Vorbilder braucht das Land
Er sprach 17 Sprachen und schrieb sogar Briefe in Arabisch, seiner Lieblingssprache.
Von Theodor
Kaluza ist die Rede.
"vom nachbarn kommt musik, nach der schon lang kein hahn mehr kraeht..."
If you want a condensed example of how much this region here lives under a rock: They are proud of having brought the
Love Parade here. It's just somehow over guys, kalter Kaffee.
How you become a computer hacker...
I mean an evil one, somebody who does something nasty on somebody elses computer. It happens just like this, by accident really, out of fun and curiosity... Imagine you are sitting around at your desk and you try to configure your new WLAN router. You don't really know its IP, so you try out the different possibilities that you find on the web. And luckily, you end up on a router configuration page. But there is something odd: the configuration software is not what you were expecting to see. Say it's this ugly pink panther color, where your router is not supposed to know about T Online at all. And the network is called differently than yours. Very strange, but you can change all the settings, keys everything. You go make yourself a coffee and then come back and check the list of available networks and oops there is your network of course and among others one matching the configuration tool you were just staring at. That one is open. Hm ... It's just so tempting.
No, no. I didn't do anything. I appreciate that people have unencrypted networks, but it would be a good idea to at least password protect your configuration interface. I just wished my neighbour was Wolfgang Schaeuble. Oh no, of course not really, who wants to live next to
Mr. BIG BROTHER, but just for a today. Or I would have to improve my hacker skills a lot...
Columbus
Instead of some physics stuff, I was supposed to read on the weekend, I read a
book on Columbus (I am only half way through, somewhere in the Caribe for the first time.)
It is quite interesting and well written, although there are some awkward sentences which to me seem like the author was trying to write "good style" in a complicated and antiquated way. But nevertheless, it's very entertaining. Me being forced to read through physics books and articles, where you (met at least!) advance very slowly and still only understand half of what is going on (me at least!) was wondering whether any well written history book is like this, something you read at night before you fall asleep. Where you can read hundreds of pages in row without this feeling of complete exhaustion, I have after a few pages of physics. If so, I am jealous. Schoggi, really.
There is one thing I am wondering:
Columbus seems to have been the brickheadest brickhead of the world. There were many highly accomplished scientists of these days in Portugal and in Spain who told him that his calculation on how far India was west ways, was rubbish. But he didn't listen.
And in fact as we know, those people were right, if they hadn't stumbled over a unknown continent, there is no way they could have made it to India. Before he finally set off, he made the Spanish court write down what his privileges were going to be if he made it. Most prominently things like being vice king of all the territories he was going to discover. It seems that the idea was, wherever he sets his foot, belongs to the Spanish crown and him as a vicegerent. This is what I don't understand: There had been trade going on between Europe and Asia for a very long time, there were descriptions of the Asian empires. Columbus himself carried with him a letter for the Aga Khan, so he had an expectation of what these Asian states were like. It was known that there were highly developed cultures, powerful and large and rich empires, who would be able to defend their independence. You couldn't expect them to say: "O hola, bienvenida Espana, finalmente podemos entregarte nuestro oro. Te esperamos desde hace tantos anos." Rather they would laugh at these fourty men, sell them some stuff and send them off again, and when they came back, more of them and strongly armed, there would fight. You could expect to establish trade connections with India, but not gain it as a colony without a war. And the Spanish they knew how long it can take to win a war against an equally strong enemy, they had just finished the reconquista. Of course, it's different if you expect to end up somewhere where there is nobody living or just some tribes in the bush hunting with spears. Those you can easily impress and kill with the "modern" European weaponry.
Well and this was what happened. But how could they know? or if they didn't how could they expect it? Or was it only Columbus who expected it, because he was crazy anyway, and the catholics kings guaranteed him his rights, because they thought there wasn't ever going a Spanish governour of India?
Scheiss Tusse!
Die
Alice mein ich. Seit letztem Donnerstag mindestens hatte ich keine Internet verbindung. Konnte
pppoeconf nicht mehr ausfuehren und in
ifconfig stand auch kein ppp interface drin. In den logs stand immer nur
timeout waiting for PADO packets
Das ist so ein
Ping back den man vom peer zurueckbekommen sollte, wenn die Verbindung aufgebaut wird. Wenn man nach der Fehlermeldung sucht in verschiedenen Foren, dann kommen sehr unterschiedliche Loesungsansaetze, in den meisten Faellen etwas wie "hab ein neues Modem gekauft, dann gings." also keine wirklichen Loesungen. Ist auch scheints auch schwierig, denn das ist ein Problem vom ISP, (es sei denn man hat die Kabel nicht eingesteckt oder so...). Ich hab dann mangels irgendeiner Idee mehrmals bei der Alice hotline angerufen und ne email geschrieben, aber die Hotline war immer ueberfuellt, email koennen sie nicht beantworten (so die Reaktion nach 2 Tagen), weil ich mein Kennwort nicht auswendig wusste und deshalb in der Uni, wo ich die mail geschrieben hat (zu Hause ging ja nicht) nicht angeben konnte. So heute komme ich heim und siehe da es geht alles wieder, ohne dass ich irgendwas getan haette,
ifconfig listet auch wieder das
ppp0 interface. Eine Woche ohne Internet danke schoen liebe Alice. Dafuer zahl ich also monatlich 30 Euro oder so. Mal kucken, ob ich mich nochmal beschwere, beim letztem Mal, haben sie mir immerhin 15 Euro "geschenkt" weil das viel zu ewig (etwa 7 Wochen, statt 2 bis 4 wie angekuendigt) gedauert hat mit dem aufschalten.
