Last evening, my PC began to emit high-pitched squeals. The sound drivers in Windows seem to be a bit flakey. My natural reflex was to reach to the left of my screen where my loudspeaker with the powerbutton for the speakers sits. Well, what I had forgotten was a bottle of soda which stood in front of it.

Uncapped.

I knocked it over and soda began to pour on my desk. I quickly picked it up again, but quite a bit of liquid had escaped. Now get this: It barely missed my iBook; the lower right corner was touched by a tiny bit of liquid. I immediately dried it off; so I am pretty sure that nothing had actually entered it. However, by this time the soda had run down to the front side of the desk. I guess my desk is at a slight angle. Anyway, the stuff was flowing off the corner and on the ground – missing my PC by about 10 centimeters.

You do need to know that my PC is currently sitting on its side, with the left side (now the top) cover removed and various harddrives randomly sitting in/on the case. Had my PC been a bit further to the right, the soda would’ve flowed right down into the PC, over my harddrives to the CPU.

Needless to say that probably would’ve killed the entire thing.

I feel quite lucky.

It looks like I might have hit a critical Linux bug in Fat32 implementation. If this is true, then it just cost me a major number of TV shows I had archived, and hence a LOT of time and effort to get them back. Still, if this is actually what happened and I have no way to get my data back then I will have to seriously reconsider my use of Linux. Only problem: What are my alternatives on intel compatible hardware?

BSD? Even less Hardware support.

Microsoft? Get real.

Bah, if I hadn’t had so much luck earlier today I’d probably give up on my hobby now.

Also, with a little bit of luck my co-worker Olav should still have some of the files I lost.

I just hope the overall file structure of the drive didn’t take any damage. If I lost everything, then I am really royally screwed.

Update, many hours later: It looks like almost all files will be recoverable. I may afterall have inherited my grandfather’s luck. Still, the entire episode is less than pleasant. I’ll have to seriously rethink my external drive strategy. Fat32 probably will have to go.

It’s snowing like crazy. It started when I was on my way home from the airport (no, I did not fly anywhere). It’s really a thick white mess out there. The only problem is that it will be dark very soon, and I won’t be able to make any good photos. With a bit of luck it will get colder over night, and maybe, just maybe, I could take photos in the morning.

I really hate snow when I have to go through it on my way to work, but now that I am off I really think it’s cool.

And he’s got the right priorities, too.

Alright, you may know I’ve been a tad busy lately so I don’t check many weblogs or news sites these days.

Thus it came as a bit of a surprise that Nico and Sibylle actually married Nico has the right priorities about these things, too: He figured it’s okay when Sibylle started a weblog.

The man’s clever.

Maybe I should ask that on a date?

“Do you have a weblog? No? See ya.”

This gives me another clever dating idea. Why exchange telephone numbers? Afterall, it’s very easy to locate me.

“You can find me on google, send me an email and I’ll get in touch.”

Hmm…. I wonder.

Update, January 2nd 2006: Nico switched from Moveable Type to their own blog software. The downside of this is that all old links are broken…. so I changed the links to what posts I could find by a quick search on his site.

These past weeks have been crazy. No, no details. I finally get to take part in a nice project – and it’s only a 30% job. Bah. I notice, however, that I am in serious need of vacation. This may sound dumb or something, but I feel very, very burnt-out. Doesn’t help that for the past 1.5 years I bought virtually nothing geeky with my hard-earned cash.

HR discovered there was a bug with my time track profile. In short, I didn’t have any of the normal limits set. I am not sure how many hours my boss will have to get me back after they’re done with it. For November alone it should be 7.5 hours. Right now I have 3 over the limit of 40. That means: December 2003 is the first month I got over 50 hours of accumulated overtime. I try to keep my overtime in check. Really, I try. But it’s simply impossible.

Got home past 9pm on two days; took pretty much no lunch break all week (yeah, yeah, I know, I know, that’s illegal. If anybody asks: I am spending my lunch break on my way home). Had two days of serious arguments with my boss and coworkers this week. This adds a lot to the burnout. I hate it. I guess in the end neither they nor I were completely right. As I said, I need a break.

I don’t know how Martin survives the hours he is working. I guess it’s the virtue of youth. I’ve been spending way too much time at work again, and thus, I shall allow myself a bit of luxury today. I’ll head home with the 2:55pm bus.

Yes, I know I am bad. :)

Update, Dec 3rd: Of course I ended up taking the 4:55 bus.

Ah, what a joke. I arrived at work at 8:20 am yesterday (Friday) and got out of work at… you guessed it… 8:20 pm – That’s twelve hours later. A mail problem kept me occupied for the greater part of the day, and when 30000 users aren’t receiving their email, the pressure to put aside the things you really want to do on the same day is relatively high.

Still, my boss and I managed to fix the problem (hey, we’re a good team, hehe) and I think I got pretty much everything done that I had to get done before my vacations. Except buying tickets: When I left at 8:20 I really wanted to catch the bus; the alternatives were either to wait another hour (no way) or to talk to the nearest subway station (20 minutes on foot, no way either).

I wanted to check how much overtime I had put in this week, but the terminal we use to check our time balances was broken. I really don’t remember the exact times… but I think it was something like 10-12h for the week. I haven’t done that much overtime in quite a while. Not that I mind, it was necessary and at least I can feel really good about not working for two weeks now. Still, such long hours do have disadvantages. I didn’t manage to go shopping for food once this week, so I have absolutely nothing left at home. The stores open in about three and a half hours and I’ll probably be one of the first in line today. Also, when I work for 12h and then get home, I really do not have much energy left in me to do anything meaningful. On most nights, I just read some news and email, and dropped off to deep slumber. I did manage to test a few new computer games but not very thorough.

And don’t even think I had time for my website re-implementation project.

My co-worker Michael just came into my office. He was quite proud of himself as he told me he had just stood up for his non-smoker rights at the airport.

“Normally, I never say something, I just get annoyed but I keep my mouth shut,” he said. “But I remembered you and your fight against the smoke and I decided to say something this time.”

Here at the airport, smoking is prohibited except in small designated areas. When some airport employees started to smoke in a non smoking area, he complained to them and asked them to please move over to the smoking area. They declined, until he mentioned that he would call security. Grudgingly, they stood up and left for the smoking area.

After they had disappeared, other people around him commended him. “I wish there were more people with your courage to say something about such things.”

So, I feel pretty good now that my shining example of standing up to bad things has had some effect. It confirms my opinion that if everybody would just stop taking crap from others, defend their rights, and accept no nonsense, then the world would be a much better place.

Met with [Martion(http://www.martinlormes.de) for some Geek Food and Futurama. The Food consisted of Coke and Subway sandwiches. Now that is a way to spend a good evening! He borrowed me an Airport card for my trusty old iBook, but we – very quickly – moved back to wired LAN. 11 Mbit is, quite frankly, way too slow for anything except very small applications. Like fetching email or browsing the web. Transferring large files to the file server? You got to be kidding! Maybe Airport Extreme (54 Mbit) will work at an acceptable speed.

The installation of the airport card in my 12″ iBook was, quick and painless. though. Hey, I’ve also finally installed all the current updates of Mac OS X 10.2 – which took forever. I really, really need to get one of those drool inducing G4 iBooks ASAP. Screw Bush, I need a faster notebook to save my sanity.

Futurama: We watched “Obsoletely Famous”, “Bend Her”, “Three Hundred Big Boys” and, uh, the episode with the Space Bees. I love them, all of them. We wondered, however, what kind of drugs were used in the writing of the scripts.

Trivia of the day: The term “dingbat” is a typography term of obscure origin but has been used to describe decorative “characters” or symbols for a long time. It can also mean an “empty headed person” as an insult, and was seemingly used with gusto as the later by a character in the 70s TV show “All in the Family”.

What movie would be more appropriate to my series of Halloween reviews than, well, the movie “Halloween”. This classic with young “scream queen” Jamie Lee Curtis is probably the best known example of the slasher sub-genre of horror movies.

For those who don’t know the story: 15 years after he killed his older sister, Michael Myers returns to his little Ohio hometown to follow his murderous instincts.

Hey, I pretty much just summed up the entire movie in one sentence. I had never seen this one before, except maybe possibly on TV. When Olav suggested it for my Halloween reviews I was actually quite eager to finally watch it. Olav is going to disagree with me on this, but to be quite honest, I think this movie sucks.

For about the first sixty percent we get to see what seems like a typical Halloween day. Kids being kids (that is, tormenting each other); teenagers being teenagers (getting stoned behind the wheel, being horny, and so on), all that sort of stuff. In between we have the good Doctor Loomis who’s trying to convince everybody that Michael Myers is “evil” because, well, he doesn’t really have any evidence but he just knows the kid is evil.

So after a while the plot thickens, and eventually, some of the girls buy the farm. Some naked breasts in between, and one of them, like all great movie sluts, dies after having sex (which by the way must have been the minute waltz. I guess the 70s were really quite naive and harmless when it comes to movies). The showdown is quick, harmless, and to the point. The end is predictable as it can be – especially when you know that Halloween spawned an entire series of movies.

I realize this movie’s supposed to be a classic, and maybe it even managed to scare someone once upon a time. But unfortunately for Mr. Carpenter, Halloween does not stand up to the test of time. I’m genuinely trying to think of one moment during the entire movie that scared me, and frankly, find none. I will be gentle with Mr Carpenters work; I am sure a great deal of this is that (a) the plot of the movie was pretty much known ahead of time and (b) the slasher format has been copied again and again until one is nowadays seriously tempted to suggest that anybody proposing to finance another slasher movie should have his own throat cut in a graphic manner. This would probably do the world more good than another clone of Halloween.

There are many old horror movies that are still scary today, but Halloween unfortunately isn’t one of them. It’s probably a must-see simply because it started the slasher craze, and because Jamie Lee Curtis is proof that a woman gets either more good looking with age, or with money.

Let me add a few words to the very simple DVD edition I watched. It was the German version and was bare of any extras. A few text pages about actors and the director are rendered in a yellow-blue combination that is so painful on the eyes that they could actually be the most frightening part of tonight’s cineastic experience. Browsing Amazon it seems that at least three editions of the Halloween DVD were produced. Hopefully some sort of collector’s edition has nicer extras. Halloween is one of the movies I’d really have loved to hear an Audio commentary of. There wasn’t even an English audio track. At least, they restored scenes that were obviously cut from the original release – they were not dubbed, but merely subtitled. I can barely manage to imagine just how horrible the movie must have been without these – quite essential – scenes.

Note: One interesting tidbit is that one of the horror movies the kids watch in Halloween is the movie “The Thing from Another World” from 1953, which Carpenter later re-made in the 80s.