General

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).

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.

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."

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.

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.

Arbeiterkammer Oberösterreich found out that the mozarella ciabatta from Billa is not quite healthy. I won't buy there anymore, at least for today, as I don't want to get sick due to [[Staphylococcus|Staphylococci]] and [[Enterobacteriaceae]].

Email from George W. Bush.

Awful plastic surgery. The horror.

Niko called Firefox a "hyped" browser. IMHO, Firefox is currently the best free browser around, especially due to the high number of great extensions that are available. This is an (incomplete) list of my favorite Firefox extensions:

• Web Developer Toolbar: the web developer's swiss knife with integrated chainsaw, shotgun, and towline. Disable Java, Javascript, CSS at a fingertip, edit CSS on the fly, get information about the last HTTP request, find broken images, outline frames, table cells, images, deprecated tags, validate the current page's HTML, CSS, and Section 508 and WAI accessibility on the fly, resize the browser window to a certain size (useful for checking pages for problems with low resolution screens), and many more features.
• User Agent Switcher: useful for switching the browser's user agent string.
• WML Browser: WML pages aren't shown as XML source anymore, but as real pages instead. Very useful when you do WAP development, especially in combination with the User Agent Switcher.
• Smooth Wheel: fixes an annoying misfeature in Firefox, that is the not so smooth scrolling when you use the mouse wheel.
• BugMeNot extensions: integrates bugmenot.com into Firefox. Very nice if you have mandatory registration pages.
• Linkification: Allows Firefox to view plain-text URLs and e-mail addresses as actual links
• SwitchProxy: allows you to save multiple proxy settings and switch between them quickly and easily. Especially useful when you quickly have to switch between a "Zwangsproxy" and [[de:Java_Anon_Proxy|JAP]].

Yesterday I did something that I haven't done for the last 10 years: I went to the football stadium to watch the football game LASK Linz vs. SV Ried. The football game itself was quite nice to watch, but the goals were missing: the game ended with a goal in the 90th minute. But what was way more interesting was to observe all the people around me. So many "experts", who exactly know what to do, tactical geniuses, many of them drinking beer, combined with just stupid "jokes", homophobic rants, and a certain selfrighteousness. Probably that's why I've never been interested in going to the football stadium.

tpp has been heavily refactored in the past few days. Right now, still some features need to be reimplemented that used to be in the latest released version (1.1.1) but aren't in the refactored (partially rewritten) version. One feature that was in the old version but isn't the latest version is LaTeX support, the possibility to convert tpp slides to LaTeX source files that can be translated to DVI or PDF files via latex or pdflatex.

Now the question to my readers: what export formats would you recommend? If LaTeX, which package? I would like to use LaTeX packages that are delivered by default with popular ΤεΧ distributions like teTeX, pdflatex shouldn't have any problems with it, landscape format should work correctly, and it should be easy to generate programmatically. If an XML-based solution, is it transformable to HTML and/or PDF? I would really appreciate your input if you have any more insight or experience into other presentation formats.

According to Telepolis, the observers of OSCE described the voting processes in the United States "sub-standard": they had less access than in Kazakhstan, they were not allowed to get close to the ballot boxes, and the electronic voting machines were less secure than in Venezuela. Oh, and in Ohio, where the election is most likely to be decided, none of the observers weren't even let into the polling station. Democracy-wise, a sad day for the United States. But: everyone gets what he deserves. And: every man is the architect of his own fortune. When the US americans want a bad economy, more war, more international isolation and less civil rights, let them have fun with it.

Today, I got my last birthday present for this year: finally, my aunt managed to come to Linz and celebrate my birthday. As always, I expect to get a very original birthday present from her. And this time, it was definitely one of the best presents that I ever got before: Schott's Original Miscellany (actually, I got the German translation, "Schotts Sammelsurium"). This is nothing but a book containing more or less useful knowledge, collected by Ben Schott, and englishman who seems to have way too much time.

What is so special about this book is first of all how it looks: a very nice binding, with wonderful fonts, and also wonderful fonts inside. Then the content itself: it contains a lot of interesting and funny stuff, like how to adjust one's bow tie, which ice thicknesses are able to wear which weights, the different types of sushi and what kind of food is used for them, the nine mortal sins, the correct way through the labyrinth of Hampton Court, the free masons' grades, or the mysterious deaths of some Burmesian kings, and many, many more things.

Especially the last thing is really funny: Nandabayin for example laughed to death, when an Italian merchant told him that Venice was a free state without a king, in the year 1599. Hilarious.