HOWTO: Discover a country you never planned seeing

02 03 2007

Step 1. Be bored at worked.
Step 2. Get attracted by a discount airline‘s commercial in your favorite online newspaper.
Step 3. Discover that flights to Bucharest are incredibly cheap and decide to go there for a weekend in April.
Step 4. This is the crucial step: Don’t pay attention while booking the flight and choose the wrong date for your return flight, so you end up booking 1,5 weeks in Romania.

Summary: Christian and me will go to Romania from April 20th until April 30th. Wish us luck/fun/whatever.

Sweetmorn, Chaos 61, 3173 YOLD


23C3 here we come

25 12 2006

In a little less than four hours, berq, lippi, red667, and me will leave for Berlin where we’re going to attend the 23C3. Since the ÖBB still sucks, we’re once again going by bus, arriving tomorrow at around 6:30am. Judging from last year the time between our arrival until we can check into our hostel at around noon will be spent drinking beer, which definitely isn’t a recommended breakfast option. Kids, don’t try this at home!

I’m pretty sure we’ll once again have loads of fun, and unlike the last years I plan on regularly blogging and posting pics from the event, so stay tuned! Anyone interested in meeting up at the 23C3 either post a comment here or send a mail to my GMail account.

Prickle-Prickle, The Aftermath 67, 3172 YOLD


citizen428 weekly telegram

26 02 2006

Saturday, February 18:
teemow and Steffi came from Cologne to Vienna. Spent the night at B72, Chelsea and Elektro Gönner. Nice.

Sunday, February 19:
Had a decent brunch with my girlfriend at Restaurant Leopold. Then had some coffee at the Bluebox with teemow, Steffi and Laki. The “Coheed and Cambrea” concert in the evening got postponed again, so I went to the “Einhorn” with my former flatmate Doris to have some beers…

Tuesday, February 21:
Attended the IT Suppliers Day of one of our customers. Went to Laki’s place with my girlfriend in the evening to have some Caipiroskas with him, teemow and Steffi.

Wednesday, February 22:
Met my co-conspirators (details to follow) berq and colo (who now has a blog too) at the Käuzchen. Got drunk again, but it was definitely worth it… ;-)

Friday, February 24:
Had some great lunch – Seafood Soup and Walleye In White Wine Sauce – at Alberto’s with my boss and the WCM guys. I’ll do a nice article series for them starting in June. More info will follow.

Saturday, February 25:
Went to the office for a workshop (around 2,5 hours), which was actually pretty informative and nice. Started reading The Cocka Hola Company and love it.

Sunday, February 26:
Had brunch with Karin and Andi at the Lux, which IMHO offers one of the best breakfast deals in town (all you can eat buffet with great antipasti and lots of other good stuff for Euro 8,40!). Highly recommended!

Boomtime, Chaos 57, 3172 YOLD


"playing the angel" and other stuff

18 02 2006

We’ve been to the Depeche Mode concert in the Wiener Stadthalle last Thursday. Although it was quite nice, concerts this big definitely aren’t my thing. They are more like Hollywood movies: good while they last, but nothing life changing or overly surprising. I much more enjoy small Punk or Hardcore concerts, where you can have a beer and a nice chat with the band afterwards and generally feel much more involved…

teemow and his girlfriend are going to stay in Vienna for a few days, so I guess we’ll go out partying tonight which should be good fun! :-)

Tomorrow I’ll have brunch at Restaurant Leopold with my girlfriend and will go to see JR Ewing and Coheed and Cambria in the Arena Wien with my former flatmate.

Prickle-Prickle, Chaos 49, 3172 YOLD


Mini update

10 01 2006

Yesterday evening m3’s girlfriend Susanne organized a little surprise dinner at imás! to celebrate Martin’s 35th birthday, which was really relaxing and entertaing. :-) It was just what I needed after a rather unnerving day at university, and it really made me look forward to my other “social events” this week (the monthly AGLUG meeting on Thursday and another Pardus meetup on Saturday).

Today was my second day in my new job, which I mostly spent on heartbeat scripts and a “funny” server which shows some irritating behavior. I also had to build my first deb package for the deployment of some in-house software, and I have to say that I now love Portage more than ever… ;-)

Setting Orange, Chaos 10, 3172 YOLD


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01 11 2005

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…