Kiva

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

Prickle-Prickle, Confusion 13, 3173 YOLD

Oct 12th 2012: In an unprecedented moment of clarity, humanity finally admitted defeat, burnt everything to the ground and decided to move back up the trees. This is our last news report, good game everyone!

Sweetmorn, Discord 73, 3173 YOLD

Instead of watching TV, do yourself a favor and watch some good movies. Here are a few recommendations:

Life in Loops
A Scanner Darkly
Donnie Darko
2046
Bin-Jip
Samaria
Kin-Dza-Dza
Seom
Shortbus
Jisatsu saakuru

Sweetmorn, Discord 68, 3173 YOLD

43places, 43things, Last.fm, MySpace, Plazes, SuprGlu, Ta-da lists.

Fuck you, Web 2.0.

Sweetmorn, Discord 63, 3173 YOLD

The past few weeks (including the 10 days in Romania) have been a thrill-a-minute, so I’m currently really worn out. I also don’t feel like blogging lately since I got a lot of stuff on my mind, so don’t expect too many updates in the near future.

Setting Orange, Discord 52, 3173 YOLD

Today at work we needed to find a regular expression to extract the name of a backup job from an SNMP trap. The trap looks as follows:

“[beginning garbage]job name[more garbage]”

The job name can consist of several words containing alphanumeric characters, separated by either a space, an underscore or a dash. Here’s the crucial part of the final solution I came up with:

((?:\\w+[- ]?)*\\w*)

When you use this in a longer regex that also filters out the beginning garbage, this works like a charm even for strange job names as “foo-bar_baz qux_ madness”.

Setting Orange, Discord 22, 3173 YOLD

Steve Rogers aka Captain America has died in Marvel’s recent Civil War story line.

Although he never was among my favorite comic heroes, you just don’t let a super hero die like this. And if you do, don’t later resurrect him. I still can remember how I was traumatized when Superman died in the arms of Lois and how affected I was when all the other super heroes attended his funeral to show their respect, only to get disappointed by “Reign of the Supermen” and the later resurrection.

Farewall Captain America, and don’t let them turn you into a zombie!

Pungenday, Chaos 73, 3173 YOLD

Step 1. Be bored at worked.
Step 2. Get attracted by a discount airline‘s commercial in your favorite online newspaper.
Step 3. Discover that flights to Bucharest are incredibly cheap and decide to go there for a weekend in April.
Step 4. This is the crucial step: Don’t pay attention while booking the flight and choose the wrong date for your return flight, so you end up booking 1,5 weeks in Romania.

Summary: Christian and me will go to Romania from April 20th until April 30th. Wish us luck/fun/whatever.

Sweetmorn, Chaos 61, 3173 YOLD

Thursday
Got bored at work, so I ordered an ASUS WL-500GP to finally replace my trusty old Netgear MR314. It’s supported by OpenWrt and DD-WRT, features 2 USB Ports and is pretty cheap. What more could I possibly ask for?

In the evening I met parasew whom I haven’t seen in a long time and who really should take up blogging again! Alas it was a little too nice, which made me stay for way too long (around 3:30am) given that I had to get up at 6:30am on Friday.

Friday
Tired, tired, tired! Work wasn’t supposed to be stressful, since a Brocade fibre channel workshop was scheduled for the whole day. But of course one of our customers had a problem which needed fixing, so Christian and me had to go there to prove our ninja-like problem solving abilities.

Saturday
Attended a Taekwondo seminar from 2pm until around 7:15pm, which was really cool but quite exhausting. I also took my first grading (including breaking) and promoted to 9th kup.

Sunday
Didn’t do much for most of the day since I had quite a bad hangover (hey, at least this time I had an excuse for getting drunk), but then decided to attend the pretty nice XHTML+CSS workshop at the Metalab.

Monday
Since I couldn’t really sleep the night before, I was pretty tired for most of the day… Nonetheless I attended a friend’s birthday party in the evening, where I stayed until around 2am.

Tuesday
Deciding that I don’t want to waste my evening with lying around in front of the TV, I dragged my tired body to the Metalab. “Unfortunately” it was way too interesting there, which made me come home way later than I expected (around 2:30am).

Wednesday
After three nighta with less than 6 hours of sleep, I was quite afraid of the evening, where red667’s birthday party was scheduled. Surprisingly it wasn’t as devastating as last year’s, but still was really good fun. Happy Birthday again you punk!

Today
Since I took that day off, I finally managed to get some sleep. I wasn’t all lazy though, and rearranged my apartment to adjust to my living alone again. I now have a real living room, so my bed room isn’t jammed with electronic equipment anymore.

I’ve also received an invitation to become a beta tester for Joost (formerly know as The Venice Project), and judging from my short fiddling around with it, this thing is really hot. Expect to hear more about Joost, as soon as I have a little time to play around with it.

Setting Orange, Chaos 60, 3173 YOLD

In poker the term “drawing dead” refers to the process of drawing to a hand which will lose even if you make it, e.g. drawing to a flush when your opponent already has a full house. Learning to identify such situations will save you a lot of money and make you sleep better.

But I think it’s pretty important to apply this principle – and many others found in poker – to your real life as well. Don’t waste your time and energy chasing something that won’t win you the pot (e.g. make you happy) anyway. Don’t feel committed to something or someone because you’ve already made a big investment in terms of time, money, feelings or whatever, when you realize that you’re essentially drawing dead. Learning to let go at the right moment is a very important skill, and even if it hurts quite badly at times, it will spare you from far more serious trouble in the long run.

Boomtime, Chaos 52, 3173 YOLD

Yesterday we played two games of 1000 Blank White Cards at the Metalab which was quite a lot of fun. The cards we created ranged from “Emo Cheese” (which cuts itself), “MySpace down” (which of course lets emo cheese melt) to the even more bizarre “Milchschnitte frisst U-Bahn” (sorry, I couldn’t possibly translate this to English). If you want to spend a nice evening with your friends, 1KBWC definitely is an option which you should keep in mind.

Sweetmorn, Chaos 51, 3173 YOLD

Two weeks after I stopped taking my antibiotics, the inflammation of the middle ear I suffered from a while ago decided to come back to play another show in my auditory canals. This means one more week of taking a lot of medicine, which will possibly lead to another depression caused by an extended period of soberness. But actually I’m not blogging to complain about my recent problems in coping with reality, at least not now. This rant is about the stand-in doctor I had to visit today because my usual GP is on – most probably well-deserved – vacation. Mrs. Substitute, if I have to wait for more than 90 minutes in your office, please at least pay a little more attention when I’m telling you about my medical record and don’t ask the same questions over and over again. Not ignoring my questions and telling me a little bit more about what exactly I’m supposed to do for the next few days would have helped too…

Sweetmorn, Chaos 36, 3173 YOLD

Today I’ve been to the cinema for the first time in quite a while and watched Babel by Alejandro González Iñárritu of Amores perros and 21 Grams fame. Once again Iñárritu’s unexcited story telling is a welcome change from the fancy camera work and editing which got so popular in the last few years and serves the – sometimes a little too predictable – story well. The acting ranges between solid and excellent, and I especially liked the performance of Rinko Kikuchi who excels in the role of disturbed teenager Chieko.

Setting Orange, Chaos 35, 3173 YOLD

I just finished watching Rounders about half an hour ago, which is a really nice Poker movie and quite entertaining in general. Although the plot is a little too predictable at times, the great cast including Matt Damon, Edward Norton, John Turturro and John Malkovich more than makes up for it. The soundtrack was pretty cool too, so I decided to also order it along with a DVD of The Cincinnati Kid.

For additional Poker entertainment season 3 of High Stakes Poker started not too long ago and the first three episodes have been pretty good, although I’m already quite fed up by Mike Matusow’s constant babbling. I’m just not that happy with the player selection for the current season, since Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen are missing and I’d also love to see one of my personal favorites, Chris Esfandiari. Nonetheless I find HSP a lot more entertaining than NBC’s Poker After Dark, which had a great start when Phil Hellmuth was going ballistic in the very first episode.

I also found a really interesting thread on the 2+2 forums, where “Nate.” took on the challenge in turning $5 into $1000 in less than a week on PokerStars. I really wonder if the $5 Stars recently transferred to my account – I’ve only been playing Party and FullTilt lately – should be treated as a sign to try the same?

Oh, and for the title of this post: It’s a quote from Rounders, and it’s as true as it gets.

Setting Orange, Chaos 35, 3173 YOLD

Today I found this excellent Flash animation on the Metalab members mailing list, which may prove to be a great help in raising your non-techy friends awareness of privacy issues. Unfortunately it’s in German only…

http://www.trashhero.ch/redirect/1881.html

Pungenday, Chaos 28, 3173 YOLD