Back to the basics

Hello there!

I haven’t been writing anything for a long time. Basically, the reason is that I am incredibly lazy. Still, there is a bit more to it. I am in my last year at school and I actually have to spend a little time doing school work. Further on, there is my unsatisfiable desire to get around, get to know new people and discover ancient long-forgotten cultures (for example, my last hitchhike took me to the Bavarians). Not to mention that I commit a lot of my spare time to the two exchange organisations AFS and YFU.

However, I have been getting increasingly unsatisfied with my English skills and especially my ability to express myself. So I thought it was an exellent idea to resurrect this old blog of mine bearing in mind that there are the A-level exams (Abitur) looming ahead.

I haven’t made up my mind what’s going to be the main topic for this new blogging area. I am sure I will be sharing various stories with you my dear readers. I still have some untold stories about my last hitchhiking trips in my repertoire and I constantly experiment with my ubuntu distribution. Let’s just see what inspires me …

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 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!

It’s ice cold now

Of course it’s not that cold – usually it should be a helluva lot colder at this time of the year in Latvia. Still, it is cold enough for snow (unfortunately there isn’t any yet) and in my opinion it doesn’t need to get any colder.

Still, I wonder whether this could be called a real latvian winter. Probably not.

Today I had to do a bit of leg work and I was glad I had my ocassionally working iPod with me – music is very usefull to distract from the cold.

New Year’s pledges

I achieved last years pledges pretty well, though I couldn’t manage to buy a Macintosh laptop …

So that’s the first pledge for the coming year too. I should think about some more, but I still got some time (in my time zone it’s only 8 o’ clock). Maybe I will come up with some more, maybe not …

Anyway, a happy new year to all of you!

Patriotism and Independent Day

Yesterday was the Independent Day of Latvia. I knew in the back of my mind, that this day was somehow special,  of course it was written everywhere the days ago.

I was going to help painting the walls in my hostdad’s office. Still I got some hints all the time, but they weren’t hints to me that time, only now when I think back. First, the radio broadcasted some a service and it was the first time I could understand anything in the radio. At bridges, the lanterns were decorated with national flags. It even crossed my mind that this was a sign of patriotism you wouldn’t ever see in Germany, but I still didn’t got what it was all about.

A bit later, we were tough working, someone called me and asked wether I would watch the parade. Which parade? Hey, dude, it’s the Independent Day and that’s why there is a big parade! It finally dawned on me. Unfortunately I couldn’t watch anything, but the flying helicopters holding large national flags.

Later I still managed to pay a visit to Old Riga. Can’t remember to see it so crowded. At some place (how is it called again?) there were screens showing pictueres during a speech resounding from large speakers. People handed out national flags made from paper, I managed to get one!

A lot of Russians were present to, a lot of drunk people too (not only Russians) varying from dizzy to dead drunk. The latest mostly Russians as far as I could see, I have to admit. And, of course a lot of police too. I didn’t read the papers (or better: read the headlines, because that’s usually all I am able to understand) yet, bet as long as we have been there, nothing bad happened.

At around 9 p.m. people wandered to the river to see the firework and there it was really crowded now. The firework was the 2nd best firework I ever saw and the other one had been the one for the LNT (Latvian TV channel) birthday. Actually, I think both firework were pretty much the same, just yesterday there were speakers playing music and it was more foggy and wind blewing all the smoke in the wrong direction, towards the audience.

To draw the balance, it was very interesting. I have never sawn such a patriotic event in Germany and even the atmosphere during and shortly after the World Cup this year didn’t reached the patriotism yesterday at all. And I’m pretty sure Germans won’t ever be able to develope this kind of patriotism.

Still The Day I Broke My iPod

Life’s a bitch.

A fucking mean one, sometimes.

The Day I Broke My iPod

I’m leaving

This night I’ll be leaving for Latvia. I fly from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt and then to Riga. My hostfamily will wait there. Huh! I’m kinda nervous now.

Btw: WordPress.com has some new awesome features. Example? My current post got just auto saved. Try the pages around the dashboard. A comment and tag tracker. Hilarious!

Peace, I’m out. See or read or write you soon (hopefully, at least).

Last summer

An excerpt of Last Summer – Lost Prophets

And we laugh till we cry
Always so hard to say goodbye (good bye)
And we all sit round here in our home town
It’s so good like this, these are times we’ll miss
The memories, I hope will never fade
Glowing embers fly across the sky your

Here by my side, in my summer, our last summer
The world passes by in my summer, our last summer
The light makes shadows fall, surrounded by each other
I let you watch it all, the view through our last summer
The view from our last summer…

Usually I prefer to create own blog content. But this time … it’s so fucking apt (only it’s not exactly our last summer – i mean we’ll hopefully see us all again in just about 11 to 12 month) … :-)