dinyar’s blog

So seeing as it’s late and I do need to sleep at times, I still haven’t bought a digi-cam (I want a cheap, well fabricated, thin, water-proof, many-megapixel, durable and preferably well designed model.. any hints? ) and I’m still trying to find out the URL of the photopage that a collegue of mine uses (no, it isn’t flickr) I won’t be able to write about my day out with the kids swimming (summary: short sleep then water on my newspaper, even more paper on my t-shirt and pants, change to a more suitable costume for the day (yeah - trunks ), very much water all around me and finally a few crying kids due to the sheer amount of water (or the lack thereof.. this changes from minute to minute.) pictures follow. promise.).

Anyway - the reason for this post a question to my barely existant but still highly valued readers:

Do you personally know of any geek without gmail?

To answer it for myself: I don’t (k, I’m making assumptions about one of my friends here, but I just can’t imagine him not at least having an unused account.).

The not-so-important-ones anyway.

So first I found myself in a crisis of identity yesterday. It lasted for about 5 hours, but it was real bad. It all began when I read this. Now, I am aware that I am very obsessed with Sam’s blog at the moment, but I guess he’s just in a similar situation like me at the moment, or whatever.. and I am likewise aware of the fact, that he’s not sure whether to visit graduate school in oposition to my problem (which I am going to outline in a second - paitience, please), but the dillema is probably similar. So anyway I enroled for physics at the University of Vienna yesterday and all was fine.

About six hours later I found myself wanting to be a chemical engineer, or a molecular biologiest or WHATEVER JUST NO STINKIN’ PHYSICIST!! And I felt really bad. Thinking that you invested about 4 years of your life into a subject that turns out to be the wrong one is an extremely awful feeling. Extremely. I mean - all my life (or at least for say a quarter of my life) I’ve been very sure that “In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.” (Ernest Rutherford) and then I want to be a chemist! A chemist! (No offense to all you chemists out there - I’m just trying to act like a physicist looking down on all those approximations which I don’t (yet?) understand. )
So I went to bed and woke up only to search about physics on Google. I found out that the University of Vienna is awfully bad at teaching physics, but I was anyway thinking about changing to Berlin after two semesters which is supposed to be quite good (to be honest among the three best in the german-speaking world [which isn't as big and not nearly as competitive as the english-speaking one I realise]). And I found out as well that physicist really do have a broad spectrum of possibilities after graduation reaching from working as an actuary to doing research to working in high-tech industry. I think I’m on track again.

So after I managed to handle that situation the following turned up: I recently moved my desktop computer to Vienna from my hometown in the “Waldviertel”.. somewhere way up north of Lower Austria. Decided to do a fresh install of Debian GNU/Linux seeing as I had installed a new graphics card as well as gotten myself a brand new 19” Samsung SyncMaster to replace my old 15” which I was getting increasingly angry with. So I was amazed by the speed of the install (not counting the hours of waiting while downloading all those masses of files) and later on amazed by the new-found beauty of the Debian desktop. Really nice. Set everything up without a problem.. and then I began to “tweak”. I wanted to try out the immensley cool 3ddesk app which playes your virtual desktops on a cube and lets you rotate it (mainly to impress non-unix people.. ), it’s not compiz though, but all the same OpenGL powered - which isn’t supported by the free drivers for my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Damn. So here I am sitting around with a more or less new card and I can’t use it due to the refusal by ATI to open up their specs for the general public in aid to write good drivers.

And then it happened: I was seriously pondering using ATI’s proprietairy drivers. I have been a free software evangelist for my neighbourhood for about 3 years now and then I fall for some stupid drivers! So to make a long story short: I failed miserably due to some bug with either the drivers (which would make me very happy ) or the kernel (which I guess is very unlikely) or X.org (which is also unlikely I guess) or possibly some dependency problem with Debian that hasn’t been documented or something. In any case the newly made module didn’t load and I was stuck without hardware acceleration, but I guess I can cope with that.

On another note: I have resumed my contribution for some boinc projects - namely Einstein@home, seti@home, Rosetta@home and climateprediction.net, might be cool if others join as well. So if you haven’t signed up already, then maybe look through some of the projects and consider also donating a bit of CPU-time, some of them do seem to be quite important IMHO.

First of all: Check out thetechnomads.com, it’s a site by four MIT-Students who are trying to raise a whole lot of money for two charities by driving from London to somewhere in Mongolia. Don’t ask me how, but you can anyway help them by donating.. Definitely worth supporting IMHO..

Another story having to do with MIT.. sorta.. If you know me from before this blog you probably know that I wanted to study there at one point of my life. Long story short: they didn’t accept me (not too distressed about that though.. was great fun and with an acceptance rate of something around 4% there’s nothing to be ashamed of.. ). So anyway I was under the impression that MIT’s 1000 freshmen were sort of low, but I had no idea just how low..

So I enroled online for the University of Vienna and decided to finish enrolment on tuesday shortly before work - I arrived there and found about 10 to 15 people waiting in a line and decided that I didn’t want to wait that long, so I left again. Later I talked with a few collegues of mine about this and was explaining that I hoped to be more lucky next time whereupon a girl explained that 10 people waiting is pure luxury at the University and that she was waiting behind like 50 when she enroled. This was my first moment of revelation. The second was today.

I found myself behind like 5 people (University begins again in October, so I’ve finished enrolment very early actually.. ) waiting and when finished with the whole procedure I was given a coupon for being “one of the first 5000″ to enrol. I mean - “under the first 5000″! That’s actually near the whole student population of MIT! I actually felt really quite taken aback - and sortof stupid..

Anyway I was informed in the mean while that there are only about 150 physics freshmen, so that sounds a lot better and I don’t plan to stay here anyway for much more than two years, but I’ll see.. playing with the thought of studying in Berlin beacause the city is supposedly very beautiful - going to see for myself when I do Inter Rail with a couple of friends.

On another note: I really need to get a digi-cam now. Went past some guy on such a tiny motorbike yesterday and I was completely supefied! This guy was just amazing and the thing looked like one of those toys.. regretted not being able to take a picture, but thanks to google I found this:

Imagine this reaching like up to your knee.

And with this I leave you.

Yesterday I volunteered to help two interns with the kids.. I mean - they’re really sweet.. just..

chaos!!

No, to be honest: It was really nice - played football for about two hours at first and then I spent most of the time pushing various kids on the swing, picking them up from the floor and generally just being used as a pony.. well, until the goddess of wrath’s (or someone else’s) anger turned upon me: two girls started fighting about something, resulting in one torn neckalce, one crying girl, one complaining girl and about 18 screaming kids.. so much for a peacefull conclusion of our otherwise really cool outing.. BUT I enjoyed being screamed at and carrying kids around the place so much that I volunteered for another 4 days of childcare during the next two weeks..

On another note: Here’s a great big thank you! to the guys at C&A (link opens in new window) - they’re curently looking into their stocks to see if they can help us out with maternity clothes for a woman living at our home with nothing more than what she’s wearing. C&A is apparently involved in quite a few campaigns having to do with social institutes so their willingness to help us out so unbureaucraticly is extremely nice.. I’ll keep you updated about this.

You know.. while writing blog-entries I’m increasingly often find myself checking whether I’ve written enough.. (I’ve just written two full entries so far - talk about early writer’s block!) I think I’ll start pulling Sams and adding pictures to my entries.. gotta get a digicam to do so though.. any suggestions? Compatibility with GNU/Linux is, as always, taken for granted.

Recent reply to a post of mine (in german):

aba vü zu vüle ausländer sans trotzdem
zumindest de de was nix hakeln
de de was brav ernere steuern zahln und net in staat zur last fallen san halt leider de minderheit . .

rough translation:
but still far too many foreigners..
at least those not working
those working and paying their taxes and not living of state-support are sadly the minority..

god, how those idiots get me angry.. i ought to really stop visiting this sort of websites..

1. most of “them” are asylum-seekers who aren’t allowed to work! they are given the possibility to help in our refugee home and are more than willing to do so..
2. as soon as you let “them” work half of austria will go round complaining about “the foreigners taking away our jobs”..
   and
3. f***ing stop generalising! of course a few people are not willing to work! of course some will be too traumatised to work and of course most of the people fleeing from a country for economic reasons won’t be a member of the upper-class, but they’re just humans.. I mean what do you expect?!

arg..

So even I was finally pulled into teh blogosphere!!1! great..

well, ok: wordpress is obviously a neat piece of code (standard compliant and free above all.. ) and I’m reasonably satisfied with the current theme - no, I certainly won’t design a custom template (anyone who’s seen my homepage will know why.. ).

Anyways.. from now onwards I hope to post some anecdotes from my life in here.. for all who don’t know:
atm I’m working for the Caritas in Vienna in a refugee home and enjoying it immensely. I’m going to study physics at the university of Vienna as of octobre, but I plan to continue my work for the Caritas.. any other details can be found on my homepage (atm it’s still german-only, but I hope to change this sometime in the near future.. )..

so with this I leve you to browse this blog.. have a lot of fun..