Okay, I didn’t learn and went to the Institute again. Was it better than last time? Certainly not. This lesson was accompanied by a soundtrack made by our instructor (good idea: as soon as you notice repeating songs you’ll know that soon it will be over), it started with AC/DC’s TNT.

Guided by the song I started euphorically into the warm-up exercises. I lasted longer than the song, alas not much. At the end of the second song, which I don’t remember as I was trying to keep going, I looked at the clock and noticed that my endurance is down to approximately ten minutes.

The next song that came through my fatigue was Foo Fighter’s Burn Away. At least I only gave up during the last exercise (which was meant to power out everyone), but my body ain’t made for too many alternating push- and sit-ups.

Have I already mentioned that after that I enrolled for a three month beginners course? Might do some good.. for example I wouldn’t be able to smoke today even if I wanted. So where’s my magnesium? Maybe I can prevent some of tomorrow’s muscle soreness.

I am realizing that everybody’s lost their simple ways
and now that it’s here I see it all so clearly
I’ve come face to face with the enemy, the enemy.

Godsmack - The enemy

Finally I finished “Against the Day” by Thomas Pynchon. It went as the last one: small interesting episodes were mixed with long passages that I only read to get through the book. It’s not surprising that I’ve read half a dozen other books during that one. I must confess that I lost track of the various story lines through those escapades. Afterwards I’m not sure that it was worth the time (although there’s something with Pynchon that makes you come back to the books) especially because of the anti-climaxing end. At least “The crying of lot 49″ had a better ending.

I also had my first Krav Maga lesson yesterday. Pain ensured. I’m not sure if I should continue: it’s not a bad idea overall but I might have a small problem with a hobby that consists of “punch the enemy in his genitalia or face and run like hell”. I had fun though. By now I’m quite good in differentiating the different kinds of muscle soreness.

So on to the next book on my “force myself to read”-list.

Over the last one and a half years I’ve been involved with the SECOQC project. It’s goal was to provide a prototype of a quantum key distribution network. Such a system would provide unconditional security, thus wouldn’t be isn’t vulnerable to improvements in computing power as traditional cryptography.

The final presentation of the prototype happened this Wednesday. The last days and nights before that were filled with applying the last fixed but finally it was worth the time. But let the newspapers do the talking: orf, heise, der standard, sueddeutsche, Austrian Telekom News. There was quite good news coverage in german-speaking Europe (and some eastern europe countries) but sadly the news didn’t seem to have jumped over the pond (at least some American physicists were at the presentation so it got noticed anyway).

Feels strange to know that something that big and cutting-edge is finally successfully finished.. and that I’m an unemployed student agai

After some years I’ve finally come to ride my bicycle in Vienna (no, I don’t count those city-bikes as real bicycles). The journey from my flat to my company takes around 9 kilometres and should take me around 38 minutes according to the Viennese bicycle route planner.

The travel to my company took me approximately 50 minutes, on my way back I needed 35. Why? First of all the quality of the route planner is mediocre. It’s like “I’m not sure on which side of the river my route should be”. So just memorize the general direction, throw away the plan and try to move towards your goal while driving against as many one-way streets as possible. It will work. Second of all, who thought it a good idea to not label the bicycle tracks? It has a little bit of playing Half-Life: you want to get to the tall building seen on the not-so-distant horizon (some subway/tram bridge in my case) and you have three choices: the one that would lead directly towards it will of course lead you to nowhere. And finally the gear shift of my bike didn’t work as well as I remembered..

But big kudos to this morning’s Viennese car drivers: I survived them and this might have taken some steps on their parts. The same goes to the people on foot that where at high risk today.

Oh, and never, really never, try to stop with wet brakes. Now I’ve the rest of the summer to get under 25 minutes.

One hundred plus through black and white
War horse, War head
Fuck em, man, White knuckle tight
Through black and white
Metallica - Fuel

Austrians are currently bombarded by news of Josef Fritzl and his crime. While freedom of press is dire to me, a little bit of self-imposed constraint might be more helpful for the victim’s recovery. Alas in a perfect world where that would happen the crime itself would never had taken place. Unfortunately there was another similar case not too long ago where the media coverage rather reminded me of cynical movies.

One also witnesses international coverage of the events through the Internet. They ranged from good (thank you, BBC) to poor. My personal favourite was some Swiss paper that claimed after those two sad cases that Austria is collectively mentally ill and somehow created a correlation to the second world war. Another interesting thesis was that Freud (an Austrian) could have only pioneered psycho-analysis in Austria as here are enough mentally-ill persons as test cases. Being a mostly healthy person this feels a bit estranging. But this is only small compared to the irritation from facebook groups. Why do people think it’s hip to create groups whose names reference to the crimes or try to joke about it?

Is being dumb really the new black?

The other piece of news that covered Austria recently is our glorious failure to keep up with the Kyoto protocols. Interestingly I didnt’ get any news coverage of that from national news companies. Not flashy enough?

I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes

Rolling Stones - Paint it Black

My unhealthy addiction to cigarettes wears hard on me. I tried to quite multiple times but alas those times were mostly breaks before I started again. Sometimes longer (even a year), sometimes shorter (three days till yesterday). So it might be time to actively do something against it. My punishment for the pack of cigarettes that I smoked yesterday is simple: I won’t go to the Eläkeläiset concert in a few days. Concerts are the one thing dear to me, maybe missing some of them reminds me that I want to stop smoking in my weaker moments.

Also I might need a carrot matching that stick. After I’ve bought one of those limited NiN Ghost CD sets last month I’m in dire need of record or blue-disc player (yeah, I’ve opted for the very limited autographed set). That will be a perfect gift to myself after, let’s say, one month of not smoking.

Could someone please buy them better drugs? This is just ridiculous.

The last month brought a new subculture to Vienna: the Krocha. Their name derives from ‘krochen‘ (which is more or less Austro-German for ‘crash’, as in ‘to crash a party’). It seems as if Austrian media is infatuated with having an own subculture.

Alas in contrast to the ‘Kaffeehauskultur’ (coffee house culture) I feel a bit ashamed of it.

How do you define Krocha?

• Strange speak. There are a couple of words that have to be used frequently, best in each sentence. Most of those are of Viennese origin thus I had to put up with them before. Most of them are redundant and meaningless but who could deny a childish charm in using phrases as ‘oida fixx bam!’. As a bonus you can use that phrase for almost every occasion, if unsure add another ‘oida’.
• Strange taste in clothes. flash caps and neon-coloured parts. A fable for brands that do not fall into my preferred range (D&G, Ed Hardy) which counts as bad taste in my opinion.
• Massive use of youtube et&. Wow! If that is a sign of a sub culture I propose all people that are able to read and actually understand a text should claim to form a subculture. Alas they might be much smaller than the ‘Krocha’..
• Bad taste in Music (techno) and dancing style (well, I’m the last one standing on a moral high-ground here). And solarium tan is deemed to be mandatory. Did I mention that I can’t imagine myself being a Krocha.
• no political or revolutionary motto whatsoever. Sure they’ve their outfit, who needs an opinion?

Well I called people falling in the above categories by various other names, not suited for public mention. Now I just call them ‘Krocha’ and don’t have to feel bad about it.

That enough for claiming to be a whole subculture? What about all badly dressed youths from the backwoods town I’m from? They talk in a strange own language for sure.

No thin roses, no goldrush, no miner, no revolution they’d hire
And the shipyard is a graveyard, no one will be trying to find him
Audioslave - Broken City

Lots of stuff is going on in my life lately so excuse my not-posting too much.

• By now I’ve taken my part in founding another start-up company. Things are looking good, the company seems to be bound to stay. At least I’ve get to work with people I know and like both in a professional as well as personal level. Getting C.T.O. of a (albeit small) company with age 25 doesn’t sound to bad, huh?
• That new assignment brought me to the United States of America. The precise location was Scottsdale, Arizona which is situated near Phoenix. I can’t say anything more than the typical European observations about America, so I will just skip that. But if you’re nearby check out the Skeptical Chymist and an unnamed sportsbar for food. Although I must confess that an Irish Pub without smoke and smoke-stained interior just seems wrong to me.
• On my trip to the states I also bought a new camera. I’m now a proud owner of a Nikon D40, 18-135mm objective. You can see my misguided attempts of photography here.
• If you dig Radiohead, look at Amazon’s CD box. It includes all albums sans the latest (”Rainbow”) to a very low price.
• Also I smoked on my trip to America. Again. Still it seems like that I’m over smoking.

By now I’m working at reimplementing some Ruby on Rails backend code in plain old Java with some Spring help. Maybe I can convince myself that Ruby didn’t fail me, but I’m just doing the right software engineering thing: writing a prototype with a script language and then reimplementing another production system in Java. But it still stings.

The beat of your heart, the slow burning away
Of the bitter fires of the devil’s arcade

Bruce Springsteen, Devil’s Arcade

The last four days back home in Carinthia passed too fast.. and as soon as I was back in Vienna work covered me again.  I’ve finally finished my climbing lessons, didn’t even miss one of them. Now I hope that I can find the motivation to visit those halls of pain again. I’m more than a little bit proud of my discipline, I even attended each Pencak Silat class until now - alas my performance in those ain’t the best.

I spent most of today’s afternoon coding a quite simple web application using JavaServer Pages with a Spring2, Hibernate and Java Persistence Architecture back-end.  Security is handled through acegi, packaging through maven. Although this is more time-consuming compared to the last Ruby on Rails application I coded but there’s less Voodoo involved. Overall the resulting system feels more secure and stable.