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Today I bought a lava lamp as a christmas present for my brother, at Leiner. It's really interesting to see the "original lava lamp" with a price tag of EUR 69,99, and an (quote shop assistant) "affordable replica" for as much as EUR 6,99 beneath it. I took the latter one, of course.

I'm sure most of my readers already had to cut onions at least once in their life and had to cry because of that. Well, my ingenious brother found a way to reliably avoid that (and it indeed works, I tried it out today):
Get a big piece of cling film, and wrap it around your head so that it covers your eyes. Be sure that you're still able to breath through the nose! Then start cutting your onion(s), and you won't experience any more crying. The only disadvantage is that your look through the cling film is not as clear as without, but to be honest, who cares as long as there is no more crying involved?

And the currently advertised "BigChicken" is the proof. It's a combination of the good, old BigMac layers, without the little cucumber slices, and with the chicken thingies (that you probably know from the McChicken) insead of the normal meat. When I opened the box yesterday, it smelled very tasty, but when I actually ate it, it tasted like... well, almost nothing. That was so disappointing. These guys you see in the TV commercial must either have a lapse in taste or be on some drug that made them have an "eat flash". I bet they all smoked some bad weed, and the guy in the middle who destroys the table was taking some metamphetamine before. Does McDonalds really want to have junkies as target group and advertise that?

Today I bought the book "Russendisko" by [[de:Wladimir Kaminer|Wladimir Kaminer]]. I heard about it before, and saw a very long and interesting interview with the author on 3SAT, but never had the opportunity to read anything written by him. Anyway, after I bought the book, I started reading it in the tram, and I continued reading it after I came home, and now, I'm finished, and I enjoyed it so much like I haven't enjoyed a book in at least 5 years. A wonderful, simple and straight style of writing, a nice style of telling stories, and the book is, well, a collection of short stories that the author or some of his friends experienced. Imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie, but with more episodes, more fun, and less violence and all the other weird Tarantino shit (although I do enjoy his movies, no fear). So, a wonderful book, which I can only recommend. I think I will have to buy some of his other books.

If you want to get a (relatively) good and cheap mobile phone, and you live in Austria, get a Motorola A925 with 3Reload from 3. They don't advertise this kind of mobile phone, but the (out-of-stock) Nokia 7600 instead. The advantage of the A925 to the 7600: the A925 comes with UIQ 2.0 as user interface (Symbian OS as operating system), and with 3Reload, the phone costs only EUR 99,- (without any contract, you'd pay EUR 799,- for that phone). So, if you want to do some Symbian programming, and want to start without wasting too much money, this definitely the device to start with.

Today I got a nice letter from my ministry of the interior telling me that my declaration for civil service was correct, and that I'm now officially forbidden to buy, own and bear arms that are subject to authorisation, and I have to say, I'm proud of that. But have a look at it for yourself:

But after the current scandals of soldiers torturing recruits, this is the only sane decision.

Remember last time when I posted a drawing that was only made because I was bored? Today I brought this to the next level, by actually drawing something? Today, I brought this to the next level, by actually drawing something on real paper, using a pencil only:

The drawing itself shows the X key from a keyboard, a baseball bat wrapped with tripwire (something only Martin will understand), and Hirundozilla, which you should already know from this posting. Yes, I'm extremely bored.

Note to self: must-sees in the 21C3 conference schedule:

• Day 1:
  • 11:00 - 12:00: Hidden Data in Internet Published Documents
  • 12:00 - 13:00: Inside PDF (x)
  • 13:00 - 14:00: Enforcing the GNU GPL (x)
  • 14:00 - 15:00: Biometrie in Ausweisdokumenten
  • 15:00 - 16:00: Edit This Page - Scaling the Wiki Beyond 1 Million (x)
  • 16:00 - 17:00: Verified Fiasco - ein Projekt zur formalen Analyse und zum Beweisen der totalen Korrektheit des Mikrokern-Betriebssystems Fiasco
  • 22:00 - 23:00: Free Software in South America (x)
  • 23:00 - 24:00: Das Literarische Code-Quartett (x)
• Day 2:
  • 11:00 - 12:00: Lightning Talks: Day 2 (x)
  • 12:00 - 13:00: Softwarepatente - der Tag danach (x)
  • 13:00 - 14:00: Natural Language Steganography (x)
  • 15:00 - 17:00: Bluetooth Hacking
  • 23:00 - 24:00: Fnord-Jahresrückblick
• Day 3:
  • 11:00 - 12:00: Toll Collect - Verpeilen im industriellen Maßstab
  • 15:00 - 16:00: Practical Mac OS X Insecurity
  
  
  • 16:00 - 17:00: The Reality of Network Address Translators
  • 19:00 - 21:00: Security Nightmares 2005
  
  

Update: changed a few things, due to changes in the Fahrplan. Fortunately, I can now see both "Natural Language Steganography" and "Softwarepatente - der Tag danach".
Update 2: the "(x)" means "seen".

Via arc:

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.