would you believe that i will be at the viennese hofburg tonight wearing a borrowed suit jacket and joining a bunch of weirdos in smokings and costumes which normally gather at lectures about electrical engineering or construction statics? well, although i can't pair dance at all and probably will be looking like a crooked picture from the 7ties with my fat blue tie, i was persuaded to attend the "ball der technik", the annual ball of the technical university of vienna! – provided the bouncers really let me in.

i must have been either quite exhilarated or pretty sleepy at that morning of my consent...

i think i'll take my el cheapo camera with me and some pictures (as crooked as my look) back home for alo.

update: the bouncers made me buy a bow-tie because a simple tie was against dress code (probably a symbolic act of schüssel nostalgia). but this was just a short bothering intermezzo. it did not stop monika and me from getting into the ballroom blitz. inside, we met matthias, one of the platzer brothers.

being my first viennese ball it was a really fascinating experience. wondering about all the hidden choreographies of such an event (not only regarding the dances) i spotted some very beautiful dresses.

if you should be interested in watching how a car (a volkswagen, to be precise) is built you can watch it at "die gläserne manufaktur". this is the first time i have seen animated 3d panorama movies...

the new scientist is doing an experiment in open source: "good ideas are worth money, so why are people giving them away for free? this week, new scientist is doing something no other mainstream magazine has – publishing an article under what's known as a 'copyleft'. we're helping test one of the boldest ideas of our time. the outcome is up to you. to read the article, go to [...] newscientist.com. there, you can provide feedback, copy the article, redistribute it, modify or reissue it, without worrying that you've violated our copyright" (via pimi via xhrc-list. the "hrc" in xhrc stands for hypermedia research center, the "x" probably for exclusive).

a most likely differences between an article in a weblog and an article in an online newspaper about one and the same topic probably are the bloat factor and the use of words like "trend".

these lovely blue midgets!

remember the smurf's communist leanings? it just came to my mind that i always wondered why the cat of gargamel (who gets connotated in the cartoon as the bad guy) is called "azrael" – at the time only by intuition, ie. thinking of the homophone "israel".

azrael is another name for "ariel" or "uriel" (and some say the cat was called "uriel" in earlier times). obviously this name refers to a priest or one of the archangels (the angel of death) but there is a strong emphasis on jewish history.

adding gargamel's appearance as "a parody of a stereo-typical jewish man with dark hair and prominent features" one probably could come to the conclusion that the smurfs are not communists at all, but merely aryan puppets similar to right-wing terrorist groups like the us-american ku-klux klan.

however, political propaganda always tend to pocket popular symbols for the sake of her ideology, either as evangelism or as determent. and maybe, very maybe, communism and national-socialism have more in common than most of us would want to admit?

flames, please.

blogging for mental health.

after years of scientific research and heuristic evaluation (heheh) the self-proclaimed jane fonda of bloggærobics (aka p3k) has created a very useful and relaxing exercise for all those ass-tightened bloggers out there. it's new, it's simple and it works efficiently. so here it is:

the next time you find a piece of information you consider important enough to post on your weblog, sit back, relax in your chair, inhale once and exhale twice and then simply don't do it. don't blog it. keep it to yourself. keep it as your personal secret; as a thought only owned by yourself.

do this once a day and you will see welog world in brighter colors than ever before. well, actually, we all will see weblog world in brighter colors than ever before. but that probably might be just a nice side-effect...

quotes by statler & waldorf and other muppets.

waldorf: nurse! there's something wrong with this weblog!
statler: what's that?
waldorf: it's online!

today i am looking like a red-bull junkie who got quite an overdose of taurin: i was at the ophtalmologist and got some drops (not candy) trickled in the eyes that made my pupils (not students) inflate like a pair of torched black-hole twin suns... but everything is ok, i was told the black dots i see sometimes in the morning when gazing at light backgrounds just are some harmless liquefactions of the vitreous body (ie. i am "without pathological findings"). however, i wear my sunglasses at work right now and that's propably looking a little bit weird (too cool to be cool).

gray, henry. 1918. anatomy of the human body. page 1003.

a final link before bed time: bloggus caesari, a weblog by julius caesar. look, he's writing in english, too!