citizen428.blog()

...some random stuff I wanted to blog about for quite some time already:

• *Pearl Jam concert (September 25th@“Wiener Stadthalle”:http://www.stadthalle.com/): I have to admit that I’m not the biggest PJ fan, but since Silvia was nice enough to invite me (thanks by the way!), I went to see one of the best concerts in a long time! The band and the atmosphere was great and I was quite surprised to see the traditionally rather lame crowd in Vienna so excited! (pics@flickr)
• *Internet Explorer on Linux: As we all know, IE sucks donkey balls. But some sites who don’t care about standards – and whose developers definitely should be first against the wall when the revolution comes – only work with Microsoft’s browser. But don’t despair, help is available in form of IEs4Linux, a shellscript which downloads IE and automatically configures Wine for it. Flash 9 is also included and if you really insist on it, you can run 3 different versions of IE at the same time (5, 5.5 and 6), which is pretty handy for web developers. I have IE6 installed on my Kubuntu system for quite a while now, and in the rare cases I really need it, it works like a charm.
• *Pokerstars client on Linux: Most online Poker sites don’t seem to be interested in Linux users, since the clients they offer are mostly only available for Windows. Some of them at least offer Java clients, but with my general dislike for most things Java and my strong preference of Pokerstars over other Poker sites, I gave the client a shot under Wine and was really pleased to find out that it just works™. Of course it would be much nicer to have a native client, but for the time being I’m happy enough with this workaround.
• *UEFA cup Pasching vs. Livorno@Pasching: Went with some other Sportclub fans to see the UEFA cup match Pasching vs. Livorno in Pasching. It was a great day, and I still laugh my ass off when I think about the policemen and -women who found our little group of around 25 people rooting for the away team (as Austrian you were only able to buy tickets for the home sectors) so frightening, that they not only surrounded us for the whole match, but even put on their riot gear. And there I was, thinking every policeman in Austria already knows that we are only dangerous to ourselves.
• *man pages: Read them! You know you should! Even if you believe you know an application. E.g.: “man sshd”, section “AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT”. Or am I really the only person who didn’t know about all the useful options like “from”, “command”, “no-port-forwarding”, “no-pty” etc.?

• *Mac stuff: Here’s some cool widgets and plugins which make the OS X experience even nicer: iTunesShut, VI Input Manager, Application Update Widget (thanks Moose!), AppleScript Shell, Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes
  

Last but not least here are some funny/interesting things I found over the past few weeks:

• Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer (via metalab-members)
• Robot chicken: Great stop motion animation. Examples: 1, 2, 3 (thanks colo!)
• ELP Laser Turntable: bonki posted this a while back, but I never came around to post it here.
• Bruce Schreier facts: ‘cause Chuck Norris isn’t as cool as Bruce! And as we all know: Bruce Schneier tapdances in Morse Code. (via berq)
• China Makes a Sexy, Slutty Robot: What can I say… (thanks m3)

You probably don’t want to know what I’ve been up to lately, but mean bastard that I am, I’m going to tell you anyway.

Wednesday: Watched another Chinese movie at the Viennale, which was called Hong Yan. If you like quiet movies which tell simple stories, this one definitely is a good choice. I liked it quite a lot, so I really recommend you try to see this one!

Thursday: My girl friend and me had lunch at the Wiener Deewan, which is located in Vienna’s 9th district. It’s a nice small restaurant with Indian/Pakistani food, which has a unique concept: All you can eat, pay what you want! Really! They have several great curries, salad and bread. Quite a lot of dishes are vegetarian, and everything’s delicious. And although the drinks sell for fixed prices and are not included in the “pay what you want”, you get free tap water with the food, so you don’t feel obliged to order drinks. The dal is fantastic, as are the other vegetarian dishes and the lamb curry. The restaurant itself is small and packed, which together with the intersting mix of people adds up to a nice and relaxed athmosphere. Definitely a good place to go if you are in Vienna and dig Indian food!

Friday: Football! Went to Parndorf to watch the Sportklub game, which we lost 4:0. Later we collectively tried hard to erase our memories of that game, and I somehow ended up in a strange location I’ve never been before, watching a Russian/American surf punk band called The Jancee Pornick Casino. Here’s a little info from their web site: The trio calls their own style Las Vegas-punk and Russian surf, but there are many more ingredients like rockabilly, beat music and even 60’s elevator music, all being laced with a good jug of good-hearted Russian humor making the Pornick sound so vivid and unique. These are some wild boys but, man, they can also play their instruments! Unfortunately we came rather late and only saw the last few songs, but the gig was pretty cool and I’ll probably buy one or two of their CDs once I have money again… (Hint: If you now feel a strange urge to buy me one now, I surely won’t stop you!)

Saturday: On Saturday my friend Steve decided that Salzburg is way too boring, so he came to Vienna to visit museums, meet friends and for generally having a good time. We had food and some beers at the Blue Box, before moving on to the Xeno, where I finish off a lot of my nights out with a last beer on my way home… It was a relaxed and nice evening, especially since I hadn’t seen Steve for quite some time before this.

Sunday: I’m sure that like most other days Sunday had a morning and afternoon as well, but I only remember watching TV in the evening and listening to the first episode of Cory Doctorow’s new podcast, When Sysadmins Ruled the World. It’s really great and I can’t wait to hear the next episode, so I definitely recommend this to you my fellow geeks and nerds!

Monday: Went to the Big Time International Pub where some Austrian Pardus players had a little meetup. All in all there were 8 people, we had some beer, talked a lot about the game and generally had a good time. You still don’t play Pardus yet? Well, then you certainly should start!

Tuesday: Nothing special. Did some long overdue university stuff, hung out in the Pardus alliance chat and watched 3sat for the whole day. They have a China special going on, so it’s 24 hours of documentaries and movies about the “Middle Kingdom”. Some of this has been quite interesting, and how often do you get a chance to claim watching TV is related to university?

I’ve also played around with some technical stuff and found a really nice project I hardly can wait to tell you about, but I’ll leave that for another blog. I’ll now try to find out what happened to the last few hours, because I just noticed it’s close to 9:30pm already and it only feels like 6:30 or something… Oh, before I forget it: I added a ClustrMap to my blog’s sidebar, so that from now on I can check from where in the world my blog gets read. South America and Africa don’t seem to be particularly interested in what I write, which makes the kittens sad. And does nobody around here ever think about the children?*

Disclaimer: I neither have children nor kittens, but I didn’t want to drag Baby Jesus into this mess. If I would he’d be crying though…

Yeah, it’s time for a little update again, so let’s sum up the last week and a half, shall we?

On Friday the 16th I went to Neusiedl with some friends. We arrived at the camping site in the afternoon and had some drinks before going to watch the football match between the Wiener Sportklub and Neusiedl SC. We won that game 2-1 and I can’t remember when was the last time we celebrated a goal as much as we did celebrate the winning goal in this game. Later on we went to see a concert of Austrian Ska band No Head on my Shoulders in the surprisingly nice Bergwerk Neusiedl. The gig was great, and to my surprise the guy playing the guitar is an old friend of mine whom I haven’t seen for years. It’s also worth to note that our friends from Tyrol joined us for the weekend, which maybe explains why the partying continued into the wee hours and my memories are a little vague… And it’s probably also the reason why we spent the greater part of Saturday hanging around and doing nothing, except for a little shopping trip to the outlet center in Parndorf. In the evening we then proceeded to watch the game of Wacker Innsbruck (yes, that’s the way the team should be called) against Mattersburg in terrible rain. I’ve seen many football games under bad weather conditions, but this match definitely is among the worst, especially given that it ended 0-0.

Today is the perfect example of a nice and lazy afternoon, and I just love it! After having a great brunch at HighTea where we had toasties, antipasti, bagles and lots of other really good stuff, I’m just hanging around in front of my PC reading, doing some Gentoo work and generally having a good time. Live can be so easy…

Now let’s see if I have anything interesting to tell you:

As we all know, football is one of the greatest hobbies around! What’s better than travelling through the whole country – and sometimes even further – with your friends, watching games and having a few beers? Or meeting with people to watch a game on TV together? Or travelling to fan tournaments and playing yourself? Not much, that’s for sure!

Alas there is this dark time called off-season, where you have to find another way to satisfy your football addiction. That’s exactly the time of the year football books have been written for, and in this blog I’m going to recommend you three of them.