473 Uploaded a bunch of photos from the LAC.

Today at the supermarket I actually managed to get someone kicked out. And it’s cool.

I was waiting in line when the woman of the couple in front of me decided she forgot something. I turned slightly to the side to make way for her, and my shopping basket bumped into the guy behind me. Not hard, but it did. I would not even have noticed, had he not started to lament. So I pulled my earphones out and turned towards him.

“Is there a problem?”

“Yeah don’t hit me with your f-ing basket.”

The guy behind me was of a very special type. Light, short hair; grayish skin; leather jacket, slightly crouched posture. I know the type from the central station. Everything about his demeanor said “Hey – I am a drug addict”. He also used 2nd person singular – In English this makes no difference, but in German that is the informal address you use with friends, buddies, and so on. Strangers are not supposed to use this form; in fact you can basically forbid someone to use it on you.

“Well, the woman needed to get through and I don’t have eyes on my back. Don’t stand so close then.”

It’s not my fault if people are dumb. You really don’t have to stand on each other’s toes in a queue at the cashier. I always leave enough space. I would of course have apologized as a matter of formality, had his tone not been so hostile.

“Blah blah, don’t talk gibberish,” the man said.

“You really should try a more civilized tone, and I did not allow you to call me ‘Du’”. I find it always a good idea to remind people I am not their buddy. If they use 2nd person plural, the formal form of address, there is more of a buffer, more distance between us. I am hoping to remind them “hey, I am not your friend, treat me properly”.

“What a sh-t nonsense, I call you whatever I want, go back to your bank and relax your f-ing self.”

By now it was clear that this guy had a perception of me and that I stood for the other end of society. I don’t work in a bank, but what point would there be in correcting him?

I turned to the cashier-woman. “Excuse me ma’am, could you please make sure this person stops annoying me?”

“You heard the gentleman,” the cashier said. “Just stop it, okay?”

“I bet you also still go crying to your momma,” the guy told me. I ignored this. “Someone really should teach the ass a lesson,” he added.

“Hey!” the cashier exclaimed. “I will pretend I did not hear that!”

The guy was then talking to the person behind him. Similar type, a bit taller, darker hair, with a beard. Buddy of his. Something about “d-ck size” and: “Clearly this as-hole has an inferiority complex.”

“I think only one of the two of us has that problem,” I smirked.

“Whatever, go put your sh-it on the band and stop bothering me jerk,” the man retorted cleverly. By now it was my turn and I paid. As I started to pack my things, the man had put his groceries on the band. He stood next to me, ready to pack his items after the cashier had scanned them. He was sill mumbling.

“What a f-ing a-hole, someone really should beat his nose to a pulp.”

“OKay,” I turned to the guy. “This is really enough,” I said.

“Get out,” the cashier intervened. “You know, I will not sell you these items, just get out of here and stop bothering people.”

“Fine,” the guy said. “I will go shop someplace else.”

“That is probably better,” I replied.

“Yes, you do that, just go now,” the cashier said.

The guys knew when they stood no chance. Had they continued, the cashier would have called other co-workers, possibly the police. They turned and left.

“Thanks, really appreciate that,” I told the woman.

I packed my stuff and headed home, feeling good that justice had been served for once.

Well, a couple of people have bugged me with inquiries like, “what’s up” or “where the hell are you hiding” or similar catchy questions. The truth is that there is simply not much blog-worthy stuff happening around here. Work still keeps me occupied, but what should I tell about that? I avoid the news, especially national news, because I am allergic to the current government and their strange policies (Link in German, sorry Wenny et al). There are no travel plans, I don’t get around to writing the bunch of reviews I have yet to write, and my main (small) hobby Neverwinter Nights I cover elsewhere.

So, I am not dead. I haven’t given up on posting here. I am just hibernating. I got some stuff on the cooker, but it’s on a small flame. If anything comes of it, it’ll get blogged.

I guess my iPod is nearing death. Seriously this time; after I had revived it last time by reformatting it, this trick didn’t work. I still get weird errors hinting at disk problems, and the device is only recognized by the PC on maybe one out of four attempts. It lasted one and a half years so far, which I find way too little for such an expensive device.

Now I will have to think about I will do next. For now, the iPod still works. And I am doing an intensive disk check as I write this. But what next? What will I do if – when – the iPod dies? Buy a new one?

I really don’t know yet.

Update, the next morning

The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume NILS JEPPE' created 10/25/2006 9:33 PM
Volume Serial Number is 4BDD-E7E8
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
   58,450,664 KB total disk space.
        1,948 KB in 88 hidden files.
        2,192 KB in 545 folders.
   46,767,916 KB in 10,291 files.
   11,678,604 KB are available.

    4,096 bytes in each allocation unit.

14,612,666 total allocation units on disk. 2,919,651 allocation units available on disk.

Well, no disk errors. I have no idea what the little guy’s problem is.

I played a long game of Defcon last night. Easily 2 hours, I would say. What a thrilling game. It was tense and I was actually sweating through parts of it. Game setup:

• Diplomacy mode
• Random territories
• 6 players

The game began and I found myself in Europe. A tough place. I quickly contacted Russia and suggested we should stick together when thing would begin to fall apart. He agreed.

South Asia began the nuclear war very quickly. (The player was new to Diplomacy). He tried a full-out launch against Russia and Africa, and to a lesser extent, Europe, and was promptly removed from the global community. He did cause some damage to Russia, but he didn’t get many nukes through; the combined Russo-European Anti-Missile Defense system worked effectively. Russia retaliated by trying to take out as much of South Asia’s infrastructure as possible. Africa joined the war with a massive bomber assault on South Asia. As the commander of the European Strategic Forces, I sent several bomber wings South-East as well. We succeeded in taking out most of South Asia’s defense installations.

Meanwhile, I had received reports of African subs in the Atlantic. The African leader agreed to withdraw the subs. I also took this opportunity to place a full submarine fleet into the Mid-Atlantic, and a smaller fleet into the Labrador Sea. North America had also a large fleet there, consisting of at least a carrier group and a battleship group. The European diplomatic corps asked them to kindly stay out of our territorial waters, to which North America agreed. A mistake on behalf of a European bomber crew nearly led to a break in the Alliance between Russia and Europe, as they accidentally dropped a nuke into Western Russia (I mis-clicked), but fortunately, no damage was done, and the diplomats were able to defuse the tense situation.

The global war began to expand, as South America used the chaos for a sneak-attack on Africa. Africa called for diplomatic sanctions, which were enacted. It was at this point that North America also left the global community, and allied itself with South America. The North American fleet in the North Atlantic began to attack the European forces in the area, and the peace-loving Europeans found themselves thrust into an unwanted war against the Americans.

This war dragged on. Africa had been severely decimated in the attacks, but Russia honored its commitment to the alliance and sent a battleship group as well as bomber support. With much effort, the Russo-European fleet managed to hold of the naval assault in the North Atlantic. Bombers and submarine launches began to decimate North American defense installations. The submarine fleet in the Labrador sea was sunk during this attack.

Eventually, North and South America began a launch of their ICBM silos. They nuked Africa, but most of the missiles sent against Russia and Europe again failed to penetrate the Anti-Missile shield over Eurasia.

Finally, as most of the nuclear forces in the world had been exhausted, I ordered my forces into a full retaliatory strike against the Americas. The silos launched first, and were joined by the Atlantic submarine fleet. Enough nuclear missiles made it through to devaste cities across the Americas, but the remaining Anti-Missile defenses especially in South America proved that they still had teeth.

As the European counter-attack subsided, the survivors surveyed the devasted cities and counted their losses. Radioactivity in South Asia and in Africa would make those areas uninhabitable for years.

During the final stage of the counter-attack, Russia did backstab me and launched some left-over nukes at London and came out. That attack, however, was purely motivated by being on top#1 spot, so I feel it was done “out of character” and should not be part of the “in character” narrative.

Lessons learned:

• Diplomacy games require patience. It is not advisable to be the first to launch, because this gives others a good opportunity to attack you.
• First attacks should be made by bombers. They have no “launch detected” warning, they are mobile, and you have lots of them.
• Submarines are very, very vulnerable once they surface. Handle with care.
• Only do a retaliatory strike at the end of the game if you really must. It will distract you, and you’ll spend your nukes for no reason.
• If you lead and someone is close in second place, he will most likely backstab you. Take out his silos and stuff at the very least, but do not disable your air defences completely.
• Radars should always be nuked first. Always.
• The best way to overcome AA is to take out the radars first, so the AA has less reaction time, then overload the defences. You have plenty of nukes, they have few silos.
• It’s too bad there are no “alliance victories” in the game.

Thanks to all the players for a great game last night.

My sister and mother sent me some photos taken with my sister’s new camera. The building they live in – and which used to be my home for many years when I was still living in Hamburg – is being torn down by its new owner. While there are still people living in there. From what I understood this new owner isn’t very diplomatic or clever. Instead of offering incentives for the remaining tenants to move out, the strategy seems to be to chase them away by making life unpleasant for them. I could understand this if someone was really being uncooperative; but in this case it’s definitely the other way around. Resistance to the relocation plans increases the more obnoxious the new owners are. I told my mother to get a lawyer.

I am really not unhappy to see this building go; it’s really not a loss for mankind. But I must wonder at the methods employed to achieve that goal. I guess my inability to comprehend this mentality is the reason why I will never own real estate myself. Personally, I’d rather be humane and poor than well-off and inhuman. But that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.

The BBC reports that Human Rights Watch has described Saddam Hussein’s trial as “flawed and unsound”.

HRW said it had documented “serious administrative, procedural and substantive legal defects” that meant [Saddam Hussein] did not get a fair trial.

Well now there’s a surprise.

Block port 25/tcp outgoing from all dialup (and dsl, whatever) ip ranges. Only whitelist exceptions on request, then blacklist them again when an abuse report comes in.

If every ISP did this, we could probably reduce spam by an order of magnitude.

And no normal user will need 25/tcp outgoing anyway.

AP reports about protests after an American woman was kicked off a Delta Airlines flight for breastfeeding her child.

America needs to get a grip already. It’s starting to become annoying.

This is what happens when people steal my bandwidth and I notice it. (The lower pic.)