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1063 words
A number of little points here in the light of the past days.
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Our summer school and the term are over now. There have been many nice lectures and talks in the past weeks, but it has been quite long. So it’s good to return to more quiet times.
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The many Russian guests at the summer school were rather quiet and we didn’t talk to them much. I was also told later that probably they couldn’t go out or do stuff while they were here because it’s very expensive for them. Two of them will be remembered: One for looking like Björn from Mando Diao and another one for being so freaky or hungry (likely both) that he walked around at a barbecue grabbing and eating half fried sausages or other food items without even asking or saying thanks. Not that there wasn’t enough for everyone… just a question of manners, I guess.
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With the end of term there were quite a few parties in town yesterday. Somehow we started that at the wrong end and wanted to go to a party at the philosophy department. Usually their parties are quite cool, not over exciting but enjoyable. But that’s when they’re inside in the department’s basement. This time it was outside and while still being friendly it didn’t feel particularly crowded. This was a bit of a shame as I went there with one of the summer school guests from Vienna. So it didn’t look particularly exciting, I suppose.
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After he had gone to rest we went on to the party in a hall just down the road. It was much bigger and more lively. And they still had their barbecue running at the time… but I didn’t like the people too much. Looked more like lawyer and business types.
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So on we went to the summer party in a street in town. It’s a number of houses there where people are quite alternative, anti-fascist and whatnot. And they had a big party in the joint garden of the whole block. It was quite cool there, nice drinks, decent music (really good at stages, in fact), and all the people I had expected to meet earlier were there as well. The party had a ‘superhero’ motto meaning that you were welcome dressed up as some superhero. I guess we all went incognito, Incredibles style if your wish. In one cellar they had a guy dressed as Batman playing noisy metal. Which was as freaky as it was cool.
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The only strange thing was that on entering we had to pay. Well, that wasn’t all that strange. Just with people being all that alternative they didn’t want to charge the guests, which would be all commercial and creepy but we were asked to make a donation for some good cause. Why can’t they just charge us normally and then do with the money whatever they want. Donate it for some good cause, say. With all the effort they made in organising and setting things up, it’s not that they didn’t deserve getting the money they asked for.
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Consuming your daily media will have told you that the latest volume of Harry Potter has descended on us. I haven’t touched any of those books, but this morning the postman dropped a parcel from amazon with us as our neighbours weren’t in. It contains the new Harry Potter volume and they’ve even produced. special packaging for that. Which really surprised me as usually it looks like all the European amazons share the same packaging materials (at least they print amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.co.uk on it) and I was impressed by how big scale they are…
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The Powerbook is still running. Let’s hope it lasts. Now I still have our departmental Powerbook sitting here. When I tried to start it with my hard drive and without the extra RAM from my Powerbook, it just failed – giving me the ‘question mark’ screen. This might be an answer to the question whether X.4 can run on a system with 64MB. Our admin said that he wants to upgrade the machine to a decent amount of RAM and drive space – and OSX I suppose, as he’s a Unixy guy. It’ll be both useful for people who need to borrow a portable computer and for him as I think he was interested to at least try out OSX at some stage.
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Now he asked his usual supplier for Mac RAM prices. My impression is that those people have no idea whatsoever about the Mac and they started telling him about having to get special RAM (‘Kingston’?!) so it works. Incidentally it’s also about 30% more expensive than what I would buy. So the ‘expensive Mac’ impression may still last a bit.
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When talking with our admin about my current computer problems he first suggested I go to the new Mac store in town. While I haven’t been there myself, I’ve heard that I’ll most likely beat them in software and hardware experience by miles. So they’re quite useless.
All they can do is sell iPods,
as our admin eloquently put it. And that doesn’t take a lot of skill these days.
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Why is burning DVDs so hard. Right now I have around 20 writable DVDs which Björn’s DVD writer couldn’t write. And that’s not a matter of the plus/minus problem. I’ve written both kinds already with the device, of the R and RW types. But it refuses to write, or even recognise many other DVD types. Very strange. And even worse than it was with CDs (where I never had any problems before my burner started to break).
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I lost my sunglasses recently. Actually I think I forgot them at the checkout in a supermarket and they were gone when I returned a few minutes later to pick them up again. So I really need new ones. But I so can’t decide what to get. I looked around in some stores but didn’t like anything too much. The ones I had before were really thin and small ones. I liked their look but they had the disadvantage of being not very good when the sun comes from the side. On the other hand I once tried my brother’s sporty glasses which just wrap around you head and give excellent protection. I’m not sure they’re exactly my type of thing, though. Arrgh!
July 16, 2005, 16:02
