gregoa's blog

a short description of my experiences on entering the U.S. – disclaimer: austrian passport, VWP, EWR airport, yesterday evening.

immigration

I spent roughly two minutes at the immigration counter. the dialog with the polite, tired, & probably bored guy was like:

he: what are you doing in the US?
me: going to a computer conference at columbia university.
he: how long are you staying?
me: until the 14^th of august.
/he looks at passport
he: you are here for the first time?
me: yup.
he: (instructions for fingerprint scanning & photo)
he: do you work at home? what are you doing there?
/me explains
/he probably doesn't really listen
/he stamps passport

customs

I had ticked "I bring food" on the customs declaration form, & entered "cheese, 0.5 kg, $9" in the "goods to declare" box. the guy handling the queue sent all people without any "yes" ticks straight to the exit, & me to the counter. dialog with the friendly lady:

she: what food are you bringing?
me: two small pieces of cheese.
she: anything else? meat? fruits?
me: no.
she: ok, put your bags here. (belt for the luggage scanner)

that was all, no more questions, no inspections, or whatever. – & noone actually looked at the customs declaration form except for the one "yes".

some of the things I did on saturday & sunday:

• reduced the amount of dust in my rooms
• increased the amount of air in my bike's tyres
• created an armel cross-building chroot (with pdebuild-cross, multistrap, & some patching & swearing & beating)
• switched from xterm to urxvt
• filled in the ESTA/VWP form to be allowed to enter the u.s.
• upgraded colleen (which doesn't have any devices for hard disks under /dev anymore since then)
• cleaned the toilet & the corridor
• uploaded some packages
• played with some of the meego stuff; not very successful
• saturated 2GB of RAM + 1GB of swap by having ~40 tabs with airline websites open in chromium; still no ticket
• wrote two blog entries (what's recursion again?)

some successes, some failuresroom for improvement.

I just sent my statement regarding the amendment of the austrian telecommunication law (implementation of the EU guideline on data retention) to the federal ministry for transport, innovation and technology.

it should show up on the parliament's law draft page at some point.

quote of the day:

07:00 <Ryan52> this social networking thing is getting rediculous. the side
               of my orange juice carton says "find us on facebook" and
               "follow us on twitter". :/

2010-01-03, #debian-perl (OFTC)

1984-12-19: police forces try to clear the protesters against the powerplant in the "hainburger au", finally the federal government declares a "christmas truce", & later the area at the danube becomes a national park.

2009-12-21: police forces evict students from the "audimax" in vienna, the center of the university protests.

& I thought we as a society might have learned something. FAIL.

if you want to send an email to the BZÖ & you want to find out their email address you can:

• go to http://www.bzoe.at/ – ok (if you ignore the 123 HTML errors)
• click on Mailen Sie mir with the photo of the current chairman bucher – hu? interesting URL in the address bar: ..?content=westenthaler_kontakt
• above the form you are told that you can use office@bzoe.at for contacting them – hu? the actual code does not agree: <a href="mailto:joerg.haider@bzoe.at">office@bzoe.at</a>)

it seems that they change their chairmen too often for their web guys ...

went to a concert (thanks to my flat-mate david). rebekka bakken. great voice. highly recommended.

& when I came home the new issue of profil was already lying in front of the door.

current temperatures:

• innsbruck, austria: 13°C
• mar del plata, argentina: 14°C

so much for european summer & south american winter.

I did it again: driving from eastern tyrol home to innsbruck via the val pusteria. & again I was surprised by the lack of decent radio stations on that route: you basically have the choice between (rural) umpf-ta & (techo-style) uff-tza.

at least hardly any traffic, & having no border controls (despite the current currency alcohol & money making sports madness) is great.

btw: what about building some decent roads in this valley?

if you'd like to have birra moretti & don't want to go to italy — I know a supermarket in london where you can get it.