Le Bobsch Blogsch

Ping

2013-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

I’m still alive and kicking, fyi.

Fuck yeah, Prose!

2013-01-21T00:00:00+01:00

I’m writing to you via prose.io, an awesome new Web-App that let’s you edit the contents of your github repositories directly from your freaking browser! ♥

BarCraft Austria Newsletter Lottery

2012-04-08T00:00:00+02:00

BarCraft Austria recently launched a newsletter in order to keep people who don’t like Facebook up to date with their events. I did the sign-up page and the preliminary layouts for the emails. I am not happy with them. They are going to improve. On the other hand, content is king, and on that front the BarCraft Austria newsletter delivers.

If you sign up until April 14th, you enter the lottory to win an Anno 2070 Limited Edition, amongst other things. You can sign up here.

Up way too late. Again!

2012-04-07T00:00:00+02:00

Don’t you hate it, too? You are happily typing/hacking/designing/… away and you just want to finish »that one last thing«TM. When you look back at the clock again, it’s about 3:00 a.m. in the morning. Sure, you get stuff done. But on the other hand, you won’t be up until midday. I hate being a night owl.

You look stunning today, if I may be so forward ...

2012-04-02T00:00:00+02:00

Hey There, I am Back! This blog has been in hiatus for too long. I’ve been using it to play around with some grid systems, HTML5 boilerplates and rapid prototyping frameworks. Some of the screws are still kinda loose, and if you look close enough you can see the duct-tape that is currently holding everything together.

But I really don’t care, because I want to go shopping for a new jacket for spring. And then I have to finish deploying ALL THE PAGES for the BarCraft Austria Newsletter …

See you later, alligator!

Drawing the Line

2011-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

For all of you who don’t yet know it, I decided to put my studies in Human Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna on ice for the time being. I’ve thought about it for quite some time, since April, actually. I didn’t really think about quitting, at least in the beginning, but I was trying to get an idea about how my life would be in the next five years if I passed the SIP1 in June. How it would be if I failed the next attempt but passed it in September. Or how it would play out if I couldn’t pass it at all. Whatever outcome I could think of, the problem remained the same, and that simple discovery sealed the deal for me.

I Simply Can't Do It!
Me, 2011

These are most likely the hardest words to say for me. I know that if I put my mind to something, and try hard enough, I can do it. If I tried to learn Russian, I’d most likely be able to at least master the basics, although I might never become a master. And I still think that I could be a good doctor.

But learning something requires time and space. Mastering something requires even more space and time plus focus and dedication. You don’t earn a medical degree and become a good doctor by just investing just a little bit of time. You need to commit to it, to dedicate a lot of time and effort.

I knew that in the beginning, and I was ready to do this. But I was also not ready to let all the time and work I put into my Informatics Bachelor go to waste. It was just not enough for me to only attend some classes in IT and spend the better part of my time on Medicine. I would have needed to spend almost all of my productive time on medicine, at least the last three to four months before the SIP 1 exam, and I just couldn’t.

Sometimes you better just stop.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I don’t think that the time spent on studying medicine was a waste. Quite the opposite. I learned a lot. I met a lot of interesting people, although it’s hard for me to keep in touch with them. Mostly I don’t manage to.

But most importantly, I tried to do something because I felt it was worth the effort and the risk. I failed, but I started to move on when I discovered I was getting more unhappy and bitter every day, because I just couldn’t do it.

This is what kept me from stopping for a year: the fear, that I had wasted my time. The fact that I had tried to do something that, as many people told me, was too much effort and too complicated, but that I tried nonetheless, and I failed.

I decided to see it as an experiment that failed like most experiments do, and move on–move back, rather–to another experiment. I gained the confidence to stop while I still could, move away and take care of other things, and maybe repeat the experiment with a different setup at a later time when I made this adjustment to my perception. If you feel like your running against walls at your current job, school, project, ask yourselve’s the following questions: Am I happy now? Can I still do what’s necessary to make this work? If the answer to both question is „no“ for you, maybe you too should think about moving on.

I did, and I still feel it was the right decision.

I’m still processing what happened, so this will mostly likely extend into a series. More to come, later.

I started to write this in June, but postponed publishing it because I wanted to use the summer to think this through again carefully. Now I feel confident enough to put it out there.

A big thanks to David for hunting down all those nasty mistakes in this post! He didn’t read the last paragraphs of this post because I wrote them this morning. If you find any mistakes in those, it’s not his fault.

Birthday-Specials in Vienna

2011-06-12T00:00:00+02:00

We get older. Depending on how old we are, we get a less older every year, relatively speaking. If you’re ten, a year is a tenth of your life! If you’re eighty, that one year suddenly doesn’t matter as much. So turning 83 doesn’t hurt as much as turning 35 or 23, right? Another thing I’ve got to get out of the way before we can start: why do people complain about getting older so much? Being young sucks infinitely more: a lot of stuff you don’t get to do because you’re too young, you’re not allowed to or you simply don’t understand. Compared to that, turning 16 (you’re allowed to drink beer now), turning 18 (you’re suddenly allowed to drive a car, if you’ve got your driver’s license, and buy liquor), turning 25 (you no longer need to pay extra insurance fees when renting a car in the USA) or turning 35 (you may run for Bundespräsident in Austria).

Now that we’ve established that getting older is in fact awesome because you get to do more things, let’s get to the main topic of this post: birthday specials.

A Little Disclaimer

This is a snapshot in time. I write about stuff that I tried or got told about. I tried to verify my information by checking the homepage of the establishment, but it might be that the information there was simply outdated. I’m sorry if you went to a place to enjoy a free drink you read about here, but it’s most likely not my fault. That out of the way, please email me if any conditions for birthday-specials change or a special is dropped all together.

I further would encourage you to visit the restaurants and bars I write about not only on your birthday. I’ve been to all of them, they’re definitely worth the time and the money you spend there. Another thing: don’t let the homepages of some of the restaurants scare you away. Many restaurants in Austria have appalling web presences, while serving excellent food. It annoys me, but I’d rather go to a restaurant with a nausea-inducing homepage serving excellent food than the other way round.

Caffe Latte

… the original!

This one is truly great: They invite you to a complete three-course-meal – soup or starter, main dish, dessert – on your birthday. If you main course is more than 10 €, you pay the difference (e.g. 2 € for a dish that would normally cost 12 €). Don’t forget to bring a valid ID. I had super tasty Rocket-Soup, incredible Filet Laces in Pepper Souce and a Cheese Platter to round things of. Top that off with a Caipirinha as an appetizer during the cocktail happy hour – every day from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. to closing hour (!!!) – for 4.90 € and a Trumer Pils during my meal, and you’ve got one happy Bobsch. Go eat there, trust me.

A great, not-so-little café and restaurant and lounge right within Vienna’s seventh district. They’ve got a pretty big “Schanigarten” in the courtyard, too, which means that going there in summer is extra awesome if you enjoy sitting outside. (A “Schanigarten” is an outside dining/restaurant area.)

Curry Insel

Specialities from sri lanka

Their birthday special is one of those “bring four friends, and get a main course free”-deals. The average main dish costs about 7 € to 10 €, so I guess it’s a pretty good deal for you.

One of my absolute favorites in the city. Some of the best curries you can get. They had a so-called “limited meal” for lunch during the week, which consisted of three choices of vegetable curry and one meat curry with rice and Papadam for about 8 € with unlimited seconds. They discontinued it, though, due to financial reasons. They still have “running curry” on every first Saturday of the month for 13 €.

Restaurant Colombo Hoppers

We lay our hands together and say “Ayubowan” to welcome you at our restaurant, where we offer you exotic treats from Sri Lanka.

Their birthday special is a lottery: you enter with your name, email-address and date of birth. If you’re drawn, you get a main dish for free, if you visit the restaurant within one month after the birthday together with at least two of your friends. The winner is determined one month in advance.

This is one of the hints I got from Irene, who is among other things working for Tupalo.com. Check out her numerous reviews on Tupalo, or watch her stream on twitter for hints to current events or great places to check out. Really, it’s worth it.

Churrascaria

“Churrasco” is a typical Brazilian experience.

This is one of those “bring your friends, we’ll invite you to dinner” deals. If one books four Churrasco-Dinners via the homepage and enters “Geburtstag” into the additional information field, the fifth dinner for the birthday girl or boy (or whatever in-between or outside) is free. A “pay 4, get 5” deal. Does not include drinks! With 24.50 €/person a bit on the pricey side, but it’s all you can eat. Reservations are mandatory! I haven’t been there myself, but I’m told it’s worth it if you like meat (check) and Caipirinhas (check).

There is no information to be found on their homepage about this special, but they wrote about it on facebook some time ago. But I have to verify, whether they still have this special or not, since they only announced the offer for a limited time, from November 2010 till the beginning of March 2011.

Linux and Me

2011-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

I’d like to start off this blog-post with a lot of swear words, some of which you might have never heard. Others, that might make you blush. But I won’t, I’m trying to be professional here, people.

There are many articles on Linux, so I am not going to write a detailed explanation of what Linux is and is not. If you don’t know what Unix or a distribution is, if you have no clue about FOSS and GNU, please, consult Wikipedia before reading on, as I am not going to define terms like these.

So, What’s the Problem‽

I wanted to set up a development environment using Ubuntu 10.10. I’m doing a project with OpenStreetMap for my Bachelor thesis, and I thought I needed the mapnik rendering tool chain to run on my development machine. So I went out to install Ubuntu on the old work laptop of my girlfriend, rad little HP Compaq 2510p. This is where things started going wrong.

My variant of this 12'‘ notebook is equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo ULV Processor with 1.20 GHz, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM and the Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chip. Everything installed fine right out of the box. Put in the Ubuntu DVD, installed the system and was ready to go within the hour. But somehow the current kernel has problems with the soft-buttons the 2510p is equipped with. They don’t work most of the time, and the volume slider is hit and miss at best. That wouldn’t matter too much, since I don’t like soft buttons and don’t use them, but when the touchpad stopped working after awaking the notebook from sleep, I knew something was fishy. Since I thought that maybe an update or myself fucked things up, I decided to reinstall.

That didn’t help. Happy with my squeaky-clean install, I worked a bit, sent it to sleep, some problem after reawaking it. I still wanted to go on. So I went ahead, reinstalled it and made sure that I was using suspend to RAM and not suspend to disk like I did before. Shutting the thing down every evening sure would suck, but I didn’t want to reboot every time I take a break from work, since I usually send my notebook to suspension when I do. Some problem after the first reboot.

Since I had now established that reinstalling the machine wouldn’t help, I decided to just make do with what I had, and use the mouse. This worked fine for about half a week. Then Ubuntu 11.04 was released. Curious about Unity, I went ahead and upgraded from 10.04 to 11.04. Shouldn’t have done that. After installing a proprietary driver for the graphics chip, unity wouldn’t start anymore. At least I think it was the graphics driver. After trying a few things to fix this and the soft-button issue I found on various forums, I decided that I would reinstall this machine one more time.

I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 11.04 from scratch. When I booted the first time, everything was fine. Starting installing the software I needed, took the PC to the university to show some of the progress I was able to make to my thesis-advisor Wilfried. This is when I make the error that will end my little experiment with Linux: I want to power down the PC, and touch the soft-button for the WiFi & Bluetooth instead. (Yes, I know that’s anywhere near the power button, but I was sleepy and not paying attention.) Of course, the WiFi-card is deactivated. This is supposed to happen. When I see that I pressed the wrong button, I go ahead and try to reactivate the WiFi before shutting the notebook down. I couldn’t. The button stopped working after the first press, and I was not able to get it working again. And I tried, for about a day.

This, and the fact that we had in the meantime managed to set up a server running Ubuntu 11.04 and the tools that we need plus OpenSSH, was the cue for me to minimize my losses and just stop this right when it was becoming ridiculous. I really tried to make this work, but it just shouldn’t be. Just like my last adventures with Suse or Arch or (K)Ubuntu (8.04, 9.04, 9.10).

I really like the idea of FOSS, and Linux. And maybe I am just too stupid – which I don’t believe, since I can use the server without any problems – or too stuck on windows – again, see argument one – to make this work. Whatever it is, I am done with trying to use Linux as an operating system for development and university. It’s just not worth the hassle for me. I’m going to stick with Windows 7 – which is great, by the way – until I get myself a MacBook Pro or a new Laptop running Windows 8. I like my Linux the way I like my sewer plants: far away, and only with a remote connection.

LAN Party Nostalgia

2011-05-22T00:00:00+02:00

After surfing around the intertubes for a little bit last night, I started looking at the pages of the biggest, most well known Austrian LAN parties. What I found made me sad and melancholic the same time. I visited the, sometimes partly broken, pages of the Days of Thunder LAN, Dagor, CityX, nur48Stunden, Detonation, Ennsomnia, Freestyle Zero LAN, Detonation and a few others. I took the time to check the pages of the clans Eagle Squad 7 and Defcon5 as well – I knew some people playing for those, but both are long gone as well. Some of those I just found by using the orga.nice IT LAN system’s references page.

But I digress … Back to LAN Parties

Most of the old, big ones are gone. Namely DoT was discontinued after 2009, CityX last happened 2006, Ennsomnia was discontinued in 2005, dagor’s as well as Detonation’s last stands were in 2003 AFAIK. Only a few remain. There will be another Hausruck-LAN and the Wallhall 2 in June, another installment of the KD-LAN in September, Freestyle Zero LAN in October, as well as another installment of the nur48Stunden-LAN in November. All in all, the future is not looking that bright, but also not as bleak as my rendition my sound. There are still some smaller LAN parties around, although I wonder how people should find them, since there is not LAN-portal like lanscene.at anymore. Even the information on the homepage of the esvö is very limited, not including too many parties for this year.

But why the Nostalgia? LAN parties are nice. I like them. Gamers and Nerds everywhere, people playing games and having fun. Paradise on earth. These might be the only parties on earth which young males attend without even hoping to meet women or get laid. As one of the visitors of the Detonation 2003 put it in a radio interview “I’m on a party with 300 men and one girl” (Thank you for that anecdote, Alex & Alex' Brother).

Enter: esvö

With lanscene.at gone, there is no central calender for LAN parties in Austria anymore. That, and the steady decline in the number of clans that has been observed over the past few years have turned the Austrian LAN-scene upside down. A strange development, considering that a lot more people have consoles and PC suitable for gaming, and gaming has become more “social”.

So, some people decided that since we’re Austrian, let’s open up a “Verein”. (A club. It’s pretty easy and low cost to open up a club in Austria, so there’s a lot of them. There’s the term “Vereinsmeier” in Austrian German, for people who are overly active in clubs and take themselves way too serious.) Their most noteworthy achievements in my opinion are the “Elternlan”, a LAN-Party for parents, and the “Österreichische Staatsmeisterschaft der Konsoloenspieler”, the Austrian National Cup of Console Gamers.

Der eSport Verband Österreich sieht es als seine Aufgabe, den elektronischen Sport in all seinen Bereichen zu unterstützen, die bereitstehenden Mittel bestmöglich zu nutzen, diese zu koordinieren und Maßnahmen gegenüber der Gesellschaft und der Politik zu vertreten.

– Stefan Baloh, Präsident esvö

That’s their mission statement. For those of you who don’t understand German, let me translate:

The Austrian eSports Club’s mission is to promote electronic sport in all its fields, use available resources as efficiently as possible, manage the distribution of those resources and represent eSports to society and politics.

– Stefan Baloh, Präsident esvö, translated by Florian Holzner

I have somewhat limited hopes that the esvö will change the Austrian LAN Party scene. To host a party with more than 50 people, you simply need sponsors, and even for smaller parties sponsors are definitely a plus. And you don’t just need prizes in-kind for the tournaments, you need money up front for the venue, the catering, cleaning, damages that might occur during the party as well as the equipment – servers, switches, cables, tables, etc. pp. – that you either need to rent or purchase. And the interest in sponsoring LAN parties has simply declined, from what I take.

Another problem that the esvö will not be able to fix is people. Many of the people that organized LAN Parties some time back have grown up, gotten jobs and created families, which means they simply don’t have the time any more. And new blood is sparse in the orgnizer-scene. I don’t really know why. Some people say that it’s “the internet”. While definitively being involved in the decline of LAN Parties, I do not think that “the internet” is at fault alone. This seems to easy to me. Maybe the players' taste in and style of games has shifted from competitive to casual gaming. That in conjunction with the ease of finding people to play over the web might be responsible for the downfall of LAN-parties in Austria. Maybe it’s the fact that Austria is too little of a country to attract the attention of companies willing to sponsor eSports events of the necessary size to host tournaments with big enough prize-pools for Pro-gaming teams. Maybe LAN-Parties no longer work alone, but need to be combined with some kind of I fair and a supporting program like concerts and parties. It has been tried in Austria in 2010 in the Festpielhaus in St. Pölten under the name of CyberLab 2010. The project has gotten some media attention, and was moderately successful, I would say, and impressively so for a first timer, but is nothing close in size to Dreamhack or [GamesCom]. (I was unable to attend Cyberlab 2010 due to exams at that time, so I have to rely on reports. Please correct me if I am wrong on the Cyberlab.)

Closing Words

While I am kinda sad to observe a steady decline in LAN-Parties in Austria, and annoyed by the fact that there is not really some kind of central spot to look for LANs on the world wide web, I still think that there is hope and great potential. The parties that are still around are proof of that, and I look forward to attending one or the other this year. I will turn this into a series of posts, possibly even with interviews – wink, pants – with some of the inactive or still active orgas, since I am not satisfied at all with what I have found out. I have the feeling that this account is incomplete at least, but okay as a starting point for a more detailed investigation. Thank you for your attention.

Hello World!

2011-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

I finally went through with the plan to buy the domain lebobs.ch and setup a blog for myself. Markus told me about pages.github.com some time ago, and this weekend I finally set down and purchased my domain, set up the repository, site structure etc. pp., the end product of which you can see here.

I’m still undecided wether to blog on German or English. I guess I’ll make up my mind while I’ll create the layout and design for the page.