day5: return of the zivi

ah.. finally i'm back home again. breakfast was business as usual. class was somehow more boring than the other days, perhaps because my mind was already in front of my three screens here, reading dilber comics. :) in the last period we watch a really interesting video segment about how zivis were interrogated in the 60s and 70s. they were asked extremely stupid and irritating questions. often those interviews lasted two hours or more and some people had to go through different instances and sometimes you were accepted four years after submitting your conscientious objection. i'm glad today you only have to write a little letter to the federal office. after class we had to wait in line to get our 2,25 euro food money, which we were told we had to receive because its a law. :) luckily my lastname starts with f and i didn't have to wait long, so i was one of the first to arrive at the bus-stop and a few minutes later at the train-station, there i was told by a fellow zivi, that no trains are arriving, because someone commited suicide and jumped in front of a train a few km away from bad oeynhausen. after half an hour my train arrived. i had to switch trains again in hannover, where we had to wait 10 minutes in front of the station (inside the train). from the announcements i learned that there was some construction work going on and a lot of train were delayed or rerouted. i finally arrived at my home station at 2.50pm. at home a new mainboard for my ibm workstation, 10 ubuntu linux cds and a bothersome brother awaited me. home sweet home :)

day4: one more to go

breakfast was as usual. seems i'm getting used to this schedule. i even went to bed last night before 11pm and was asleep before 12pm, but then around 2am some morons were looking for their friend, of course they had to slam at every door and wake everybudy up, so my plan of getting more than 5 hours of sleep were screwed. those bastards! sleepstealing is a serious crime, you know. ;) in the first period every group presented their results of yesterdays works. ours wasn't that good, because the one who was supposed to do it rejected the "honour" :). the second period was quite interesting, we watched a documentary about cars and the resulting pollution throughout the world. although it was more than 10 years old, the problems adressed still persist. we continued in the third period with another grouptask, we had do examine vw's 5000x5000 model from different perspectives. as expected nobody was interested (most of us talked about that in school already). lunch was really delicious today, i had braten with potatos and sauerkraut. afternoon class was rather interesting, the groups presented their results from the previous lesson and afterwards we watched a speak of Max Frisch, which he held on his 75th birthday. hmmm.. i'm writing less and less each day. five days are really enough. you probably can't imagine how boring it is here. perhaps i'm addicted to the internet, because somehow i feel the need to be online the whole day and read news and email and stuff. gah, i want to write more, but nothing happens, so i'll write about uninteresting details. :) i brought my empty coke bottles back to the store, which is by the way called "Lschdepot", what could be translated to fire department. i got 60 cents, which reduce the cost of 4 litres of coke to 3,60 euros. oh, and i learned something import today: the busline mentioned in my travel information i got from the baz doesn't exist anymore! but theres a replacement-line, which stops here semihourly. and now to something completely different: dinner. ahhh.. todays dinner was great! guess what, they made pizza! :) this was the first meal here that tasted really good. i suppose they serve the good stuff on the last day, so that the zivis wont go home thinking "man, the food there sure was crap". the kitchen personal does not know what "REfill" means, but they have a basic understanding of psychology. weird. well, in the end they're just women, perhaps they do this stuff on purpose. could be some kind of genitically preprogrammed behaviour when forced to serve food to about 130 men. mhh... i think i should cut back on caffeine and sugar, my brain is a little to active. *G* i hope i can get more sleep this night, we have to leave the rooms tomorrow before class starts, with all our stuff.

day3: staying alive

breakfast: man, what an disapointing event. still no juice and today they even reduced the wurst choice, but there was a light and the end of the tunnel, they had cornflakes, they just didnt serve enough milk. those damn bastards! when will they learn that they need a person whose sole task is watching over the buffet and refill things needed??? perhaps i should comment on the weather, just for the records. well, its cold and raining all the time. in the beginning of todays class we learned, that two attendees have left us. both shared a room and had a serious quarrel the evening before. one was injured and sent to the doctor, the other one is in police custody if i understood it correctly. its said that the room is completly demolished and not usable anymore, the other two who slept there, have already found new sleepplaces. lunch was quite delicious today, but gulasch with kndel and rotkohl isnt much of a challenge for an average cook. however they were able to make a little mistake, they forgot to put some apple in the rotkohl. perhaps apples didnt fit into their budget, which consists of 1,30 euros per person as we learned in todays class. i didnt expect apples to be that expensive. :) we also started finally with our real topic in the second period. the first thing we had to do was drawing a luck-curve ("Glckskurve"), which should represent our personal relation between the amount of money you earn a month and your level of luckyness. most graphs looked the same, but the teacher insisted on showing all of them (~20) and everyone had to comment on his. in the third period we read extracts of a studies which had to do with globalisation, governance and personal luck of the citizens. afternoon class was somewhat irritating. i thought we would continue to talk about globalisation, but we had to form groups again and got some material about demographics of family structures in karlsruhe (at least the group i was in). the other groups had newspaper articles or studies about other stuff that has to do with families, espacially kids and financial issues. we all had to write down our "results" on big pieces of paper. during the afternoon i watched even more DearS, this series has so cute and funny characters its addictive :). but i pulled myself together and did something productive/creative. i created an star wars adventure. its not completely done yet, i will have to reread the rulebook to work out the details. but i can say two things: i think its hilarious *G* and i included more choices and different ways to achieve the same thing. perhaps its just coincidence, but its interesting that nearly all ways how to get players out of the game came to my mind while listening to nightwish's the end of all hope. and here's a special note for my players: fortune cookies are really tasty and healthy. (i hope they read this). dinner today was like the other evenings. they served something that should probably be "kartoffelpuffer", although they're one of my favourite foods i didn't take 'em, they looked... err.. weird :). oh yeah, and like yesterday morning and today at lunch, the water-machine is still empty! as yesterday i dont suppose that i'll do anything of interest from now on till i sleep, so i'll stop here.

day 2: let the games begin

wow, i was quite creative/talkative yesterday. i never thought i could write such a detailed diary-entry. at school i was horribly bad at these things. perhaps thats why it comes out now? ok, back to the topic, i'm already sounding like piro :). we got up at seven in the morning. although bendix was supposed to get up earlier, because we both wanted to have a shower before breakfast. but we managed it anyway. breakfast was kinda rare. not much choice on the buffet, not even cornflakes or orange juice. oh now that i mention food, i complety forgot dinner yesterday. we moved our lazy asses to the cantina at 17.30 (these eating times are just like at my workplace for the patients) and got some slices of bread with wurst and cheese. there was also a rather warm toast with something on it which looked like mushrooms and molten cheese, but i skipped that one. hmm... where did i stop?...*scroll*... ah... so, after breakfast was done i got my laptop from our room and went to class. today we talked about the rights and duties of people serving in the civil-service (for the sake of my fingers i will write zivis from now on, as thats how we are called here in germany). the first period was again not very amusing, so i went to the vending machine in the break and bought a coke. woot, sugar and caffeine rule! :) ok, back to class. we formed little groups of 3-5 people and got papers with about 6 tasks on them. you needed to look up something in the "Leitfaden zur Durchfhrung des Zivildienstes", which is a rather big rulebook for both zivis and their workplaces. our group was done quite fast, we had to look up things that had something to do with driving people around. so, i played tetris till the period was over. a laptop in class is quite handy! my group-fellas were a little bit jealus, but they had their mp3-players with them. the rest of the classtime every group presented their results. and in notime it was lunchtime. today we had steak with potatoes and vegetable. it was quite eatable. :) but theres one thing that bugs me about our meals: there not enough to drink! in the morning the water-machine was empty! and as if thats not enough, half a liter of coke costs 70cents and you dont get pfand back! ok, enough rantage for today, back to class. yes, we even have class in the afternoon! wee, i love exclamation marks. here are some just for my pleasure!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :) afternoon class is until three pm, after that we have freetime. chris and i decided that the brewage prices here are way to high and went to the next store to get something cheap to drink. hey, you have to drink at least 2 litres of water every day! if we relied on the in house vending machine, that would make 2,80 euro a day! i bought 4 litres of coke for 4,20 euros at the store and i will get pfand back if i return the empty bottles. when we returned i decided to watch some more DearS and now i'm listening to Nightwish and writing down this crap. damn, i tend to write a lot when i'm bored. i really should put my effort in creating the next star wars adventure which i wanted to do for two months now. well i think i can quit here as i dont think anything worth writing down will happen till i fall asleep.

day 1: the arrival

well the train-ride was quite comfortable. as usual when i'm at the station, i got myself the latest linux-mag and then went to the railways. i had to switch trains in hannover with a 20 minute stay. quite boring, but i have my trusty mp3-player with me, loaded with nightwish and black sabbath. both bands make btw good car music, especially for speedways :). the whole trip took about two hours, till i arrived in bad oeynhausen (strange name, eh?). i got out of the mainstation (which seems to have only two railways) to find the next busstation. to my surprise the line i had to take only drives every full hour. it was quarter past eleven when i arrived at the busstop and i had to be at the zivi-schule around twelve o'clock. "luckily" i was given a little map with a description how to get there by foot in about 30 minutes. with around 5 or less degrees celcius and high air moisture you can prolly imagine how fun that walk was :). the "login"-procedure isnt worth mentioning. the next item on our schedule was lunch. yay, "something" to eat. the noodles with some kind of tomato sauce and hacked meat did taste awful, prolly because the cook put too much oil on the noodles (i didn't even know you can do that!). after lunch we had about half an hour freetime which i spent with the other guys in our room. we used that time to introduce ourselfs. like in almost every room we are four guys: bendix (seems to be his real name), christian, hendrik and of course me. at 13.30 we all were supposed to be in the cantina again, where the head had a little speak about how our course will be structured and what the house rules are. we also learned that we would have already class that day, from 15.15-17.30. unfortunately noone from my room chose the same topic (statistically not surprising as we could choose 1 out of 5), but at least we can report each other about what we "learned". the "teacher" (they are called "dozent[en]" here) i chose is a calm guy whose speaking speed can be quite snoozing, especially if you only slept 1 or two hours the night before :). i was the only person to bring a laptop to class (i might be the only person who brought a laptop to this institution). hmm.... my writing style is getting less inventive as it was back in school. i really should read more english literature or read more subtitles while watching anime. :) foreseeing as i am i brought two series and two movies, as i was told the whole seminar would be very boring. after class we all met in our room again and got to know us a little more. i learned that bendix is "living with jesus" as he states (he has several editions of the bible and a yellow textmarker with him). at first i thought he was a witness of jehova or mormon, but it turned out that he's just doing his own thing and not even a member of a regular church. christian is kinda shy and doesnt talk very much, but my laptop helped him to open up a bit and he talked about his computers. nerds... :) he calls himself a "modder" and is a regular customer of caseking. then there's hendrik, well, i dont know very much about him, only that he lives in bielefeld, which is about 40km away and wants to sleep at home. after watching two episodes DearS i got to bed and continued reading "The forgotten Tales of Middle-Earth Part 2". DearS is really fun to watch, lots of ecchi humour. At about eleven pm i fell asleep.....

live coverage

the entries that will follow the next days are my personal diary that i write here at the seminar. it is just the long,uncensored and boring truth about what happens here.

seminar

the coming week i will be attenting a course thats part of my civil service. i will live and learn in a combined school/youth-hostel kind of thing located in bad oeynhausen. i heard from others who had their course already that it is veeeery boring and you can't do anything fun there. i'm glad i have my notebook with me, so i can watch anime during my freetime and play games during class while pretending to take notes. *G*

ibm and linux

i thought ibm and linux would be a perfect team when choosing my new home-server. but now i am trying to install linux on an ibm netvista a40 for about two days and didnt succeed. i tried debian, archlinux, crux and yoper. i once got archlinux and yoper running, but they were kinda unstable. during all installations and even while running knoppix the pc rebooted once in a while. it seems to have something to do with some kernel driver i think. the hardware is fine, i tested everything with pc doctor (a tool provided by ibm). i tried searching for error-reports like mine, but i only found sites where people stated they successfully installed debian on this type of hardware. perhaps i should give it a last try.