Moving Again

Yeah, that's right -- unbelievable, eh? I'm preparing yet another move.

Despite all its challenges and tendency to be completely and utterly wasteful of energy and monetary resources, there's something liberating about picking up and moving again, something completely wonderful in the excuse to get rid of the old crap that's been broken/is no longer in use.

Today marks my one step down, one step to go in getting rid of all my useless, broken stuff.

After hemming and hawing for way too long about making an appointment for the Elektroschrott to be taken away, the appointment for the city to take away my crap is finally tomorrow. Not only is it somehow relieving to finally be able to get rid of the TV you accidentally broke a year ago when you let it fall down as you were moving furniture around, but also to finally be able to say good riddance to the microwave that started on fire that time you were melting butter.

I'm sure my friends -- who are kindly helping me move soon -- will be happy I lugged the heavy/awkward bulk out of my flat and onto the sidewalk by myself, since they're less than thrilled (I'm sure) that I've enlisted them to lug ten odd boxes of books to a new city as it is.

(Thanks in advance, friends).

I want me some JT/Barney Stinson NOW, AKA LIKE YESTERDAY

The whole media/culture constellation in Krautland is wack.

I mean, there's the whole GEZtapo thing, which is now attempting to market itself as a "service" rather than a fucking tax that people don't get to vote on democratically (as if voting ever made a super duper difference anyway). Though I have a whole lot I could say about the Geztap... *ahem* Beitragsservice, today (like every day) my beef is with GEMA.*

I hate GEMA because it makes me feel disconnected with the coolness out on the world wide web. Also because it's frustrating to hear about how something is "all the rave", but then find out that you are not able to partake in said rave.

So, today I was watching sxephil on YouTube again (Dear GEMA: Block him and it's over. For realsies.), and he had a video which ever so hinted at the awesomeness of Suit & Tie.

Alas, what did I find?

Oh, yeah.

Normally Clipfish solves most of my problems if I'm trying to find an original video of something embarrassingly awesome (which is even more embarrassing judging by the fact something so awesome only has 35K hits -- awesome website, brah), but there's no official video of Suit & Tie on there yet. Probably because someone at Clipfish is in bed with someone at GEMA, and one of those someones hasn't finished pulling out and washing up in order to upload the fucking video yet.


I hate feeling so restricted in my internet surfing/stalking of cute cat and JT videos. And I hate that it necessitates people to encourage me to do sketchy internet things to get around these issues of silly things like international borders/censorship because the German government/related cronies all want their fair chance to sink their dirty hands into the honey jar.

FFS, I want JT's video just so I can be like "Heh! This is totally Barney's theme song! LMFAO!" with the rest of the world.

Is that too much to ask?!

*For those overseas folk of you, GEMA is a nice system that technically exists to give artists of all kinds the royalties they deserve. This is questionable since GEMA apparently takes a nice slice of that pie. It is also completely annoying because the end result is Germany being more censored from internet awesomeness than communist China. For more news, you could search on the interwebbies and read for days!

The Point of No Return

I have two computers. You see, I have this really old notebook and a semi-new netbook. I got my netbook when I was fed up getting the blue screen of death on my older notebook. No matter what I did, my system kept crashing and I feared for the term papers I was writing.

I'm hardly a computer genius. Aside from wiping everything and re-installing Windows fresh, I neither knew what else to try, nor was interested in spending the money to blow a fresh breath of life into a laptop that was over three years old.

Enter my netbook.

I originally bought it because of its battery life. (Nine hours, HELLO!) That being said, I couldn't get over how slow it was. As in I would prefer dial-up slow. Still, making myself a coffee while Facebook would load was nothing compared to the fact Word would freeze anytime a document I was working on hit the twelve-page mark. (Errrm: how am I supposed to write a Master's thesis or *cough* a doctoral dissertation, then?)

It must be said that, in the meantime, I was still using my old laptop as a DVD player since I don't have a TV. Not being connected to the internet seemed to resolve the crashing problem, so I just went on my merry way with that.

I'm not really sure why I decided to try out Linux. I suppose it was a mixture of boredom and hearing coworkers and people I know rave on and on about how amazingly wonderful the whole thing is. So, I went an installed Wubi to see what all the hype was about.

It could just be a point-of-view thing, but somehow, if something is not working on Ubuntu, I see it as some sort of let me figure you out challenge, and I don't run around yelling "F-U Windows, F-U!!"

Yeah, it's probably just the attitude I go into it with.

Still, the best thing about Ubuntu is that, all the things that drove me crazy about my notebook that I couldn't figure out (mostly to do with user settings) were suddenly fixable in Ubuntu. (And Ubuntu is awesome for computer dunces like me who likely couldn't do anything more than a few basic things with the Terminal if their lives depended on it.)

I haven't been playing around with it for that long (maybe a month or so), but I finally took the plunge and did a full install of Ubuntu to get rid of Windows.

So far, so good.

That said, I suppose I'm not entirely at the point of no return considering I've still got Windows 7 running on my netbook.

Nevertheless, my primary system is now Ubuntu, and I'm happy as a clam.

(Why are clams happy, anyway? Did anyone ask them?)

So there.

My Ears Hurt

Every so often, I have the chance to channel my inner housewife again despite the fact I'm no longer anything like that.

Despite the fact I am now a busy bee in the public sphere and have less time to make my cuddle-atmosphere in the private one, I still like home-y sorts of things.

Except vacuuming.

I've always hated it. It's loud, hurts my ears, and I hate dragging a freeking canister around my flat, plugging and unplugging as I go.

In order to avoid my life-long hatred of vacuuming, I got a Roomba when I lived in Canada. I was quite happy about the fact I could turn it on while I took Maxie for a walk in the morning, thus killing two birds with one stone. No vacuuming on my part, and no Maxie howling at the vacuum cleaner. I tried to take the fact Roomba would always end up locking himself in my bathroom with a grain of salt.

Seeing that Roombas are much too expensive for a student budget in Germany (and why in the world would I tote along a transformer to charge my Canadian one here?), I had to get something new.

So, I got myself what seemed like a decent vacuum: the Ergorapido. Now, it may seem like the perfect thing ever. It's lightweight, has no bag (hate emptying them almost as much as I hate trying to remember to buy them) and no cord, which theoretically meant I would finally enjoy cleaning my floors. It also had excellent reviews and a good rating from the Stiftung Warentest.

I mean, in theory it wasn't bad. It was lightweight and easy to clean, but the whole "mit perfeckter Staubaufnahme" (read: perfect at collecting dust for the non-Krauts of you) is an f-ing joke. Ignoring the fact -- for just one second -- it wouldn't pick up dust or dog hair from my parquet floors, imagine my disgust at trying to vacuum carpets with that thing.

A friend who looked after Max earlier on this year even expressed her disdain at the fact you had to go over the same spot about a gazillion times to get it halfway clean, which kinda "defeats the point".

Agreed.

Needless to say, I tried -- and failed -- multiple times in the last two months to vacuum with that piece of garbage, and finally gave up. I couldn't even stand my flat anymore.

So, I went to Real to get a new vacuum. It's a Dirt Devil, half the price of the Ergo, and sounds like a plane about to take off. It also has crappy ratings for having a difficult filter to clean.

BUT it cleaned my floors.

I probably will try to avoid vacuuming with a vengeance as has been my style for the past twenty-odd years, but at least the dog hair is finally out of the carpet.

Okay, I'm off. Time to start my non-housewife-y day now.

I feel OLD.

So, being back in Allgäu last week, I took plentiful advantage of one of my favourite Allgäu pastimes.

Hiking up Grünten, you ask?

No, of course not!

I was playing copious amounts of MarioKart on Wii, silly!

There's something you should know about me and video games -- I don't play a lot of them. I think it has something to do with the fact I hate losing. It's not just a matter of disliking being the loser. No, it goes so much further than that.

Take, for example, family game nights at my childhood home. There I was, Sunday evening after Sunday evening, storming off in a fit of rage after playing Uno-Rummy Up and losing to my sister.

Screaming, tears, red-faced frustration, the whole bit.

Naturally, my dislike for losing extended (and still extends) to video games. I was never a fan of games like Zelda, Super Mario Bros., or anything that required trying to beat some sort of boss. As a kid, I was much more of a SimCity 2000 kind of girl, especially with all the cheats in hand that I could find. (This, of course, ended up extending to The Sims, where I would live out magical fantasies for my Sims who didn't have to work since I graciously gave them one million Simoleans to live off of.) I also liked playing Donkey Kong's 1-3, but only the first couple of levels that I'd mastered. By the time I'd hit Mine Cart Carnage, I was a goner.

Anyhoo, back in the days of SuperNES (yeah, remember that?), I was a big fan of MarioKart. I always lost anyway, but for some reason it didn't bother me in that game. I was always jealous of friends who had the game on N64 when it came out, because I was not only still playing on SuperNES, but since my parents hadn't bought the game for me and my sister, we were still renting it whenever we could at the video store.

So, MarioKart has always been my favourite video game excepting the whole Sim-bit. So I love playing it when I go to Allgäu. Especially on the internet with those losers who are still playing it after umpteen years and have about 9000 points to their Mii's name. Losing (possibly partially because I still insist on playing Peach, though I've recently been testing out Toadette) still doesn't really faze me, and I've started to accept Rainbow Road as a beautiful thing rather than the subject of my (Mii's) demise.

But, yeah... My point about being old. On one particularly drunken evening, we decided to pull out N64 for a go on MarioKart.

WTF.

How in the world did we (as humans) play with graphics like that?! How in the world was this some sort of awesome step-up that was state-of-the-art in comparison to SuperNES ?!

As if Peach's "here we gooooo" wasn't enough to drive one silly, the graphics are ridiculous. In the back of my tipsy mind, I thought that there could perhaps be a problem with my vision, and the game was just as amazing as it was in my pre-teen memory. So, I tried again the next day in a more sober state of mind.

Alas, the graphics are just crap.

(In Nintendo's defence, it was 1996, after all. You know... Like before Titanic even came out the first time in theatres?)

Then I started thinking about other technologies I grew up with.

• I learned DOS to operate my family's first computer.
• The best thing about WordPerfect was getting to print out things on that paper you had to tear the sides off of.
• S., T. and I used to sit on dial-up forever so we could go in the official Hanson chat room. (Don't you judge! I hear you judging!)
• We used to play The Oregon Trail at school and save our progress from Number Munchers on a floppy.
• I used to love playing Dr. Mario on NES. Yeah. NES.
• We were using ICQ loooong before MSN even came along.
• My first laptop was bigger than most PCs, and definitely just as heavy.
• Back in high school, we used Nexopia and not Facebook. (Well, actually we used Enternexus. And who knew that the site was Canadian? Ahhh, maybe that had something to do with it?)
• And the list goes on...

I suppose it's worse for people who grew up without computers. Nevertheless, it's been interesting to go from my Motorola peanut phone, to wondering who the heck would text in the first place since "It's faster just to call", to wondering who the heck would need internet on their phone, to sleeping with my Blackberry.

Seeing the graphics on N64 made this rather clear to me, believe it or not. Otherwise, I've just been living in some sort of technology bubble without thinking how this all happened.

Anyhoo, not really any point to this all, except that I feel like a technology dinosaur. Also, I am torn between wanting to stick with MarioKart on Wii or better for the rest of my life and trying to get hold of a SuperNES copy to see how bad it really was.

Herzlich Willkommen!!

So... I'm sure you're probably wondering about a couple things.

1. Why did Elli move her blog, and
2. Why are there posts from 2009 here?

1. One of the reasons I haven't posted in a coon's age is that my *ahem* previous blogging platform was pissing me right the hell off. Between not posting shit, posting half of it, or just plain old deleting what I wrote, I was getting fed up. The poor interwebbies had to sacrifice reading a good eight or nine posts, because they were deleted by the blogging robot and I had no interest in retyping them. Poor interwebbies didn't even stand a chance.

To be honest, I thought this might have had something to do with the fact I'm still using a surfstick since my fucking internet provider still hasn't gotten their ducks in a row, but the same thing happened to me in Canada when I was using a real internet connection.

So, there's your answer to question number one.

2. This is actually an old-school blog that was still floating around on the interwebbies from the time I was married. It's actually kind of interesting, going back and reading the things I've written. If you feel like doing this (because it's kind of like an act of voyeurism, I suppose), please keep in mind a few things:

• I wrote posts specifically for people back home.
• With that in mind, I wrote those posts specifically in order to convince them things were going just swell. You will notice this when, every so often, some sort of phrase like, "I think that's just fab" comes across the screen. Yes, you are correct -- the only way you would hear me say something like that is if it was dripping in irony. And even then, not likely. That was also the case in 2009, but, you know... It's necessary to keep up appearances sometimes.
• Yes, I suppose that makes me a liar. Whatevs. I'm a shitty liar now, and I was back then, too.
• I did nothing but study, get drunk by noon and write on my blog. I think you will see this reflected in those posts, should you choose to read them.

Anyhoo, maybe you will be horrified by the things you read there. I admit, I was a little horrified myself, but I decided not to delete anything in the end. I was more conservative, younger and in a completely different environment. Things have changed a lot in the last three years, but I've come to terms with the fact I was a complete tool then. I mean, I still am a complete tool.

So, whatevs.

I've also gone and transferred the blog posts from the old platform to this one. Only from the most recent one, though, and not from any others that have also bit the dust. You know, for your archival pleasure. Or not. I didn't update the embedded links, though, nor do I plan to. If you really want to know what it is I'm referring to, Google it. Give your fingers a workout.

Like I said -- whatevs. (Yes, this is my new word now.)

March 7, 2012

When I got back to Krautland last year, I tried to avoid signing any contracts. You see, Krauts are notorious for their ridiculous contracts, and since I had no idea how long I’d be staying around, I decided to get a pay-as-you-go phone, six-month internet contract, etc.

Well, I’ve decided I’m going to stick around for a little while (poor you), found a pretty good deal on a contract, and decided to get a Blackberry again, to boot.

You know… I really miss my Bold 9700. I gave it to my mom when I left Canada in 2011, and all I’ve done since I’ve been back is look at it longingly as it sits on the countertop. As functional as my Nokia C3 (or whatever the heck it is) is, I miss my Blackberry. And I don’t like paying out the butt to text Canuck friends, most of whom are in possession of a Blackberry themselves.

So, my Blackberry has officially arrived in my building, is staying with some unknown neighbour, and is patiently awaiting my arrival. I’m gonna love the heck out of that little phone when I get home next week!

So…. If you are also in possession of the wonderful, beautiful technology that is embodied by a Blackberry, send me your PIN so I can bother you at all hours of the day with useless messages. This will really be at all hours of the night, though, considering the time difference. It’s okay, I’ll let you retaliate by sending me BBMs while I’m sleeping.

Because I do cuddle with my phone, don’tchaknow. Me, Maxie and my Blackberry in a week. What a bunch.