A friend and I decided that we don’t want to spend New Year’s Eve in Vienna, so we’ve been discussing various options since last Friday. Since I couldn’t convince him to celebrate in Tirana, we finally settled on Rome. So today we start hunting for tickets, find some semi-decent ones with Austrian, but somehow don’t book them right away. A couple hours pass and when we finally get our lazy butts to the online booking site, we discover that the return flight for January 2nd is gone. Anyway, a couple of mishaps and coordination problems later, I finally have tickets for December 28 and January 1st. However, when my friend tried to book the same itinerary, it turns out that the flights already became more expensive, so he didn’t book them. This is kinda awkward, since he was the one who originally wanted to go to Rome, whereas I would have been open for a lot of other options too. We’re currently discussing splitting the additional costs for his tickets, so I really hope that they will still be available at the time he tries to book them…

And in case you wonder: Yes, it’s the friend who was also involved in the Romania incident.

Pungenday, The Aftermath 11, 3173 YOLD

Today I found a neat userstyle for GMail called GMail.app which gives the site a Mac-like appearance. It can be used with Stylish or Greasemonkey and I like the style quite a lot.

P.S. The new IMAP Access for GMail is much appreciated too.

Prickle-Prickle, The Aftermath 7, 3173 YOLD

Don’t get me wrong, Soup really is great! But it’s just not the tool for writing longer posts, and I’m missing the opportunity to get comments on my musings. So here’s how I’ll handle things from now on:

• citizen428.soup(): The whole package, including tumblelog, Flickr pics, del.icio.us bookmarks and my blog.


• citizen428.blog(): Giving in to popular demand (viz. two people) this is the no frills, blog posts only side of me. I’ve also created a different RSS feed for this, so you don’t have to go through loads of pics and URLs if you are only interested in my ramblings.

Setting Orange, The Aftermath 3, 3173 YOLD

The web is a great tool for sharing ideas and freedom of expression. However, efforts to try and control the Internet are growing. Internet repression is reported in countries like China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. People are persecuted and imprisoned simply for criticising their government, calling for democracy and greater press freedom, or exposing human rights abuses, online.

But Internet repression is not just about governments. IT companies have helped build the systems that enable surveillance and censorship to take place. Yahoo! have supplied email users’ private data to the Chinese authorities, helping to facilitate cases of wrongful imprisonment. Microsoft and Google have both complied with government demands to actively censor Chinese users of their services.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It is one of the most precious of all rights. We should fight to protect it.
http://irrepressible.info/about

I’ve signed the pledge and have added irrepressible content to this blog (in the sidebar on the left) and I encourage you to do so too!

There are also two other petitions which I deem worthy of your support:
Flucht is kein Verbrechen – Keine Schubhaft für AsylwerberInnen (in German)
Protect the Baltic Sea while it’s still not too late!

Setting Orange, Confusion 49, 3173 YOLD

Fair Use Day

Boomtime, Confusion 46, 3173 YOLD

Some more good movies I’ve recently (re-)watched:

American Hardcore
Choyonghan kajok
Bijitâ Q
Katakuri-ke no kôfuku
Herz aus Glas
Tideland

Setting Orange, Confusion 44, 3173 YOLD

*) Ordered a presale ticket for the Chaos Communication Camp 2007

*) Got myself a pre-order copy of VMware Fusion which is an absolute bargain for $39.99, since it would be well worth the $79.99 it will cost later on.

*) Found out that Tim Fite now also offers his 2004 album “2 Minute Blues” as a free download on his website. While you’re there make sure to also get “Over the Counter Culture”, which probably is the best new album I’ve heard this year.

Life’s (mostly) good!

Prickle-Prickle, Confusion 43, 3173 YOLD