...wird sehr schön illustriert von dieser Österreichisches Deutsch DB.

'Twas the night before Christmas
and all 'round my belt,
Not an item was squarking
or beeping for help.

The pager was silent,
the cellphone as well.
The email was empty,
the situation was swell.
 
The lusers were happy,
and due to my hack,
The PHB was currently
detained in Iraq.
 
The servers were humming,
the errorlogs clear,
The building was locked,
I'm full of good cheer.

I with my Guiness,
from a pint glass I sucked,
if a luser wanted a password reset,
they can go get fscked,

Murphey be damned,
The Iron's been sated.
The goat has been slaughtered
And the pr0n-feed's gold plated.

Ma's dressed in a kerchief,
A bow on her neck,
Something nice to unwrap
For this tired old tech. 

So I sip on my brandy
While server fans whine.
Her lips taste of candy
The machines will be fine.

Mike Raeder, the Magrathean Jim and AJS of the monastery are responsible for this beauty.

they've bolted a "yahoo groups" hump <*barf*> onto the usenet archive, also adding "features" like email hiding in the message, body as well as headers - which means that whatever their stupid robot thinks is an email - ie. anything before and after an at sign anywhere is replaced by x...@yourdomain.tld. message ids are obfuckated, too.

all your postings are belong to them (they think). you can't respond (without signing up for "google groups" - yeah right...) and you can't see the email addys anywhere at all.

an interesting thing that came up during the obligatory /. discussion of this stupid move:

apparently the berne convention (which seems to have been ratified even by the silly murkins) states the the author has the right "...to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation."

well, displaying my posts to usenet mangled, with an email address that is invalid and not mine, and without my message ids, breaking all the MIDs or email addresses i may have included in the posting certainly is damaging my reputation as a nerd, nitpicker and Bastard. THEREFORE I OBJECT! <sfx:manic cackle, caused by the realisation that no one cares anyway>

so far most of the country TLD google portals still use the old useful dejagoogle interface, so not all is lost just yet.

for a reputedly tech-savvy and insightful company like google this is an insultingly stupid move earning them a center place in the front row against that wall when the revolution comes.

Grad im Leiberl-Stapel gesehen, und als hinreichend antik erkannt: Tja, lang ists her *snif*. Beide Leiberln sind - wie üblich bei mir - nicht gebügelt, aber auch nach 7 Jahren durchaus noch anziehbar (B-Cat: nicht mehr perfekt aber noch nicht C-Cat: untilgbare Lack-, Dreck- oder Falschfarben-Flecke; Proto-Putzfetzen).

Well, nowaday's news certainly are good for meteor showers. And ulcers, lots of ulcers - or don't you feel a little powerless whenever you look at what the bastards in power do to this planet and the human race?
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Some weeks ago I happened to be up and about still when Rage ran on the idiotbox (ie. some time after midnight). And there, I think, I saw this trio doing real funky stuff.

The only thing I remembered was the name: John Butler Trio. No song title. Nothing else, except that the song some kind of drive and a nice beat.

Today I spent some time digging up info on these fellows. Turns out they're actually aussies, and they also have a very nice policy on taping live concerts: do it, but don't sell it. Non-profit trading is fine.

As a matter of fact, they even link to the archive.org pages for all the taped performances from their main commercial website. Now that's pretty cool! Thank You, RBT!

From the few I've sampled, this recording is the one I like best. The quality - see title- is not bad at all, but I can very much understand why the guy wanted to dance around like a fool :-)

Ah, yeah? the song that introduced me to RBT? Zebra (VBR MP3). My recommendation.

First shower was a normal warm one, to get the body started and ready for work (yawn). At the moment I'm often super-tired and depressed. The wet weather of the last few days doesn't help and keeps me from flying.

Then the weather got worse. The second shower was a cold one, dancing around in the pouring rain to remove the leaves and all the other crap from the storm drains again. The one down the footpath is blocked fully right now, which means my most important one (at the corner of the house closest to the hill) is also stuffed.

Terrific! How I love that.

Classifying the situation not overly problematic, I got my third shower. Warm again, because I was soaked and cold. At least the temperature here is high enough so that one can go out into the rain with a short, shirt and birkenstocks/thongs and not freeze immediately. Then I went to work, around noon.

In the evening the rain radar showed again "heavy" rains, and boy did it pour the last two hours. I just unblocked the drains the umpteenth time today (wearing headlamp, goretex and a short) and the next fucking storm front is already on the radar. And the important drain is still down, and will stay so until at least tomorrow arvo. Bugger.

Amazing. An aviation security guy who actually has reasonable ideas about security and how not to approach the issue. I don't find it surprising that the country in question is NZ.

Source: Bruce Scheier's blog

However, how to make Vanillekipferl is important in AU, too, even though christmas is in the middle of the warm (and this year, wet) summer.

So the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the few almost readable newspapers, ran this article with recipes today.

I'm a stupid stubborn bastard and spent a good two days to get three orinocos reflashed and the silver to gold hack (ie. 104bit WEP and 14 channels) working. Now, after lots of swearing and gazillions of reboots it works on all three cards, one original lucent silver orinoco and two enterasys/cabletron roamabouts.
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How about this OZ gem? An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces. That one won one of the Ignobel Prices last year.

The engineering winner, and IMHO highlight this year, is US patent 4,022,227: the comb-over baldy man hairstyle. greed and stupidity, a mind-boggling combination.

No points for guessing when I'll have to transfer some money to AT for paying alimony for Cornelia.

(source: UBC exchange rate plotter)