Visited Countries
It seems to be quite common, to post a map of visited countries. Voila, for your viewing pleasure:
In exactly 18 days I'll be in Turkey again, although, I've been there 6 weeks ago. I just like the country... :-)
First quarter of 2004
Nothing interesting happened in January and February. I booked our holidays in Turkey (just because Natalie didn't like to pay around 700 for a flight to the US). On February 15th we went swimming, that's Natalie's Birthday.
On March 9th my grandmother died at the age of 81. To the day, I haven't seen her for 2.5 years. I should have visited her, but you never know what might happen and unfortunately, she died 3 months after the stroke.
On the day of my birthday (March 26th), Natalie and I went to the cinema in the evening (I had to work on the day, so there's just the evening). We watched "Lost in Translation" IIRC. Funny movie...Two days later we went swimming again (same location, just because it's cool there and -- well -- *cough* cheap).
What a waste of time/space. I was just trying gnome-blog here. Works fine so far. :-)
November 2003
Again there're the LinuxDays in Luxembourg. Unfortunately, there were just a few visitors. Our stand was quite empty. I was wondering why my girlfriend joined me...just after one week (regarding that I knew her since October 31th). Anyway, it was quite nice to see some friends again. On Saturday evening we went to the cinema with Martin Baulig and watched Matrix Revolution. Impressive movie, but there hardly isn't any story at all. Natalie and I stayed at Martin's flat for the night. We're sleeping on the floor, not very pleasant but it worked somehow.
The next day Martin guided as through Trier; it's the oldest city in Germany and thus quite amazing.
In the evening we went home again (by train). I can't remember when we arrived but it must have been quite late. Natalie stayed at my place for the night and the next day because she didn't had to work on Monday.
One week later I was on the next event. This time the LinuxDay in Vorarlberg/Austria. It's been pleasent as always except the night: I had to sleep in the same room as Kurl Pfeifle (KDE guy working for danka, CUPS and NX freak ;-), Harald König (XFree86/xorg guy) and Klaus Knopper (knoppix). They snored like hell and I finally moved to another room -- much better there :-)
December 2003
I had to go to the doctor because for some reason I had an abscess. I think it was on December 9th in the evening (around 5 pm) when he removed the little bastard (the thing was really awkward and hurt quite a lot; I was relieved the day when it was cut out). The bad thing about it was, that I couldn't write a test 4 days later. The doctor gave me lots of tablets that helped me to endure the pain after the surgery. I somehow survived... ;-)
From December 27th to January 3rd, Natalie and I went to Berlin. We were living in a nice apartment in Berlin-Spandau (it's in the north eastern part of the city). Berlin's been always one of my most favorite cities. I will upload the photos soon, just haven't had the time ;-)
I forgot, we watched Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King in the Sony Center. The movie rocks!
Just after New Year, my mom called me and said that my grandmother had an apoplectic stroke -- what a shock! Anyway, the week was pleasant and quite cheap. I liked that :-)
November 2002
I've been to the LinuxDays in Luxembourg. It was really nice and I met lots of new people. They only forgot to book a room in the hotel for me. Eventually, I managed to get a room.
University 2002/2003
Uhm, I really chose too many classes. In the end I wrote 9 exams and held a "Hauptseminar". Never again! This is pure overkill! My grades weren't the best which is another reason why I won't do that never again.
Summer 2003
Really cool, erm hot! We really really never had such a hot summer! It was sooooo hot even in May/June that almost all plants died. I enjoyed that quite alot and biked as much as possible (about 500 km in May or June, can't remember anymore).
I joined a nice internship at university. We had to develop a RPG game in JAVA using OpenGL. The game was based on a framework formerly developed by someone of the Chair for Software Engineering.
We organized many (grilling) parties; did I mention that the summer was really hot?!
In August/September I joined another internship (OpenGL hacking with pixel shaders etc.). That one was quite tricky, but I learned a lot.
From July 14th to September 25th (something like that) I worked for Siemens. My task was to debug PowerPC boards running embedded linux, develop drivers and other things.
It was quite a desaster because nobody could tell me what I had to do. Most of the time the guys (they've been really nice!! even my boss) were so busy and in the end I sat in front of my computer and I tried to find some work (which mostly didn't work). By the end of September my boss asked me, if I wanted work for another 3 months (or more) for the company, but I declined.
Also in August I met my later girl-friend. It was just a day where I biked to the lake. We somehow had a conversation and I asked her if she'd like to cycle together with me. She gave me her cell phone number and one week later we were on tour (when we arrived a nice "Biergarten" in the south of Munich she had a flat tire and it was Sunday!!). We couldn't fix the bike and had to take the train back to our homes (I didn't want her to go home alone, so I also took the train.).
In the end it took another 2 months until she was my girl-friend.
From September 26th to October 19th I went to the states. The first week I stayed at cinamod's place in Boston. The city is really beautiful and I was quite impressed.
The second week I stayed in Lexington, KY at Jesse's house (I never met hime before). At that time he was also hacking on gDesklets which might have been the reason why it was no problem that I was staying at his house. Kentucky was even nicer, much nature, many national parks...
The third week I stayed at harshy's house in Columbus, OH. It was also nice there (esp. the family, his mom always cooked such good food!!). I met walters for the first time at the local university but we didn't talk too much.
After my trip to the states I went to the LWE in Frankfurt. I didn't want to go there but I had the opportunity to join Thomas Uhl. LWE was quite interesting (I met Chema, just 2 weeks before his accident :-( ).
The girl-friend chapter
After LWE, I met Natalie on October 31th (heh, Helloween); we were together for exactly 9 months. For the meantime here's a photo of her.
She looks really cute there, but believe me, she used to be quite mean sometimes, especially in the end of our relationship. She's quite too young (age-wise and brain-wise) and just not ready for a real relationship. This took me quite some time to understand...oh well. It's never easy to let go, but it was easier this time, because she really did some nasty things. Details later...
to be continued...
damnit! drunk...had a cool night at munich. university will start on monday...time for more cool parties! yeah!!!
Well, for such a long time no diary entry. I'm quite lazy *g*
So, what's happened:
Summer:
University: Quite hard, too much classes, passed some tests. On Friday there's a maths test which I didn't pass.
I also had 2 "Praktika". One assembler and one C++ image processing. It was a lot of fun for most of the time. The code for the asm stuff is still online: www.tgi-rulez.tk
The x86-FPU really sucks!
The German Linuxtag was quite a success. We sold more than 200 CD's. My presentation is here.
In September I started hacking on a C++ wrapper for GStreamer. It's quite hard, fortunately Martin Schulze is helping. He's quite experienced in gtkmm, which helps a lot. Uraeus, the rest will be much easier after having managed Gst::Element is really really done. There are some other non-trivial classes but we'll manage that.
Last week there was another LinuxDay in Luxembourg. It was really cool. I gave another Talk there (URL is almost the some like the one I previously mentionned). They offered me a book for that talk (I chose a python book!). On Friday, we did some sight-seeing together with maddog. I still have to mail him about the photos he took (see, I'm really lazy).
Luxembourg is a cool country, I enjoyed it much. I'll definitely go there next year!
I'm going to post my diary entries more regularily in future. I just need to go to bed now!
Back from GUADEC3. It was a lot of fun to meet the GNOME
hackers again. I met a lot of people which I only knew from
IRC.
I was staying at an apartment together with
jdub, Gman,
Uraeus, thomasvs,
kmaraas(Kjartan), hadess,
BBB(Ronald),
Martin Baulig, Jorn (Galeon/Rhythmbox hacker; wow, he's just
15!!), sienap (Dennis, crazy guy), kanikus
+ his GF. It rocked. The apartment was close to the city
center of Sevilla. The bad thing about Spain is that almost
nobody speaks english there. But we could somehow manage to
get everything done (describing the to the conference
center, getting food at the restaurants, ...).
The day we arrived in Madrid really sucked. We tried to find
out where the buses to Sevilla were leaving. Unfortunately
the information desk at the airport wasn't able to provide
us the information we needed, so we were on our own and we
succeeded, yay!! We left Madrid (the city sucks!!) at 1 am
on Wednesday and had quite a nice trip (I was able to sleep
in the bus which is normally not possible). We arrived at
Sevilla at 7.30 and had to find our apartment -- which was
much easier than I thought first. At the apartment we tried
to get the keys. Unfortunately Fernando (which was in charge
of the apartment) couldn't speak english at all. I was quite
surpised that his son know bits of english. We agreed to get
the keys for the apartment 45 minutes later; so we're
waiting. (bummer, I couldn't reach Markus, the other guy
from the apartment, I just reached his answering machine; on
monday I found out that he's German,...). It was quite
surpising that another guy called us (he spoke German, but I
still don't know who the hell he was) and told us to get to
a cafe. There we should wait until he arrived. So we did
that (in vain). Martin and we were frustrated/annoyed of
Spain (and this was just the second day). We finally found
out that the other gang (Uraeus, kmaraas,...) would arrive
at 4.29 pm at the train station. We decided to go there.
Together with the other guys we headed back to the apartment
and tried to get the keys for a second time. But *sigh*...
We were glad that jdub finally
arrived
(that bastard had the keys ;) ). We just put our stuff in
the apartment and left to get some food.
The rest of the
evening was quite nice (except that kmaraas broke my latop
:*( ). I could finally enjoy the day.
On the next day we had to find our way to the conference
center (which was about 3-4 km away from our apartment). As
previously mentionned (almost) nobody speaks english in
Spain, this includes taxi drivers. We somehow managed to
get to the conference where our first problem was to
register at the reception and to get something to eat
(yeah...nobody speaks english blabla). We finished eating
and headed for the first talk. It was fun to meet so many
people, people who I haven't seen for one year. I also met
some new hackers who I only knew from IRC.
In the evening
I stayed together with hadess
at the
apartment; we watched some movies which was a lot of
fun.
On the next day we missed the first talks (which
were quite uninteresting for me) and arrived at about 12:30
at the conference center. There's not much to tell about the
day except the evening. Yep, there was the XIMIAN Party! It
was so much fun (and I was so fu**i*g drunk). We had the
famous butt signing (vicious
you rock!). At
3 o'clock I was too tired/drunk and I asked Martin B. what
he thought about going home (hmmm, I dunno what I said ;-)
). We somehow got home and I went to bed (the rest...I won't
tell :P). BTW, hadess got home
at 7 am!!
Poor creature ;-)
OK, the rest of the day was quite annoying except that I met
hub and Dom. Unfotunately those guys had to
catch their train and thus our conversation was quite short
:(
In the evening we did some sight-seeing (nice!!) and went to
a restaurant (where we had the usual problems!).
On the next day I stood up quite late and was quite suprised
what had happened in the other apartment (the MAS guys were
there). They discussed about gstreamer and MAS which was
quite interesting; I learned some bits of the internals of
gstreamer, a really amazing piece of software! Later that
day we went (again) to a restaurant where I tried a snail
(baaah, tasted strange!!) and after that to the irish pub.
Unfortunately, I was quite tired and had to stay there until
3 (or was it 4) o'clock. For more information about that
night, please read hadess's diary *hint*.
;-).
Monday: That was the last day and the weather
was quite nice, so some of us decided to go the the city. We
went to the cathedral and the city park.
OK, that's it, more or less. Conclusion: Spain was fun
for the most part, except that the organisation of GUADED,
the weather and people who couldn't speak any English
sucked. Fun fun!! See you next year in Dublin(??).
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