From Berlin to Aachen for just 2,40

During the last two weeks I travelled around quite a lot. Brussels, Hamburg & Berlin in less than 10 days. The nice thing about it were the three amazing cities, three different cultures and three different kinds of people  in such a short time. The bad point was just not enough time to fully experience these cities.  However it was a great time.

Starting in Brussels. Together with eight of my friends I visited a friend of ours living in Brussels. It was an unbelievable advantage having a place to stay and and a very experienced city and night-life guide for free. Still, Brussels is a place where you can spend lots and lots of your hard earned salaries. But a large shopping mall, des beaux Cafés, some nice pubs and especially le Goupil le fol were worth it.

A friend of mine and his family visiting the older sister and her boyfriend took me with them to Hamburg. My friend and I had acquired free accommodation due to the help of the hospitality club (by the way a great community - you should try it out). However, the parents had planned in the grandparents which, being ill, stayed at home, so that we had to take the free room which was quite expensive in the end. However, we had our fun visiting the reeperbahn and some sights in Hamburg.

Without my friend I visited a friend of mine living between Hamburg and Lübeck.  I hadn’t seen her for a while and I really enjoyed my stay there. But I had planned to await New Year in Berlin so I had to go on.

At this point I started to hitch hike. There is a bus line from Hamburg to Berlin and if you book it one week in advance it costs just 9 Euro. But I wanted to stay flexible and decided to try hitch hiking. It worked out well, I came in time to party with my friends in Berlin where I stayed a few days. The way back home I wanted to try it again. I looked up recommendations on where to start and decided to take a train to Michendorf near Potsdam (for just 2,40 ;-) )where a rest stop is near the train station. After having waited just 10 to 15 minutes I had a ride to the Hannover. At the rest stop there which was filled with people it seemed to be more difficult. However, I had luck again. I spotted a car with the license plate AC - Aachen and asked the drivers whether they had some place left for me. The two Poles agreed and I was on the way to Aachen. Couldn’t have been better ….

How to explain Ubuntu

I found a great metaphor which explains Ubuntu and the open source idea in an easy way and very comprehensible. I won’t tell spoil anything - look it up yourself ;-)

By the way I am deeply impressed by the newest Ubuntu release. It’s just amazing. Try it out. Definitely!

Non stop, full-stop

A long time has been passed since I wrote my last entry. However, I have a good excuse. A very good one.

First, I have had autumn holiday and I have been to Turkey with my family. Four days in Istanbul and 8 days in a relaxing all-inclusive pool landscape. The latter was a lot of fun, as I met a couple of nice guys from Switzerland and Russia there.

Then school started again, the Cambridge CAE course started and I started to work after school on some days. So now I’m whizzing around somewhere non-stop and can’t even catch a short break in the evenings, due to the lot of home- and other work I still need to complete.

But I don’t want to complain - the course is great, a lot of fun. The teacher is from the US, I forgot from where exactly. CAE is accomplishable. And we are good supported. As she put it: “This is not like school. Not teacher against you, but we all against Cambridge.”

A special kind of humor

I just spotted a hilarious entry in the world’s freest encyclopedia. It gave me a very sentimental feeling, but I couldn’t stop laughing for quite a while.  They do have a very special kind of humor. Even in Latvia they know it, although there are some arguments between Latvians and Russians…

The two sides of learning at school

After 4 weeks of school I’m kind of used again to weaking up early, sleeping less and lesser, reduced free time and even ways to seldomly going out on weekends.

On the other hand learning can be (and I truly mean it) enlightening. We got some teachers I don’t like, or don’t like to much, but that is bearable (most of the time). History is interesting (teacher sucks ass - I spend half of the time trying to overlook this fact), Literature is even more interesting, I don’t even need to mention Informatics, PE, what else is there left? Religion too (after all, I’am a convinced atheist), Maths (my  2nd Advanced course).

English courses especially are usually a hell of a fun. I would have preferred the 2nd English Advanced course’s students, because most of them have been abroad (California, Australia), but our teacher is ways better, the other course is complaining all the time . Not to mention a friend of mine who had to change due to some class schedule mistakes.

It’s demanding too - more or less at least. Homework is demanding, the lessons sometimes are easy-peasy and to slow paced.

In the last lessons, our teacher got a bit of a reading-texts-spleen - read this, read that. Interpret this, summarize that and don’t forget evaluating!

This can be a pain in the ass. On some days it is easy to make up my mind and write some interpretation or to sum up a text and it’s fun too - after all I really like the English language, reading and  so on.

However, at least half of the other days (probably more) I’m extremely dull after school and it’s hart even to write the last bit of a lousy summarize. And that’s just English - to counting everything together it’s probably about 400% of the other days ;-)

Still, I prefer all kinds of English homework a helluva times to doing German interpretation work. Poems, poems, poems. Right now I should have done one, probably instead of writing this. I didn’t. Fuck it, exactly that is school.

Learning English again

My abroad year is over, so I decided to focus on some other thing now: Learning English. As I wrote, I’m in an English Advanced course at school and to make thinks even more interesting I signed up for a preparation course for the CAE Certificate at an evening school.
I got two reasons signing up. Firstly, I did the FCE certificate this year in April (or was it March?) and at school they now offer a preparation course for it. I already did it, so why shouldn’t I try the next one?

Secondly, I love my English Advanced course, but it is not as demanding as I had hoped for.

Lot of reasons to write on this blog how my learning is going on. When I read the first posts I wrote about two years ago I can gladly tell, that I improved a hell of a lot. Now it’s time to continue writing more frequently to brush up my writing skills and maybe I should start again reading a few English books.

School started

I need a  break! I just spent 10 days at school, but I’m already done. I sleep about 8 hours each night (or even more), but I am tired anyway. ALL the time.

At least the Advanced English course seems nice. Some pupils to whom I wouldn’t have recommended to choose English, but that’s okay. Not the teacher I hoped for - my 7th & 8th teacher and the best one ever - but another teacher and she’s okay as well.

It probably will be hard, it will be challenging, it will be a hell of a lot of work - but it definitely will be fun.

The world’s as miserable as before, but I continue to blog

I have been a few weeks now back in Germany and I recently thought about school which is going to start in about exactly … 4 days. Oh hell! I am going to have Mathematics and English as Leistungskurs (I always tried to translate this word in various languages during various discussions, but I always failed … maybe I should look into a dictionary right now. Okay, the dictionary itself is not sure which word is to use) and I thought about my skills in both subjects.

I know that my English skill is not as good as a year ago, so I decided I ought to restart blogging more frequently. Won’t hurt anyway and as long as I’ll just gab about some bullshit every now and then I don’t waste too much time for it. Especially my vocabulary degraded like hell. So don’t wonder when I’ll try to use some exquisite vocabulary ;-)

In the end I care anyway less about English than I do about maths. I should have started to learn the stuff I missed a few weeks ago. I didn’t of course.

So school is about to start….but I finish here my entry, because the compile process of sauerbraten finished and I’ll try it out now. Have fun out there, my non-existent readers!

It’s time to go

Finally, my time in Latvia is over. Tomorrow at 2 o’ clock the airplane goes to Berlin over Frankfurt and I won’t ever be able to come back …. okay, just a joke … so be prepared, I will be back!

How to fuck up your hard disk - and how to recover it

A few days ago, I got a computer from my host dad to avoid conflicts with my host brother about using his computer. There was still Windows XP installed with files and data from the previous owner, but I wanted to install Ubuntu anyway. That day the internet in my room wasn’t working so I really had nothing to do and started right away to install Ubuntu.

This shouldn’t have been that difficult - I installed Ubuntu already a few times on different computers and have never experienced any problems. That’s why I didn’t made any precautions. Lesson learned, I won’t ever do that again. Always make a damn update!

I would have made one, but I was/am rather short of funds: It’s an old machine, Pentium III, floppy disk (thank god - nowadays many computers are shipped without, I myself sometimes consider it as lesser important), CD drive and a 10 gb hard disk drive. So how am I supposed to do an backup without the resources I can use in Germany?!

Live Disk as usual, I change the partition by hand. It seems to go well - until to the next installation step: I need to assign root and swap to the partitions. But the wizard tells me the partitions are somehow broken. WTF? I cancel the installation, but it was too late, Windows wouldn’t boot any more.

It’s about fine with me - I could have used Ubuntu only. The big nasty problem was that my host dad, or better the computer’s previous owner needed some files he forgot to copy/backup/whatever. Shit.

I knew there were recovery tools for these kind of problems. I just had never ever needed something like that and I had to teach myself from scratch how to do it. Where? Big, old pal Internet would help.

I got a few tools which made hope, it showed all the data. But it was only freeware and didn’t allow to write the found data. How convenient.

I had a hell of a stress the last days. My host dad wasn’t that happy when he found out what’d happened. But after all it only confirmed his opinion that I was responsible for breaking every computer. My host brother didn’t let me use his computer, because he always has been pissed of about the need to share it and afterall I had now my own computer. Fine.

Last option: Internet cafe. A very interesting experience. Surrounded by Russians (age 9-17) playing Counter Strike and similar games. But at least the feeling that you can use a computer as long as you want and need to (okay, I had to pay … but that were peanuts 1Ls/3 hours).

I figured out how to use a tool I already tried out, but with which I was overburdened: testdisk. Back home I tried it out (after arguing with my host brother to change keyboards - I had only one for usb port which is pretty useless in DOS) and was relieved that it worked about as described, although it was a slightly newer version.

Even better: Windows worked. Internet worked. Ha, life is fine.

I wondered how I could donate something (I don’t have Paypal), but the main brain behind the tool also collects Euro coins! Very good, I ordered my parents to collect some and sent them over to France. Maybe I can even think of some lines in French to write him!