musings of a neurotic mind

after a rather lenghty break from blogging and stuff i am finally back online. or rather i got quite a wake up call to devote some time to the blog again… i got flooded with comment spam this last night and the update to the latest version von WordPress was long overdue. so, where to start with now?

well, that is how i spent the summer ‘05. to wrap things up, here are a few random thoughts:
– is there going to be a fifth season of 24? i am really curious about that since the ending of season four was kind of… unexpected.
– the podcasting hype hit austria. whoo-hooo… only about a year too late. d’oh.
– HalfLife2 owns. never seen such realistic water effects in a computer game. but not only the water… everything looks very real, almost hyperreal.
– Rob Thomas’ solo album “Something To Be” is actually quite good. what is surprising though is that although matchbox twenty is almost unknown in Europe they play Rob Thomas even in shopping malls. (heard “This Is How A Heart Breaks” in the mall today.)
– as the days are getting shorter and the evenings longer and Blizzard launched brand new PVP and RP-PVP server for World of Warcraft i am back in Azeroth.

apparently austria has just experienced the two hottest days of the entire summer so far. with temperatures up to 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F) it was too hot for most of the people around here but i had a blast with my road bike. this has been quite a busy week apart from taking the bike out almost daily for a ride. the various parts of my new computer arriving one after another and i am installing them quite carefully because i want to avoid a “cable jungle” in my new case. this is going to be bit trickier than i thought because my fan controller has not only four power supply cables for controlling the fans but another four cables for the temperature sensors that are going to monitor the temperature of various components like hdds or the mainboard. toss in the usual mess of assorted power and data cables and voilà, here goes your neat computer case. *sigh*

i thought once the whole phd stuff is over things will calm down a bit. however, this past week turned out to be quite busy. had to run a few errands, getting things in order. hence i did not manage to take the bike out for a ride this week. the weather wasn’t that great anyway. last weekend was gorgeous with temperatures like in august, hot and dry.

speaking of hot weather… the summers are getting increasingly hotter here in austria. i have been thinking of getting a mobile aircondition unit for quite some time now. although i have no problems with temperatures above 30 degrees C (86 degrees F) on the cycling path, i have a hard time falling asleep when the room temperature is above 26 degrees C (78 degrees F). so that’s why i purchased an aircondition. it still needs to be installed which is due sometime next week…

well, surely i can’t be like lance but now i do ride the same bike he rode at last year’s Tour de France. it is kind of a present for the graduation and today i took it out for a longer ride for the first time. and i love it! you can’t compare the feeling to a mountainbike, it’s completely different. this is surely going to be a hot and fast summer!

finally i found some time to blog. the last three weeks have been incredibly busy. the most important news first off: i passed the final exam with flying colors and so i am now entitled to call myself PhD. the graduation ceremony (called “promotion” in german) was last friday and it was really gorgeous because two of my friends from Graz managed to come and celebrate with me.
life is about to settle a bit down now. i am looking forward to a “hot” summer with lots of bike rides. speaking of bikes, i got myself a neat road bike.

tomorrow is the “big day”; the day i have been waiting for 2.5 years. the day of truth. the full dress rehearsal last week went very well and smoothly. i guess i am ready to rock tomorrow. this is going to be fun. keep your fingers crossed.

…since i blogged. and there is no excuse for that. life is quite busy right now, i got the “book list” for the final exam on april 28th and that list is quite extensive. well, i have to talk for half an hour about cultural studies and stuff. so i ordered the books i do not already own and dig into reading… yeah, is there any better way to spend spring when my allergies are in full swing and i can’t take the bike out for a ride anyway? (it is spring after all, we had like +28 degrees C this week! that’s insane!) so bear with me, the whole PhD thesis story will come to an end soon. very soon. and after that i am going to take a time out for a few months before i head into the job hunt…

when you are in contact with certain people via IM daily so that they become part of your life and suddenly one day they are not online and have not told you beforehand that… it’s strange. i have a very good friend who lives a few hundred kilometers away and we IM daily. it’s a part of my routine, getting up, getting online, saying “morgaehn” to him and starting my “workday”. he is always there for me, especially when i am writing i can ask him questions about the new german spelling and stuff. apart from that he’s a real pillar of support. it happened in the past that he was offline for a week (vacation) or for a few days (hardware failure) but either he told me beforehand or phoned me telling his computer won’t boot up. so what i want to say: if he is offline without an explanation something bad has happened.
i knew he would be offline this friday because he had some work to do at university. no need to worry, he’ll be online in the evening. well, when i went offline yesterday (around 10 pm) he hasn’t shown up. maybe he missed a bus or the train was late. however, since he didn’t turn up by afternoon today i knew something was wrong. i was right. i gave him a call and his grandma told me that he had a seizure yesterday and is now in hospital! OMG! now that’s bad news indeed. i hope he’ll get well soon because the summer semester at university has just started…

i’ve been wondering: is there something wrong with my blog since i upgraded to wp 1.5? i haven’t been getting any comments lately… are you guys still reading me? or are you simply busy?

well, yesterday was the day i have been waiting for 2.5 years: i went to the copyshop and had my phd thesis printed. i need to hand in five copies and i cannot print 228 pages with my humble ink jet printer. this needs to look professional hence my trip to the copyshop. well, although i knew the shop is sort of “self-service” i didn’t expect to spend almost the entire afternoon there. why? i needed to print the 22 pages containing the screenshots of the movies with the color laser printer and leave them out when printing the text-only portions. that resulted in a huge “sorting pages” orgy. however, after 3.5 hours of happy pages sorting and checking if they are all in the right order i was finally done. and sort of proud, you know, that are fruits of my work from the past 2.5 years. it’s a good feeling for sure.

it’s been sort of a busy week. not that busy as the recent one with the harddisk failure, but still… i “spiced up” the conclusion a bit, adding some aspects and making it smoother to read. well, i am going to have it bound and printed next week. finally!

yeah, i have to admit it, i have been playing some WoW this week as well. it’s quite an ambivalent experience now. sometimes you feel great, almost invincible after having slayed several mobs and sometimes you really hate the game, like when you die at the last elite mob before getting to the boss in an “instance” (special elite dungeon). oh well, it’s just a game…