate.

Now the sauce: first, my brother chopped onions and garlic, and gently roasted them. Then he added some cream, cooked that up, added some more cream, some salt, some water, more cooking, the chopped chestnuts, more water, some creme fresh, and more cooking. One important thing: make the sauce in the same pan in which you roasted the beefsteak before. According to my brother, that's crucial for the taste. Anyway, after a few minutes, the sauce itself had reached a wonderful taste, and we again added the steaks, including the "juice" that had collected on the plate, and cooked that for a few more minutes. Then, the steaks were finished, and we served it to ourselves, with a wonderful beer.

All in all, it was a really nice experiment, and most likely daily routine for my brother, but we both had plenty of fun not only with the cooking, but also with the eating. If anybody's interested in trying to do that, don't ask me for a recipe, because neither my brother nor I know the exact amount of ingredients. Nevertheless, I can only recommend this wonderful beefsteak variation, if you like beefsteak, you will enjoy this one! If you are interested in a more complete photographic documentation, just have a look at my gallery.

"That's no moon. It's a space station."

In a little bit more than a month, Christmas is coming (that's why the next few weeks are called "Advent", which is derived from Latin "ad venire" - to come). And this year, the Americanization of our continental-european Christmas is taking over even more than the years before:

Since a few weeks ago I "suffer" from something that I haven't experienced before: emptiness. Total emptiness. It's definitely not a burn-out, but everything feels just empty. The same trot every day, nothing new and inspiring. The same old stories for the last few weeks, absolutely no new topics to speak about with my friends. I just don't know what to say anymore. The only thing that keeps me from the trot is the trot itself: all that makes me survive is the ever-iterating same schedule every day, the things I'm used to, the things that make me happy (at least for a short time), like lunch, supper, The Simpsons and reading email, usenet and weblogs. But basically, that's it.

Since the time where I did that 60hr week, I lost all the impedus I would need to realize some of the ideas that I had in the last few weeks (programming-related, that is). Using the computer is basically nothing but clicking through the usual news sites, downloading the latest RSS feeds over and over, starting mutt and slrn over and over, waiting for new emails or postings, and listening to the same music over and over. Today I would have the chance to go out in Linz, but what should I do there? Getting drunk, probably. And it wouldn't help, either, as the drunkenness would mix with the loneliness that I sometimes feel and would most likely produce and wonderful, nice depression.

Of course, I could call friends, but would I do with them? Nothing. And not even the worst web chats that I once used the visit in order to prank and make fun of all the st00p1d girlies provide any of them. Yeah, they are literally empty. And I don't even have enough energy to simply read a book. Hell, yeah, I'm totally empty.

The only exception in the last few days were some really funny Jabber sessions with MP, but that was also short-lived. But nevertheless, MP could tell you a lot about Hirundo-zilla shitting nukes, movies with maths professors with set squares in their pants and weird lab exercises at his university, but that's a story for another time. And it's definitely nothing to wipe out my inner emptiness.

A few days ago my mother gave me the new [[Mark Knopfler]] CD - "Shangri-La" - to make a few (legal) copies. So I just ripped the CD to iTunes and started listening to it. And it sounded good, very good, it's quite calm and relaxed music. After some listening, one song, "Postcards From Paraguay" caught on to me more and more, as it has some South-American touch, and just sounds catchy. I can only recommend it, the CD could probably be a gift to your parents, for Christmas.

I would like to point my readers to the Kevin Sites Blog, a weblog done by an embedded journalist in Iraq. Kevin Sites is the person that took the recently shown footage of a US soldier killing an unarmed, wounded Iraqi and thus documenting a war crime. Kevin takes the shit in Iraq, and tells on his weblog what he experienced down there, bringing all the events we witnessed to us in a both very interesting and also quite shocking way. Oh, and FreeRepublic.com calls him a scumbag Lefty, so he must be quite OK.

Just found this article about Finasterid, some medicament that is used against baldness. Nice quote from the article:

Frauen und Kinder sollen kein Finasterid einnehmen. Bei graviden Rhesusaffen führten sehr hohe Finasteriddosen zu Missbildungen der Genitalien männlicher Foeten. Finasterid ist deshalb bei schwangeren Frauen streng kontraindiziert. Vorsichtshalber sollen Frauen im gebärfähigen Alter auch keine zerdrückten oder zerbrochenen Finasterid-Tabletten berühren.

So, if you want to do some long-term biological terrorism, just get medicaments like Probecia or Proscar.