sunday i ripped off my car's front bumper partially; got it hooked on a log at the carpark. couldn't find out how that bloody thing actually should be attached, so currently it's fixed with a bit of string. didn't find the time yet to fix it, as today arvo was wasted on the hill waiting for some wind to come up.

mark, darryl, nigel and i spent the waiting exchanging stories. but of course those hours i'm missing now, so i'm fixing tomorrow's lab stuff just now...yawn.

user-mode-linux rocks, but not when started from init. gah, that took hours to debug but eventually i found it...

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Austria's minister of the interior is a dimwit (and should stay in the interior where he's less embarrassing): while visiting Iceland he said in a press conference that Reykjavik has 400 surveillance cams which could be monitored live on TV. His source: a TV documentary. However, all he had seen was a Icelandic fiction film named "Citizen Cam".

(The story made it on page 2 of Iceland's largest newspaper - but they mixed up their pictures of the minister...by chance?)

...must have been Hardware Appreciation Week.
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i got my new harness today. new, shiny (well a bit dusty in fact; it's three weeks used), comfortable, cool. can't wait to fly it.

(german only)
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...Fourtou mit dem Vorstandsvorsitzenden von Vivendi-Universal verheiratet ist, einem der grössten Nutzniesser dieser Richtlinie. Hier wird ein grosses Demokratie-Defizit offensichtlich, das Assoziationen an einen Bananen-Staat weckt.", so Markus Beckedahl für das Netzwerk Neue Medien.

Aber jetzt wander' ich aus! manisches gelächter
Link zur quintessenz depesche

Yes, that's a thing I'd like to have: a cheap surveillance camera zapper based on a laser pointer and a scope.
Link

...I wouldn't have internet access right now.
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The weekend was lousy, no flying as the weather wasn't good. Friday brought a really strong storm (50+kts winds and lots of rain), quite some damage in QLD and thousands of households without energy. My take was only a little wetness beneath one exposed window.

Some ants have decided that my house would make an ideal place to live for them. I have decided otherwise and started chemical warfare.

My car seems about to become sick; either the aircon belt, the belt idler pulley or the aircon compressor are about to go titsup and the bloody things squeals a lot and loudly. Also the front end suspension needs a major overhaul (definitely new shocks, maybe bearings) and four new tyres are called for. So, lets throw good money after the bad...

It's 2355 and I've spent until 1945 at work then another two hours here prepping the lab tasks for tomoroow and trying to decide on the second assignment for the hopelessly overwhelmed Unix Programming students; in the end I settled for writing a simple shell, but actually I would have liked them to play with MegaHAL instead...

And I can't find the time to do any proper cycling or running in the evenings; mostly I've been working flat-out those last couple of days... I will leave for Melbourne on Thursday arvo, must complete the presentation slides before that, mark 15 programming assignments, finish marking 35 security assignments, and orchestrate two midterm tests. Ah fuck it, this week sucks.

But at least I managed to go to the movies on sunday: One Perfect Day. Australian film, pretty good.

These are late but better late than never. Cornelia spent from early July to late September 2003 with me here. The first few weeks Barbara was here, too, but the majority of the time we were on our own.
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So an Austrian police man called a black person 'Scheiß Neger', the rough Austrian equivalent of 'fucking nigger'. And the state court ruled that this wasn't against human dignity.

Now the federal supreme court overturned that decision. This epithet is in fact against human dignity and racist. So far, so good (FSVO good).

However that court ruling does not have any effect for the police bastard in question. Brilliant. Austria shows the world again how banana republics work.
Link to the newspaper article

The Austrian Arbeiter Zeitung has been made available online. As this piece of contemporary history rests in peace since 1989 you won't find much current news in there.

Hold it. On reading a couple of sample pages I retract the last statement: nothing notable has changed in the last 30 years. Politicians are still all crooks. Bickering, idiocy and greed still rule.

Anyway, it was interesting to look at my birthday's news.
Link to the archive

Measuring the speed of light with a microwave and a bit of chocolate, that is.

Link

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The CA.pl example script coming with OpenSSL has a couple of nice features (among lots of exceedingly ugly ones), namely -signcert: that one, slightly adjusted to eat real input files instead of this silly newcert.pem foolishness, can convert an existing cert into a req and does sign that afterwards.
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