Football

...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)

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.