The result of a quip by one of the cow-orkers today, after a very useless meeting with some minion of the Evil Overlords. Sigh.

So the new Austrian Passport Law allows for biometric crap and contact-less reading; the Ministry of Truth is already planning to use this to create a central database of fingerprints of everybody. Bastards; and not with me (at least not until 2015 when my current passport runs out).

Link to the standard article

The weekend was blown out, with a few of us being hopeful and spending most of Sunday parawaiting at Mt. Tamborine. To no avail, of course, but it allowed me to catch up with last month's rumours and flying news.

Monday was better, I had one short but nice flight from Tambo: while I got to cloudbase without major troubles, I didn't make the transition across the valley to Mt. Misery and thus didn't go XC; only Richard and Ben did. A second try later in the arvo didn't work out as the sea breeze came in over the back of the hill just as I was waiting ready on launch, and rushing to Beechmont, the easterly site, was in vain as there was not enough wind over there.

Given that I'll compete(hah!) in the Canungra Cup in a few weeks, I decided finally to replace my old Garmin 12 with a mapping GPS, a 76CS. After long deliberations I ordered it in the USA, but made a mistake with the expiry date of my credit card. Got an email from the shop asking for correction (not surprising), and also a call from the credit card company for confirmation of "recent account activity". A nice feature, actually, given the fact that I'm using the cheapest company there is hereabouts, which doesnt't earn any interest from me.

Saw Mullet on disc yesterday, enjoyed it very much. I'll have to hunt for a soundtrack or some stuff by the featured bands soon.

In other news I've got a motivation problem: I urgently need to finish a paper (about my PhD stuff) I'll be presenting at the Open Source Developer's Conference in Melbourne in December but the writing just doesn't flow...

My sister complained about "not finding old stuff" on this site, so I changed things around slightly: the newest 30 posts stay on the main index page. If its not on the main page, look in either of the archives: by date or by topic. Let's see if that helps.

...time for some recap/wrap-up.
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Once Upon A Time, Polaroid made a nice simple elegant model of sunglasses. I had two sets of these over the years; of course they broke and no matching replacement was to be found. Grief struck Yours Truly.

I do occasionally browse Crazy Clark's and similar junk shops, and one day about four years ago they had a near-copy of said model sunnies for the unbearable price of $1. All hail the junk shop! Didn't I look great? bruahaha snif

But even such pricey high-quality gear has a definite best-before date, and so the sunnies went south a few months ago (metal fatigue near the hinge). Naturally this happened just before the trip to AT and I was stuck with my flying sunnies (which one of my sisters said remind her of "Puck die Stubenfliege"). I didn't find any nice sunnies in Austria. Maybe it's the weather or the people scowling from birth that render sunnies unnecessary, I don't know.

Back here I embarked on another quest for gear (my brain wasn't good for anything useful after the long flights anyway) - and found another reasonable model in Yet Another junk shop (The Reject Shop, IIRC). I was content, and the sunnies cost a reasonable $6. True to the shop's name the sunnies developed a crack through one glass after 15 minutes of wearing. Of course the shop had exactly one single set of this model so it was back to square one.

But finally some (likely) Chinese knock-off artists came to the rescue: in a "Cheap Designer Sunnies" shop (oh the irony!) I found a near-perfect "Armani" model among the tons of gargoyle-style stuff. $30 is a bit much but they fit, look like I want it and I'm happy. End of Story.

The recent vacation had its very positive sides as well: I brought back about 11GB of condensed music from friends and family.

Much of it was not neatly tagged/named, but &rw mentioned musicbrainz, a project similar to freedb but extended to fingerprints for MP3 and similar.

The stuff is partialy lunixified; Debian packages do exist but the docs suck big-time and the interdependencies between libraries and software are as clear as raw sewage...

The tagger app is a/v as Windows dreck only at the moment, but there's a "simple tagger application" (and Perl and Python interfaces). Do not try the "simple tagger application" tp_tagger from libtunepimp-bin: it sucks oh-so-badly (where have these idiots learned programming and interface design?!).

The perl version tp_tagger.pl (only in the source package) sucks about as badly, but at least one can quickly rip out all the crap and make it work somewhat.

Rant done. The idea behind musicbrainz is very good and I'm sure the system will be used more and more once a reasonable tagger application and docs are available.

Some MS weenie tries to recruit Eric Raymond. Much hilarity ensues, including his response (where this entrie's title comes from).

This week didn't work out the way it was expected to.
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