rastplats

A lot of things came through today, the government backed financial grant was finally approved and I got confirmation from Metro Student Accomodation in Melbourne that I have a reservation for a room starting on the 5th of february 2006. The only thing left now is to book a flightticket which is scheduled for tomorrow. It’s all coming together now.

The past weekend was mostly spent hanging out with a dear friend that leave for Thailand this coming saturday, we’ve only been close for a few months but I will miss her like crazy.. Managed to do some hacking for Sylpheed-Claws as well. I updated libetpan in the FreeBSD ports three to version 0.39 and fixed an annoying errormessage on FreeBSD due to encrypt(3) not being implemented.

The final acceptance of admission arrived from La Trobe University today, I am now officially past the point of no return.. and I can hardly wait. Moving to the other side of the globe and rebooting my life in the process will be truly cool. There are still a few open issues on the financing situation but either way it turns out I’m going, when I commit to something I’m known to not fold down. Celebrated in the evening by painting a canvas using Belton spraycans.

Another weekend spent by not doing more or less nothing. I had intentions but lacked energy, hopefully things will shape up starting tomorrow. I’ll be kicking off a new database project at work which will require a lot of thinking, and given that I move abroad in february I’ve got only one shot at getting it right. Hopefully I’ll be able to reuse my dynamic database research I did this spring at the university and extend it with abstracted relations. This could become interesting.

The dormant TenDRA project is picking up speed again and I spent the evening cleaning the mailinglist archives from accumulated spam. It’s time to pick up where I left off in the dragonbook.

Had a productive day hacking on Sylpheed-Claws which resulted in 5 patches getting submitted, three bugfixes, one typofix and one feature improvement to hide unavailable menutitems. My current project is to have Sylpheed-Claws compile cleanly with -Werror -pedantic given the focus on bugfixing for the upcoming 1.9.15 release.

The weekend was otherwise pretty quiet and mostly spent cleaning and other less fun stuff..

This week saw the final form being submitted for my upcoming studies in Australia, all I can do now is await the decision from CSN on my financial situation. When (if) this is resolved, the only remaining open issues are getting a visa and a place to stay when I arrive in Melbourne, neither of which should present any problems. Keep your fingers crossed.

Did some further hacking on translating Sylpheed-Claws to swedish and continued to read the code in the evening. The weekend will hopefully bring some shitty weather, I really feel like hacking..

Spent the evening at a lecture on meteorology which seemed to last forever. The subject being quite interesting I anticipated a nice two hour session being educated.. but I wasnt as lucky. The lecturer started out by stating his teachihg record which usually is a bad sign, the next flag was raised when I realized it was a three hour class. My favourite mode of teaching is when the lecturer use b/w overheads, sticks to the subject with sidestepping into anything irrelevant and when no questions are asked. I know that this nowadays is regarded as bad practice and boring but it works and works well. The teacher for tonight didn’t really fit my profile.. he was probably the worst drifter I’ve ever listened too, he even drifted from his driftings.. recursive drifting.. and his stackdepth was really poor so he returning from the point of drift was a 10 minute ordeal. If I were to give tonights lecture I’d probably spend 1.5 hours at most, it lasted for almost 3.5. The subject was however interesting and I did learn a fair bit so it was in no way close a waste, just a bit more painful than what it could’ve been. Perhaps I’ve spent too many years at university-level lectures..

Not much else went down this weekend, helped a friend move house and did some hacking on various projects which hopefully will be up for release quite soon.

Watching the news sites is usually like a drug to me, I continously reload and check the latest news all day when I have internet access.. the past few days since Katrina struck the american south has changed this though. I just can take it anymore, I’ve had enough, the whole situation sickens me beyond all reason. When disaster struck it was not only expected but on time. This wasnt like the indo-asian tsunami last winter which came from nowhere and hit everywhere. This time the government knew when, where, how much, everything and anything.. and yet they failed. Why? How the fuck could this happen..

HOW?

The sad thing is that the answer is as easily computed as the effect of Katrina. They simply DONT CARE! The american government is like most capitalistic governments, they are elected by the people but serve the elite. The elite didn’t remain in New Orleans, they were far away. Safe. Stuck in New Orleans were mostly poor people, blacks, homeless, unemployed and outcasts.. but still citizens and human fucking beings!. But why care, they were neither rich nor influential, and they probably smelled bad in the first place. I only hope that these people didn’t die in vain, that their deaths and tragedies turns the tide and will mute the flagwavers that saluted the so called war on terror which is nothing less than government financed terror for oil. I hope that the people who defend the capitalistic systems around the world now realize the mess it’s put us in, because this is what happens when money talks. The governemnts doesn’t care about us, they care about covering their own asses and maxmizing their paychecks.. one guideline to rule them all: Profit. Never forget that the people that left an entire city to rot away in their own country is the same people that send the sons of New Orleans dying women to Iraq to kill for their profit..

Having postponed my M.Sc studies until this coming february I received the final letter of admission today accompanied by the offer acceptance forms. By now everything is filled out and ready to go in tomorrow, I can hardly wait until I hold my COE form.. I started thinking about leaving for studies abroad about one and a half years ago and it’s now finally coming true (unless CSN decides to screw me over). I really needed the good news, something to look forward to.

My throat is still sore and I’m scheduled for a new injection tomorrow, I guess I should try to get used to this..