Reading (For Dummies)

News

Doug and I got some very good news last night. We've been awarded NSF Cyber-Service grants (a $20,000 raise over my last job [unemployed]). I get this strange feeling that the awards committee was waiting on me to announce the decisions. One of the administrative assistants for the program was emailing me almost every day if I got accepted yet. I found out yesterday that the decision had been made regarding my admission to Syracuse, but I would have to wait for the official letter to learn what it was. Yesterday the decisions/announcements for the Cyber-Service grants were also made. Coincidence? Maybe not! Well, I can only assume that I got accepted to the University, too (and why not? I graduated cum laude with a "Outstanding Achievement in CS" award).

Even if it's not true, I'll delude myself and make myself feel better by pretending that that is how it is. I have been extremely self-deprecating lately after the whole miserable German university experience. I need a little ego boost to make me back into the arrogant, pompous arsehole that we all know and love.

So Doug and I are fellows, working in the same program, sharing a lot of the same political/privacy/computational views. I'm a bit more technical, he's a bit more policy. We're both f'ing geniuses. No kidding. So I think the program will be a good thing, hella fun, and it will save my ass from debt, boredom, and lunacy.

War *'ing

Can I just take a moment to say how beautiful warwalking, wardriving, warbiking, wartramming, warbussing, and warsquatting are? Thanks to Kismac, I mapped out several hotspots near my new flat, and can even use one from my bedroom. There are literally dozens of non-wep enabled hotspots in Neustadt, which I never tried to find before because of my bad battery (and frickin' freezing weather). Well find them I will, and if I get a USB to serial adapter, I'll even GPS them and make a listing for tourists.

I'm alive

I'm alive, really. I promised some photos of our Absinth, Pot, and Fire party on the Elbe, so here they are.

Absinth

Iman, Portrait, 2003.04.18

It was just a bit fire on the river, what do you expect?

Anyway, I don't have regular internet access any more. I am forced to use dialup and public access computers because of my new living arrangements.

I spend a lot of time these days bike riding. I even managed to destroy my front fork already -- took a serious jump and it started squirting oil out the seals! So I'll need a new one when I get back to the US. Maybe I'll just leave the fork here, it will make the bike lighter!

Moving away

Tomorrow morning I catch a flight back to the United States. I'm heading back early and lying to my girlfriend (and hence posting secret messages on my blog that will be revealed later, since she reads this). The plan is to get all my paperwork and crap sorted out in the two weeks before her birthday, and then to surprise her on my birthday with my sudden arrival. I only hope I can find a job and stuff...

It's sure going to be nice to actually see my girlfriend once in a while. Though moving is definitely a bummer. Ferri and I had coffee this afternoon, for the last time. Hopefully I will meet him again sometime; he's the first "real" person I have met in a long time...very earthy, ourdoorsy, and painfully aware of social intricacies. Kind of reminds me of myself in a way. Saying goodbye to friends like him really sucks. Well, at least I have a reason to come back sometime (or to go to Austria again). It just is a bit painful to have such bonding moments with another introvert when you're leaving. But hey, that's the way we operate.

Downtime

Pardon the downtime. I gave away my old webserver and router to my friend Ferri last night, as a bit of a going-away present. I was getting kind of tired of the thing running in my room all the time anyway. So no net access until I find a good hotspot in the area, or the resident network administrators update my MAC address record in their little router, and email that they changed it. These dudes are so paranoid about security that you can't change your mac address or they lock off your port, and you have to go fill out papers and stuff to get it back on. So no sense bothering to plug the thing in.

The last days have been bike riding, hanging out with Ferri, and taking apart and rebuilding my bike to see how everything fits together (and if it will fit in a box). There was a nice little campfire party on the Elbe in there somewhere, I'll toss up some pictures as soon as I can get my laptop plugged into the net again. Isn't life annoying without internet access?

Moving woes

So the UPS folks decided to fuck me over pretty royally. Yesterday they wouldn't take my boxes because I was missing paperwork. It seems that they should have told me about the paperwork when I made the order, seeing as how I was shipping 43kg of stuff from Germany to the US.

Anyway, I got the forms, and rescheduled my pickup. Today I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally I called UPS, who had no knowledge of my rescheduled pickup.

Now they can't pick my things up until Tuesday. Which is a bit late, seeing as how I'm flying out of the country on Tuesday at 8am. So I'm pretty much fucked. If Annie had any idea how much stress I'm going through to surprise her for her birthday...

Hiking again

I went hiking in the Sachsische Schweiz again a few days ago, this time with Ferri's parents. Yep, they came to Dresden to visit.

I decided to snap more photos this time. I might go back before I leave Germany, but probably not to Grosse Winterberg (the usual hiking route). Maybe just for bike riding.

As for the preparations to leave bit, it's been getting rather funny. I'll have more on that later.

Fucking USA

Did it just become illegal to run anonymous remailer nodes, mix network nodes, and firewalls (for fuck's sake) in Michigan? I hope that the Michigan government realizes that it itself uses services which, "conceals the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service."

Well probably. I hope they use firewalls...

Props to Mike T.

While I'm busy doing paperwork, packing boxes, and showing people Germany before I leave, I haven't had much time to talk trash. I figure I'll get all of this stuff done early so that I can enjoy my last two weeks in Deutschland.

A while ago, I gave Mike Tolles (? I don't even know his last name!) some space on my webserver. He didn't do anything for months, and suddenly he's exploded with political commentary, with contributions from a lot of well-educated and informative folk. Give him a read, you won't be disappointed.

Black People Love Us

Deep political commentary or racist satire? You decide. I only wish the site was pointless...

Call for Assistance

I'm moving out of Germany Real Soon Now. I need to ship some things back to the United States. The top things that need to go are a box of books and clothes. The weight is somewhere around 20-25 kilograms. So far the usual shipping companies (DHL, UPS, Fedex) will charge over 300,- € for such a box, which is a bit crazy to me. Does anybody know of some good 'secret' international carrier that can send off a box on the cheap? 300 smackers is almost enough to buy round-trip plane tickets to Dresden...

Where have I been?

Stephen's been visiting this week, and the prior week was the anonymity conference. I've been a little out of the loop. My apartment is a mess because I cook and sleep but don't clean.

We've had as fun a few days as people can have when I have the flu and am not much of a tour guide of Germany anyway.

We went to Leipzig, to the Stasi Museum and to the St. Thomaskirche.

Bach's Tomb, inside the Thomaskirche

We also went outside of town to the Dresden Pillnitz castle with Ferri. Not much of it was opened, though, because of flood damage.

Flood levels through the years

The flood table written on the pillars and walls doesn't even have last years marked yet. Last year's was higher than any of the others (evidence by a brown stain just below the ceiling, slightly above the last mark recorded in 1858 or so).

We went out for a Fraternity dinner at Ferri's, where I met a character that I didn't get to talk to long enough.

"I am an old man," he says to me, "I was born in 1917. 85 years. I lived through the war. I served in it. I did not want to, most of us did not, but I did." I was suddenly presented with the rare opportunity to talk to a former Nazi soldier who seems willing, in fact eager to talk about his experience. I couldn't think of anything to say. I guess I was worried that I would offend him or the people around, asking probing questions about life under Hitler's rule. Maybe I will try to find out his name and talk to him later. Maybe not. Some things are better left overwritten by dry history. Maybe we shouldn't ask these old soldiers to tell us their story. The nazis were evil and lost the war; so long as we remember that, why remember their names and recall the things they did as individuals?

Anyway, what was meant to be a status update turned into a psuedo-historopolitical rant.

Gulf War

I'm glad to see the war in Iraq isn't about oil.

Hiking

My old roommate/comrade-in-arms/etc Stephen stopped into town for the week.

Stephen and I went hiking in the Sachsische Schweiz today.

Stephen holding up the mountain

The rock may look familiar.

I hate walking downhill

We spent a few hours hiking around, came home. I collapsed on the floor with (hopefully just) allergies. I have more photos (uber-cute Annie-in-Dresden) in a bit.