…but it bought me a Game Cube.

Today at work I got so p*ssed that I decided to go out and spend some money on stuff I don’t really need. In the end I bought a Nintendo Game Cube, Mario Kart Double Dash!!, a memory card, and an additional controller in a shop close to my work, as well as a copy of Metroid Prime on eBay which I should get in a few days.

FAQ
Q: You know that capitalism only works by making you so depressed that you just need to buy something in order to feel better?
A: Yes, that’s why I’m also pretty ashamed every time I fall for this, but sometimes you just can’t help it…

Q: Don’t you think that sucks then?
A: Sure I do, but you can’t get drunk all the time.

Q: Why a Game Cube and not a PS2/X-Box/whatever?
A: I’ve collected game consoles starting from the old NES until Sega stopped producing their own consoles after my beloved Dreamcast. Personally I just think that Nintendo and Sega rock, while MS and Sony…ahm…just don’t. I don’t need the newest and greatest hardware, I just want a nice platform which offers the kind of games I like to play. Additionally I already own a Game Boy Advance for several years, which can be used in conjuction with the Game Cube.

Q: You could have bought that Game Cube a lot earlier.
A: That’s not a question.

Q: But still…
Well, after Sega announced that they won’t release any new consoles, I got so depressed and ended my career as a video game collector (I never really liked PC games). Now that I spontanously changed my mind, the Game Cube was the only system I considered worth buying. No flame wars please, I quite regularly play PS2 and X-Box games when hanging out with friends, I just don’t want to spend my own money on those particular systems.

Q: Will you start blogging about Game Cube games now?
A: There might be the occasional post on this topic, but this site definitely won’t turn into a gaming blog.

Q: What about the revolution?
See blog subtitle.

Q: Have you turned into a bitter cynic lately?
You’ve noticed? If I only knew what could be the reason…

Boomtime, Chaos 52, 3172 YOLD

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

1. You’ll turn into a bitter cynic. This in fact is probably the best thing about your job, which really should make you think…

2. Only wackos and smartasses work in this field. Depending on which group you belong to, this might even be fun. More often though you’re screwed.

3. If your boss screws up, it will probably get communicated to the customer as your fault. Given that you took the job in the first place, that’s even true.

4. Every job where people tell you things along the line of “An average day has 24 hours and if that isn’t enough, you’ll have to make use of the nights too!” and find that actually funny, is a good reason to spend the rest of your life in a zen buddhist monastery, a mental home or both.

5. The best thing about your average work day is that there’s always at least one person in the office who is worse off than you (see #1). However, he’s most likely also the one poor guy who’s neither a wacko nor a smartass (see #2), so you have to control your bitter cynicism and feel sorry for him.

6. The coffee is cold or bad and the coke is either warm or a diet coke. They’ve thought about everything!

7. After a certain amount of time you won’t be able to remember if the sentences “Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us.” have been said by your boss or Locutus of Borg. What’s even worse is that it doesn’t really make a difference anyway…

P.S. I’m also planning on writing up some reasons for “Why working in Business IT rocks”. Yeah, right.

Pungenday, Chaos 38, 3172 YOLD

Personal:
Yesterday I had the last seminar of my university “career”, which feels kind of strange. As the people who know me better can tell you, for the past few years I’ve always been torn between a job in the technical field and pursuing an academic career in humanities. Now that I’ve surprisingly found a job which allows me to work full time on/with free software, it seems that this decision has finally been made, but there still is a certain amount of uncertainty…

Food:
During yesterday’s lunch break we’ve been to a nice Korean restaurant which offers nice set meals (consisting of miso soup, a salad and a main course) in the range of 6,20-10,20 Euro. The beef bibimbap is great and everything else also was really good.

In the evening we’ve ordered a nice pizza which goes really well with Friday night TV, and today I’ll meet some friends at the Blunzenstricker to have some solid Austrian food. :)

Books:
I’ve just finished J.G. Ballard’s Millenium People which I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone! Currently I’m reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, which is long overdue given that I have seen Blade Runner a gazillion times but never actually came around to read the book.

As it’s pretty thin I went to a book store today and came home with The Cocka Hola company by Matias Faldbakken, Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre and Alan Bisset’s The incredible Adam Spark.

Setting Orange, Chaos 35, 3172 YOLD

This will probably result in a flamewar, but I’m really interested in hearing all your opinions here: after a long time of avoiding any desktop related software looking even remotely like it might have to do with KDE/QT and following GNOME development pretty closely, I’ve finally decided to have a look at KDE again.

To my surprise I quite like what I see. Especially Kontact looks like a spiffy piece of software, but other applications seem to be pretty cool too.

I soon should get a work laptop, and I’ll only install KDE on it to see how I like it for perfoming my day to day tasks. Everyone deserves a fair chance, I’ve once even tried Emacs for a few days to see why I love Vim ;) Once I start this little experiment, I’ll try to ocassionally blog about my experiences. Any KDE fans out there, please post some comments and tell me about cool stuff you think I should try/know about/whatever…

BTW: E17 also seems to have improved quite a lot since I’ve last installed it, and it looks really sweet.

BTW2: I’ve recently also rediscovered my love for Ion3, so here’s right another contestor for the “citizen428’s preffered GUI” competition…

Just a little info for the people who may wonder about my lack of activity lately (mainly the Ruby herd and some guys of the Gentoo/ALT project): I’ve started a new job as a Junior Systems Engineer for a company providing open source solutions for enterprise customers, which means I’ve recently been playing around with stuff like Linux Heartbeat and other cool technologies. It’s quite stressful, but also pretty interesting so far and I quite like it (despite my constant rambling about having a regular job).

However, in January I also had to finish the last few classes of my college career, so there actually was nearly no time left for Gentoo, as the measly 4 commits I did demonstrate pretty well. I still have a seminar this Friday where I’ll present the concept of my diploma thesis, but starting from next week I’ll try to do more Gentoo related things again. :)

While reading netzpolitik.org yesterday, I found a link to an article on the OpenNet Initiative Blog, explaining how the filtering of Google.cn works. Now let’s have a closer look at some of the blocked sites:

site:hrw.org
site:hrichina.org

Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China. Who is surprised that they get blocked? Nobody? Guessed so…

site:rfa.org

Radio Free Asia describes itself in the following way: “RFA is a private, nonprofit corporation that broadcasts news and information in nine native Asian languages to listeners who do not have access to full and free news media. The purpose of RFA is to provide a forum for a variety of opinions and voices from within these Asian countries.”

site:tsquare.tv

A pretty informative site about the incident on Tiananmen Square in 1989. You really should try to see the documentary, it’s probably the best I’ve seen so far on this topic.

http://64memo.com/

The Tianmen Massacre Memorial Museum. I haven’t read any of the articles on this site yet, so it’s hard to tell how exactly they are dealing with the subject.

site:news.bbc.co.uk
site:voa.gov

Ok, the BBC and Voice of America may not be the most objective news sources one can find in the world, but blocking them seems a little harsh.

site:boxun.com
site:peacehall.com

Both domains will lead you to the Boxun News Network, a site writing a lot about censorship, free speech and similar topics.

site:freechina.net

After having a look at the goals of The Free China Movement, it should be pretty obvious why the Chinese government wants this site blocked.

site:geocities.com

Free web hosting == free expression? It seems so…

site:falundafa.org
site:epochtimes.com

After having been at a conference with participants from these groups I have to say that I don’t feel any sympathy for them, but that definitely isn’t an excuse for locking them up and censoring their sites.

site:savetibet.org

It should be pretty obvious why this got blocked.

site:topforum.com

A dynamic index of Chinese forums websites.

site:laogai.org

Since 1992 the Laogai Research Foundation is trying to gather information on Chinese penal camps and other “systemic human rights violations in China, including public executions, organ harvesting from executed prisoners, the coercive enforcement of China’s population control policy, and persecution of religious believers.”

I guess that sites like the China Labour Bulletin and related worker’s movements get filtered as well, but I can’t personally confirm this currently.

Boomtime, Chaos 27, 3172 YOLD

I just noticed that I haven’t blogged much lately, so the least I can do is put together one of my random link dumps for you:

Tech Stuff:

• FLPR:
  Sure, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has proven itself to be a pretty neat platform for web development. However, there are people who disagree with one or more of the choices implied by the acronym, and yours truly is one of them. If you want to learn a little more about alternative technologies head over to FLPR to read up on web development with FreeBSD, lighttpd, PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails.
• Speaking the Lingo:
  A nice presentation on creating domain specific languages with Ruby
• Why Good Programmer’s Are Lazy and Dumb:
  Ok, almost everybody already knows that good programmers exactly know when to be lazy and dumb, but the article is still a good read for poor folks like me who are lazy and dumb without being overly good programmers…

Fun:

• Semapedia:
  Hyperlinking Wikipedia articles in meatspace is what this cool project is doing. Interesting stuff, as soon as time permits I’ll have to play around with this a little more!
• What’s My Pirate Name?:
  Everyone should have his own pirate name…
• ColdPizza:
  A nice parody of Coldplay’s recent DRM-EULA.

Boomtime, Chaos 22, 3172 YOLD

Today when I talked with a non-techy friend from the Midde East on IM, the topic of free speech on the net came up. I then started telling him about Tor and how hidden services could be a solution to this. But when I sent him the links, he couldn’t open them, but instead saw the following:

We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of [insert country here].

I guess it should have been obvious that countries which censor the net wouldn’t easily give their citizens the information needed to circumvent this censorship, but still I was pretty baffled by this.

So please everyone, spread the word about Tor and consider if you want to volunteer or donate something to the effort!

Boomtime, Chaos 22, 3172 YOLD

Yesterday evening m3’s girlfriend Susanne organized a little surprise dinner at mas 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