gregoa's blog

today was again the lange nacht der museen, & again I used the opportunity to visit some sites in innsbruck:

1. galerie im taxispalais – galerie des landes tirol: contemporary austrian paintings, some nice, & a good guided tour
2. kunstraum innsbruck: the secret diary of an affair ~1970 in texts & photos, weird but impressive
3. fo.ku.s foto kunst stadtforum: a few boring photos
4. fotoforum west: some photos ..., & I didn't see a trace of the announced guided tour
5. stadtarchiv/stadtmuseum: documentary movies about innsbruck (1934-1976), not a single one without schützen & blasmusik no matter if during the austro fascist era, national socialism, or the second republic
6. tiroler landesmuseum/ferdinandeum: not so impressive paintings & a nice reading of a local novelist, & free drinks on the balcony

"lange nacht der museen" – a warm late-summer evening, & it's amazing how many galleries, exhibition rooms, etc. innsbruck has.

a quick list of my tour (all places in the city center, & just a few minutes away from each other by bike). as usual, the quality was mixed.

1. kunstpavillon der tiroler künstlerschaft: no exhibition, & the projector for the movie wasn't ready yet
2. neue galerie der tiroler künstlerschaft: weird something (the confusing way)
3. fo.ku.s foto kunst stadtforum: a few boring photos
4. galerie 22a: great paintings from carmen m selma
5. galerie im taxispalais – galerie des landes tirol: some nice drawings, & a funny video
6. kunstraum innsbruck: weird installation & video (but somewhat funny)

• gösser's: delicious zwickl (wait – that's not art in the strict sense, & not included in the "long night" ticket)

7. fotoforum west: a projected photo blog
8. galerie nothburga: some nice mini-sculptures, & some paintings, not my style
9. artdepot – kommunikationszentrum für kunst und kultur: a few abstract (?) paintings, not my style
10. galerie kass: a few paintings, not my style
11. <some garden across the street from the last gallery>: music & fashion, if I understood it correctly
12. aut. architektur und tirol: installations, in the wider sense; with an interesting tour

ps: the only places I knew beforehand were 6, ●, & 7.

everyone's talking about wikileaks these days. I'm wondering where this will all lead us to.

two interesting portraits of julian assange:

• süddeutsche, 2010-12-02, german
• new yorker, 2010-06-07, english

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.