Comments from
the rusty cage


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About

This is the weblog of Meike Reichle aka alphascorpii. This blog mainly deals with my Debian activities, university life and general "life these days" musings.

The blog's name originates from the song "Rusty Cage". Take your pick between the Soundgarden and the Johnny Cash version. I like them both.

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Tolimar's blog
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Tue, 01 Jul 2008

What everyone's been waiting for

The married
couple


Posted at: 12:01 in /english/personal
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Fri, 13 Jun 2008

A Debian Love Story ...

Debian, I owe you!


Posted at: 00:20 in /english/personal
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Mon, 31 Dec 2007

Happy new year!

The year is almost over and a lot has happened. I finished my studies and got engaged, (Again, thank you very much for the many, many congratulations and warm wishes!) now, just before the year is really over I decided to finally make another commitment.

Now, I guess the first thing I'll turn to will be Tasks and Spätzle. ;)


Posted at: 19:01 in /english/personal
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Sun, 30 Dec 2007

Without words ...

presenting engagement
rings
Intercultural disclaimer: In Germany it is customary to buy the wedding rings
on the occasion of the engagement and wear them on the left hand until the
actual marriage. Afterwards they are worn on the right hand.


Posted at: 16:37 in /english/personal
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Fri, 19 Jan 2007

Storm's over

Kyrill crossed Hildesheim yesterday evening. Some parts of the city got hit rather badly with roofs being completely untiled and trees falling on buildings. It seems we were lucky to only lose a few tiles, since there have been reports of debris flying about in our street yesterday and the little park opposite our house looks not too good today. No disrooted trees though. However, in the next street a poplar tree was disrooted and fell on a car killing one man and injuring two others, one of them severely. Guess that explains the many ambulances going by yesterday :/

This morning, with daylight back most things seem back to normal. There's quite lot of stuff lying about and the river has really high water and also carries a lot of debris, mainly boughs and twigs though.

PS: What bothers me most, ist that most news services today have headlines such as "Storm "Kyrill": The best Photos from our readers" and similar. I hate it when people have nothing better to do than to pull out their f***ing mobile phones and take pictures whenever something bad happens and this is not exactly helping!


Posted at: 10:54 in /english/personal
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Fri, 12 Jan 2007

Happy New Year! and some resolutions

Slightly belated, but still: Happy new year everyone!

We spent the holidays with my parents, pretty relaxing, didn't do much but lie on the couch, do crosswords and watch my sisters dwarf rabbit, that my mom hat to "rabbit-sit". Christmas was as usual a three-generations celebration and quite nice.

On the 4th we went to see Irie Révoltés. Absolutely great concert!! We danced our hearts out. But, you know what? The best is not only seeing a great concert, but having the next day off. Sleeping in 'til way past noon, waking up with a beep in yours ears, a smelly pile of cloths beside your bed and every muscle sore. Have a wonderful breakfast with eggs and sausage, spend half an hour under a hot shower and spend the rest of the day humming melodies and tending to your aching muscles. Wonderful!

Unfortunately the new year didn't continue that great. I caught a nasty cold and spent the last four days in bed. But, oh well, it's getting better, I can almost breathe soundlessly again!.

Generally, this is going to be a very important year! In the middle of December I registered my Magister (comparable to a master's) thesis. I've got six months to finish it, so the first half of this year will be used for that. Once the thesis is handed in, the final (really final this time) exams start, first a very long written one, than an oral one, this will take until October. After that ... well, we'll see. I've set my mind on a PhD, since I'd like to pursue an academic career, so the next step will probably be trying to get a PhD grant. First things first though ...

Resolutions

Finally this is probably the first new year I really made some new year's resolutions. I'll put them here, so I can nail myself down to it over the year:

  1. First off, there are some things that I simply hope to keep the way they are:
    • I live in a wonderful relationship that I hope will simply go on forever :)
    • Also, I have quite a cool job (several actually), that I hope I can keep for another while.
    • I changed my eating habits quite drastically during the last months. I used to love everything "Just add water": teas, soups,puddings ... RAMEN!! Luckily it didn't reflect on my weight, which is pretty constant, but still I know that stuff is 90% chemical crap and who knows what it will lead to. (I know the optimal human would have three eyes, but I am actually quite happy with my average two.)
      So, I've cut down on that quite a bit and now have a subscription with an organic farm nearby that delivers so called Abokisten (subscription boxes?) that are delivered weekly and contain different vegetables, fruit, a loaf of bread and some cheese. The boxes' content is kind of randomized, so you get something different every week. It's a pretty neat service, since the food is really great, the price is reasonable, it's delivered right to my door, and (most of all) it makes me cook! So, here's another Keep that up!
  2. So much for the keeping, now for the changes/tasks: I guess the first is, of course, my thesis and exams. I plan to do those as good as possible. I'll be something of a challenge though. This is the first time I do such a large "project" (the thesis takes six months) all on my own, and (most worrying) at home. So here's a test on self-discipline!
  3. Although I've done a lot of acting in my "younger years" (haha) I've always been rather unmusical. This has been nagging on me for quite a while, so I've taken up playing the Blues Harp last month. I picked that instrument since I love the Blues and it's also easy to learn but still very flexible (and cheap). So far it's been huge fun but the art is, as always, keeping it up.
  4. There's this little blog I'm maintaining, that has been horribly neglected over the last year, so another resolution is to post here more often. (This way posts also won't have to be so horribly long, such as this one.)
  5. I couldn't help but notice that that geek girls top ten which Erinn mentioned (congrats by the way :)) contains but one European women. So here's something to do as well. There's quite a bunch of pretty impressing ladies over here, too. (Even AFTER 1950,dear CNET) And it seems, they need a bit more visibility. Maybe there are some things that can be done about that too ...

So, lots of plans. I hope publishing them here will help sticking to them. This also concludes my "little post", I hope the next will follow in a more timely manner.


Posted at: 18:56 in /english/personal
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Sat, 05 Aug 2006

1st Anniversary

According to our rather rough (and slightly guessed) reverse calculations, it is today exactly one year since the man who introduced me to xfce4, M*A*S*H, and an incredible amount of happiness entered my life.

Many happy returns!


Posted at: 19:46 in /english/personal
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Thu, 27 Jul 2006

What life's been like

It's been quite a while since my last post, so this will mainly be an update on what I've been up to the last weeks or even months.

Overall the past time has mainly been pretty busy. It was the end of the semester, a time that always brings a lot of work, and in this case it was the end of my last semester, which adds a little extra pressure to the whole business, since I didn't only have to take care of the usual stuff, but also had to arrange for an appropriate topic for my upcoming thesis, which is always a kind of a "balancing act". Things are however looking good now and I am quite confident that I'll be able to spend the six months I have for my thesis on a subject that actually interests me, my tutors, complies with the official guidelines, has some purpose beyond getting me a Master of Arts AND EVEN has a realistic chance of actually working out! Yay academia!

Apart from university work I've been kept additionally busy by my jobs, which unfortunately also both had a kind of peak during the last weeks. The problem about this is, that actually both of them were intended to be "only-jobs" since they both provided me with enough money and consumed just as much time as I could spare during the semester. But then I got accepted for both of them and absolutely couldn't decide which one to chose (one was at the university as a teaching assistant, the other at a pretty cool IT security consultant's) so I did both and have been juggling those two, my studies and actually getting to sleep/eat every now and then during the last weeks. This has been pretty exhausting, but on the bright side, I have a little spare money now to spend while the holidays. (Luckily both bosses are on a 3-4 week trip in August :))

One thing that suffered rather greatly from my very tight schedule this semester (apart from my horribly neglected sweetie of course) was my Debian/Free Software work that got almost entirely stalled ever since I returned from DC6. So I hope to be using the more quiet summer months to spend some time on this, maybe write a nice new talk and package some things I've had my eyes on for quite a while already.

Oh, and I'll sleep. A LOT!

PS: Last night, to celebrate the end of the semester, we went to see the Pirates of the Caribbean double feature. Hilarious!! Go see it!


Posted at: 15:04 in /english/personal
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Fri, 02 Jun 2006

Cool sysad trick #3625

When moving your MX to another server, remember to also change your MUA's settings to query the new server instead of the old one.

Should you have sent mail to my alphascorpii.net account last month and not received an answer, this is why. I finally noticed now and am currently in the process of answering these mails.

And there I was, wondering why there is so little mail to the shiny new address ... Hngh!


Posted at: 13:50 in /english/personal
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Sun, 28 May 2006

Lost my mobile phone

I case you wrote me a text message or called me on my mobile phone lately and never got a response, here's why: It's gone.
I lost it some when between arriving at FRA airport on Monday evening and looking for it before going to uni on Wednesday morning. I already checked with the German Rail's lost and found service which - unsurprisingly - was little helpful. Basically they now have all my personal info, a detailed description of my mobile phone (Siemens C55, blue, battery empty, sim card pin-protected, transparent sticky tape on back that holds the battery cover) and told me to call back later since they haven't found anything yet. I have not yet given up completely, but for the moment please don't try to call or text me on my mobile phone. Use my home number or (much better) Email.

The phone was nothing special, but I am still pretty unhappy about its loss, since I don't have the money to get a new one (this one was a gift, yet another reason why losing it sucks bigtime!) and it holds a few numbers that I don't have anywhere else.

Oh well, just not my week. At all.


Posted at: 23:21 in /english/personal
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