Password classification

I've been thinking a lot about my passwords and security, and am changing everything according to the following scheme:

"Unique" memorized password: Google, Password manager(s), home server (exposed to Internet).

• These are "master key" systems - if these are compromised then the hacker effectively has the ability to get my password to anything else. As a result, the password for these is not used on anything else (really, I ought to have a separate pw for each of these, but since they're all so unrelated I've just got one for all 3).

Random stored individual passwords: All things potentially damaging (banks, brokerages, prosper, IRA, etc)

• These are randomly generated 10-character passwords - they might get sniffed, but they're not going to get hacked. These get saved in the Firefox password DB and are also in my password manager program (Keepass, for anyone who cares)
  

Work password: all things work-related

• Everything I do at work requires me to change my password every 3 months - since I have trouble with multiple passwords anyway, I just set them all to the same thing. Only one of them can be accessed from outside the intranet anyway, and my VPN is protected by a keyfob.

Easy (but still relatively secure) non-changing password: social networks and anything else that can't cost me money or too much heartache.

Useless password: sites that I really don't care about and/or don't trust.

This bring my list of passwords I'm required to memorize down to 4. I think this is pretty managable - the only thing that I still have to worry about is accessing gmail from any kind of public computer, but I don't see what I can do about that.

An inspired paragraph

The tenant who is going to replace us is trying to nickel and dime us on the cost of buying our kitchen, which we bought at Ikea; truthfully it's really pissing me off, and I was writing a very long email to him; I ended up eliminating this paragraph, since it didn't fit into the general spirit of the email (i.e. "stop being a dick"). But, I thought it was too good not to share:

Truthfully, it's still by far the best option for everyone if you buy the kitchen; purchasing a new one will cost you a lot of time, money, and inconvenience. I also don't think you realize the depth and pain that was involved in doing it - the weekends lost at Ikea that could have been spent on the slopes or at the Biergarten: the endless hours spent at home using Ikea's software to configure the kitchen just right, only to find out later that a single item has been discontinued and now you need to start over: the soul-crushing lunches spent staring with exhausted, glassy eyes at your lover over a platter of meatballs as you wash down yet another aspirin with generic Swedish cola-flavored soda, too mentally worn out to think about anything except that the day's only half-over, and you've lost count of the number of Saturdays you've wasted in this yellow-blue hell, and you know in your heart of hearts that when you stumble out of those glass doors tonight, looking like a drunkard getting kicked out of a bar after last call, that you STILL won't have purchased a kitchen. THAT is what you are negotiating yourself into.

Of course it's very late, and I've spent the last hour or two writing this email, and the last hour or two before that fuming and trying to calm myself down so I could write the email, and the last many hours before that trying to get all my loose ends tied up for work before we go to EGYPT on Friday (w00t!) for 2 weeks - then it's almost immediately back to NY for an apartment-hunting trip, then we get 2 last weeks in Munich to say good-bye to everyone, then back to NY for good on Nov 22 or so.
Anyway, enough babbling - time to get to bed - our young friend Maike has her Vierteljahrhundertegeburtstag tomorrow, so we're all celebrating, and I don't want to look like too much of an old man.

Poker heartbreak - long explanation of a single hand

Nothing really interesting here unless you're curious about how I think about poker hands while I'm playing them.
Normally I try to stay away from bad beat stories, but this one stung.

Context: $2 rush rebuy tournament, I bought a rebuy before playing the first hand but never busted, so I've invested $4.20, at this point average stack is about 16k chips, I have 45k chips, there are about 250 players left out of a starting field of roughly 2000, with 200 or so spots paying and top prize of something ludicrous like $3k. I've been kicking ass and taking names with a very TAG game (which works really well in big-field Rush tournaments) and have invested about 2.5 hours into the tourney at this point. If I wanted to, I could walk away from the computer and be virtually guaranteed of a modest payout (like $10 or so) without even playing anymore. Then, this happens:

# my comments are preceded with hash marks and hopefully in blue.

############

Blinds are 250/500 with 50 ante. 9 players:

Button (t26498)
SB (t18929)
Nate (BB) (t45179)
Villian1 (UTG) (t62225)
UTG+1 (t49932)
MP1 (t34285)
MP2 (t34868)
Villian2 (MP3) (t20466)
CO (t73117)

Nate's M: 37.65

# "M" is a term for how many orbits you could survive without playing (just paying the blinds and antes) before you go bust. Above 20 and you're sitting pretty, and you can afford to be a little looser in your play. Between 10-20 and you need to be a bit worried and should be playing pretty tight, below 10 and it's about time to think about "all-in or fold pre-flop" on every hand.

Preflop: Nate is BB with 8, J

Villian1 calls t500, 3 folds, Villian2 calls t500, 2 folds, SB calls t250, Nate checks

# J8s is a decent hand but certainly not great from early position, particularly against 3 other players. If someone had raised I probably would have folded, but I'm happy to see a free flop.

Flop: (t2450) A, 3, 10 (4 players)

# At this point I have a draw to what is likely to be a winning flush. Since nobody raised pre-flop, I'm guessing that someone has probably paired his weak ace or T, maybe someone has hit 2-pair, and at best someone might have flopped a set or 3s or Ts. Since there's a flush draw on the board, if someone flopped a set or 2 pair then they're probably going to make a big bet here to discourage people like me from trying to hit that 3rd spade.

SB checks, Nate checks, Villian1 checks, Villian2 checks

# Cool, another free card. I guess the flop either missed everybody, or possibly someone else has a spade flush draw (unlikely, but possible).

Turn: (t2450) 7 (4 players)

# Sweet! Now I'm really hoping that someone has an Ace, maybe 2-pair, or maybe even a smaller flush than mine. It's also possible that someone has the Q or K of spades along with another non-spade card, which means that a fourth spade would make things dangerous.

#Given that I am pretty darn sure that I have the best hand at the moment, I need to bet this - how much? Not so much that everyone's going to instantly fold, but enough so that it's not worth it for someone with that K or Q to call the bet in hopes of hitting the fourth spade. A bit more than half the pot should do it - pot is about 2500, so we'll bet 1500.

SB checks, Nate bets t1500, Villian1 calls t1500, Villian2 raises to t4500, SB calls t4500,

#Well that didn't work out the way I planned. I thought that at least one player would fold and one or two would call or possibly raise. Didn't see this coming. So, what to do?

# Villian1 just called my bet, so I don't think that turn hit him - I'm guessing he either has a flush draw, 2 pair, or maybe just a relatively weak Ace, something like A9. Keep in mind that this guy limped under the gun.

# Villian2 raising really concerns me, because he's indicating that that turn hit him. Best case, he's got a smaller flush or he's making a semi-bluff with the K or Q of spades. Worst case, he's got a better flush than me. Ditto for SB, especially since for him the odds are actually in favor of calling that bet if he has a big flush draw.

# So, what to do? Stats right now:

# Pot: 14500

# My stack: 44629

# Villian1: 61675

# Villian2 and SB both have about the pot size (15k or so) left in their stacks.

# So, possible actions:

# Fold: not gonna happen. If I'm beat by a better flush, so be it, but I really don't think that's happened.

# Call: If I call, then Villian1 is definitely calling behind me, since he'll be getting roughly 4.5:1 odds on his money; there aren't a lot of hands where he wouldn't call that. The big problem with calling is that it gives everybody one more chance to beat me. If someone has the K or Q of spades it gives them a chance on hitting that last spade, and if someone has 2-pair or a set then it gives them a chance of hitting a full house. In any of those scenarios, my opponent has less than a 20% chance of hitting it, and I need to make it not worth it for those folks to keep playing.

# Raise pot (~15k): probably a good option - for Villian2 and SB that's all-in, which they're probably not willing to risk on a draw, but definitely might be willing to risk with 2-pair or a set (which would be very good for me since I have either of those pretty well crushed). However, if Villian1 calls (which he seems to be prone to doing) and the river card is a 3,7,T,A, or a spade, he'll probably be able to take the pot away from me with an all-in bet. If none of those outs fall on the river, he'll obviously have missed, and I won't get any more money out of him. Keep in mind he's got position on me, so if I'm pretty sure I've won on the river, I need to either bet, or check and hope that he bets (and he seems to be playing pretty passively, which means he probably won't bet, and will probably fold if I bet more on the river).

# Raise all-in: puts max pressure to fold on Villian1, and also vastly increases the pot size if Villian1 comes along. My guess is that he'll fold to a shove bet, or else he'll turn over 2-pair or a set, which I currently have crushed. Although I want him to fold, there's an upside if he calls: if everyone calls, the pot becomes about 60k - however, each of my 3 opponents could have a different draw against me - someone could have a set of 7s, someone could have 2-pair, someone could have a flush draw. If any of those hit, then that player is taking the entire pot. However, if Villian1 calls my shove, then he and I have a side-pot which I am most likely going to win.

# So, obviously I'm raising. Let's recap the "how-much question:

# If I raise pot, then we end up having a pretty big pot (somewhere between 30-60k) - if no outs hit then I'm going to win the pot, but it's extremely unlikely that I'll get any more money out of Villian1, and Villian2 and SB will already be all-in

# If I raise all-in, then hopefully I get Villian1 out of the equation, and even if I don't we have a big side pot. In the likely event that I win the whole thing, it also increases my stack to more than 100k, which would put me pretty close to the chip lead in the tournament.

# Sorted. All-in it is!

Nate raises to t44629 (All-In), Villian1 raises to t61675 (All-In), Villian2 calls t15416 (All-In), 1 fold

# Again, not exactly what I expected! But, since everybody's all in, let's turn over the cards:

Nate turns over 8, J (flush, Ace high) (80.95% to win).

Villian1 turns over A, A (three of a kind, Aces) (16.67% to win).

Villian2 turns over 7, 7 (three of a kind, sevens) (2.38% to win).

#At this point I'm pretty proud of myself, and relieved that nobody turned over a better flush. I am, however, astounded at the donktacular play of Villian1. Limping UTG with AA? Checking after the flop after hitting a set, with 4 players and a flush draw on the board? Really?

#According to my handy odds calculator, I now have an 81% chance of winning this. Any card that pairs the board gives Villian1 a better hand than me, but as you can see the odds are definitely against that. Poor Villian2 is really SOL - the only card that can give him the win is the last 7 in the deck, otherwise he's done.

River: (t116124) 7 (3 players, 3 all-in)

#Ouch.

Total pot: t116124

Results:

Nate had 8, J (flush, Ace high).

Villian1 had A, A (full house, Aces over sevens).

Villian2 had 7, 7 (four of a kind, sevens).

Outcome: Villian1 won t49426, Villian2 won t66698, Nate is out

I started this as a bad-beat story, but then thought that I might as well turn it into a "here's what I was thinking" sort of post. Writing these actually helps me organize my thoughts and analyze my game a little bit, so it's worth it to take the time once in a while. So, a couple of final thoughts:

1) For this one, I'm very happy with the way I played it. If presented with the exact same scenario after the turn, I hope that I would make the exact same all-in raise. If you want to enjoy the game, then you need to be able to say "I made the best play, and if I ended up in the exact same situation again, I'd do it the exact same way. Unfortunately, there is also a big element of luck, and in this case it went against me."

2) WTF is up with fools limping in w/ AA? This is like the 4th or 5th time I've seen this lately. Funnily enough, I've seen the aces get cracked every time except the two times it's been me on the receiving end of the AA limp. Add to that Villian1's lack of post-flop betting / raising, and you realize that you just lost your entire stack and gave the chip lead to a truly awful player. That stings far worse than the bad beat...

Encryption

This article caught my eye. I could go on about this at length, but I can boil it down to two points:

1) If you create a backdoor for the "good guys" to access something of value, then it's only a matter of time before it's used by some "bad guys". The time it will take for this to be compromised is inversely proportional to the value of the information. Considering how many corporate secrets are on Blackberries, I'd say it wouldn't take very long (although such a breach might not make the news, or even be discovered at all).

2) Anybody with any brains or resources is going to come up with his/her own way to encrypt communication rather than relying on a Blackberry / Skype / etc. One nice thing about modern cryptography is that you don't need to be an expert in it to use it effectively. To put it another way, the people you're hoping to catch here are the subset of criminals who know that they _should_ use encryption, but don't know that the product they're using has a built-in backdoor. Personally I think that's probably a small subset of criminals, but maybe that's just me being naive.

This is completely ignoring the surety that any such backdoor will be abused by the guvmint, of course, but when I start going down that road I sound like I should be wearing a tinfoil hat.

--Nate

More Android fun and frustration

Ever since I bought a bike, I've been taking rides through the city when the weather is nice: it's a great way to burn off a few beers' worth of calories, while also getting some sun and seeing some parts of the city that I wouldn't otherwise see. Although there are many streets that are a bit dangerous on a bike, Munich is extremely bike-friendly, and there's almost always a pleasant, safe, and scenic route to get just about anywhere.

Android now has an awesome Navigation system that gives turn-by-turn directions. It's theoretically got biking directions (although that's not available here in Munich yet). So, I figure, an obviously great implementation of this tool would be the following:

1) Go to Google Maps and cross-reference it with the Munich bike path map (http://maps.muenchen.de/radlstadtplan_2009/radlstadtplan_2009.html?str=Marienpl.&num=8)

2) Plan out a nice scenic route for the day that utilized bike paths as much as possible, and goes through one or two parks, monuments, or whatever.

3) Export the route in Google Maps via one of the many methods available

4) Pop it into the nav system, pop in one of my headphones, and go!

Instead, there's virtually no integration, which means that I either have to memorize my route (or else keep popping out my phone and double-check my location on the way), or else utilize the default Navigation routes, which always go through the dangerous, ugly, car-priority streets.

Off the top of my head, I can think of many applications for this tie-in:

--When going to your friend's new place, he can send you a route of the best way to get there.

--You're going to a picnic in the park, and you want to send your friends the best route to the closest parking lot.

--You want to publish some of the best walks or bike rides in your favorite cities.

--You found a great shortcut in town and want to share it with all your friends who regularly have to drive through the same area.

Or whatever. What confuses me is that this functionality has got to be really, really easy for Google to build in; the hard part is figuring out the route, and that part's already done! The Nav software only needs to shout out the directions - shouldn't that be easy?

Anybody else find this to be a maddening lack of obvious, simple functionality?

Heading back home

So, I know I've indicated this is probably happening before, but now it's certain: we're going back home to NYC.

The short backstory: Clau's company purchased another large company. This other large company focuses pretty much on one product and is not nearly as diversified as Clau's company. The product that this other company makes is the same product on which the Munich office focuses. Therefore, the decision was made to consolidate the Munich office with this company's HQ in England. Technically, the Munich office will stay, but it will become a "satellite" office, meaning a very small office that does niche work; definitely not a healthy place for Clau to be in her career.

We thought long and hard about all the possibilities, but it really came down to this; moving here, although personally healthy for us, turned out to be a career killer for me. I've been pretty unhappy in my job, mostly because it's so obvious that it's not going anywhere; I only stayed in it for a couple of reasons that had nothing to do with the work itself; although that worked out for the best, I wouldn't do it again if I had the chance.

So, when Clau found out that she was going to have to move somewhere, she started steering the ship towards New York. She got the official offer last week - timeframe is looking like late October.

I have mixed feelings about it; we've finally made some good friends here, and we actually had a solid month of good weather, which allowed me to appreciate just how beautiful the city is. I'll definitely miss it. I've learned enough German to have a somewhat interesting conversation. I just got my German driver's license. We bought a relatively expensive kitchen, closets, appliances, and television - we really committed to staying here, and now we can't. So, we're sad to be going, but if I have to leave here, then my first choice of destination would be back to NY, so I guess it could be worse.

We have some other stuff to sort out: details of the relocation, Clau's green card, etc. But, at this point, I'd say it's a done deal: we're moving back home!

Android in the enterprise

One of the main reasons I bought my new phone was that it natively supports Exchange, but the sad thing is that there is not currently a single Android phone on the market that any corporate security department worth their salt would allow.
Corporations don't care about the devices per se - what they care about is the potentially valuable inside information that may be on that device. If a thief / corporate spy / whatever gets access to the phone, the data on it needs to be protected. To that end, the _minimum_ requirements to allow a phone to hold corporate data would be:

1) PIN or password protection that can reasonably expected to not be broken. Logical requirements for that are:

--PIN / password existence and complexity enforcement

--After a predefined number of failed attempts, the device either self-wipes or permanently locks.

2) Ability to remotely issue a remote wipe (in case an employee quits on bad terms / is fired but he doesn't know it yet / whatever)

3) Encryption of all data on the device, so that if it physically falls into the wrong hands, the thief(s) won't be able to access the data, even if given a long time to do so.

The new FroYo build is supposedly able to do all of these, except for the data encryption. If you were in charge of security for your enterprise, would you allow users to use a device with no encryption?

Blackberrys have supported all these for a long, long time. iPhone 3G supports it (although apparently not all that well), pretty much any new Windows Mobile smartphone supports it. There is currently no single Android model that supports it (AFAIK).

I find this really strange. Considering that plenty of enterprises would love to bring Android devices into the fold, it's weird that nobody yet makes a handset with hardware encryption. I still have no idea why this is.

Google feature request

I really wish there was a way to exclude sites from search results in Google preferences. The site that's been royally pissing me off lately is codeweblog (not gonna post a link here), which (as far as I can tell) is just a site that has indexed a boatload of tech articles and sites and has created "pages" for just about every combination of keywords found on those sites. Let's say, for example, that I'm searching for a scheduling library in Android, and I happen to know that quartz is the most popular scheduler for java. Search for "android quartz classes" in google, and the first hit is...yeah, those guys.
These codeweblog guys aren't the first ones to have this idea, but they've certainly refined it nicely; furthermore, they could claim that their site isn't just a search honeypot (which it is!), and is providing a useful indexing service to the tech community (which it isn't). They would be lying, but the site looks juuust enough like something useful to be in the gray area.
Anyway, why can't I just decide that I never want to see anything from that site? The above situation is only one of many that I can think of off the top of my head why I might want to do this. Sure, I can add in "-site:xxxx" to all my Google searches, but...c'mon.

Anybody see any reason why this is not a good idea?

Eurovision 2010 -> cheese overload

So Clau and I hosted a little party to watch the Eurovision 2010 contest. About 20 or so people showed up, almost entirely women and gay men - there was one other straight man there and he discretely slipped out about halfway through. The liquor we had purchased for the event was gone in about an hour and we resorted to drinking most everything else in the apartment. Thankfully the ladies weren't into single malt or we might have had a very expensive night indeed.
Before moving here, I had no idea the Eurovision contest existed, but it's apparently quite a big deal, at least amongst women and gays. The voting period (SMS only IIRC) lasts 10 minutes. 10 minutes!!! The way the votes worked was pretty interesting, but too complex to be worth explaining - suffice it to say that they're constantly tweaking the balance between the judges in each country and the general public.
Anyway, Germany won by a landslide, so it was a pretty happy crowd. I woke up with a fierce hangover the next day but it was totally worth it. If possible, I'll be watching this every year from now on.

The obligatory YouTube links - the ones from BBC don't have the full performances but you get the idea, and they're the best sound you'll find on the net.

The winner - this song has been playing non-stop on MTV for the last couple of months, but the Germans don't seem to be sick of it yet. Admittedly it's pretty catchy, but it gets old after 50 or so listens:



Yes, she is in fact imitating a cockney accent. And she is German - from Hannover, which is the German equivalent of Liverpool. I've included the actual music video because the contest performance was pretty crap (although it still won).

"Most awesome mind-blowingly sterotypically Euro" award goes to Moldovia. Epic sax man FTW.



My top picks were Turkey and Romania, which came in at #2 and #3, respectively. I don't feel particularly good about myself for mirroring Europe's choices. I thought Turkey had the best song, plus of course major bonus points for the senseless robo-hottie. Sorry about the disabled embedding but it's by far the best full recording of the thing.



Romania's entry - I actually find this kinda catchy, plus I have a weakness for hot eastern European girls in form-fitting outfits (but really, who doesn't?). The live performance was, sadly, pretty tame; of course that's all relative - from those last 2 clips you can tell that the bar for Euro theatrics was set pretty high.



The "instant gay club hit" songs - Albania and Iceland.





And many others that just sorta sucked. You can see all the live performances at http://www.youtube.com/user/EurovisionESCTV if you want, but trust me these are the highlights.

more iTunes pain

One unfortunate side-effect of purchasing this phone is that it's made me angry at Apple all over again. At this point we're an Apple-only house (well, not counting the Windows work laptops or the Linux Mac Mini quietly cranking 24/7 in the closet) and so I've been using iTunes for everything. Honestly, I think iTunes is a piece of crap, but there was no other piece of software that was easy to use with our iPods and my wife's iPhone. For a little while, it was possible to forget what a huge racket that whole iPod / iPhone / iTunes proprietary shit is, but throw one unsupported device into the mix and you're reminded that Apply designed everything from day 1 to lock out other devices and software apps. I mean, seriously, think about it. Grrrrr.

Unfortunately, there's no good solution - I tried out doubleTwist (which looked promising) but it turned out to be a memory hog to the point where it's unusable on my lowly Mini with 1G of RAM. I found I was able to drag & drop from iTunes to my phone, but that's not very sexy or easy to use.

The solution I ended up making up was less than optimal, but somewhat functional. I already have an iPod that gets everything synced, and I didn't want to mess with it, so I made a playlist in iTunes called "Android" that contains everything I want on my phone. I wrote a Perl script to parse the iTunes XML file to get the info about songs and playlists, and sync the songs in the Android playlist to the phone, then re-write the other playlists with only the songs that are also in the Android playlists and sync those to the phone as well. Overall, it works pretty well, but the fact that I had to spend a few hours doing it is going to bug me for a while...

New phone!

So, I've been totally craving an Android phone ever since Google had the first apps contest - after much waiting and lusting, I finally gave in a bought an HTC Desire. The deciding factor was the ability to sync with Exchange, which (after jumping through some corporate hoops, of course) will give me the ability to drop my Blackberry and only carry one mobile device with me. The idea of playing with a (relatively) open platform was incredibly tempting, plus the devices were starting to get to the point where they were about able to compete with the iPhone on sexiness.

After getting it, I'm falling in love with it pretty quickly. The thing is more like a little computer than a phone - the number of apps it's got, the ability to actually multitask and (for example) listen to music while I study flashcards is pretty nice. I really like the multiple workspaces, which fits my Unix geek heritage nicely (the first time I saw CDE in 1998, I thought to myself "why doesn't every computer have multiple workspaces?") - the only problem is that I feel this compulsion to put _something_ in every workspace, so I've been poking around at what's out there and trying to accept the fact that I may not have every workspace filled up.

Other things that I like are the predictive text - I don't think I'll ever be able to type as fast on this thing as I can on my BB, but with the predictive / correcting text I'm getting reasonably close. Maybe when Swype comes out for real, I'll be able to pick up some speed.

Overall my biggest complaint is that now, for at least a while, I'm going to be terrified that my phone will get lost, stolen, or destroyed.

The bad things:

• The screen is tough to see in direct sunlight, which was not a problem with my Blackberry. The various widgets, while cool, aren't entirely perfect - for example, there's a "social" widget that combines Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr(?) into one monolithic stream - very cool, except that a lot of the Facebook pieces seem to lose authentication, or for whatever reason just choke - so, for example, I might see that a friend has posted a new photo album, but when I want to look at it, I get the message that there are no photos. Weird.
• I think that since this is a new phone, and the shiny newest version of Android, some of the apps in the market don't work right - some have oddball issues, some just flat out don't work. For instance, I got a flashcards program that looked really promising, but couldn't find any of the cards I tried to upload (which made it rather useless). It had many users and not one complaint about that issue, which makes me figure it's a specific problem to my hardware.
• I can't find a nice, clean-looking media player - the one that ships with it is craptacular in terms of interface, so I wanted something a little different. Tried Mixzing, which I really liked but for some reason kept playing the same songs over and over (again, I think it's that whole new phone/OS thing), finally settled on Tunewiki, which is pretty good but at the same time not what I want - truth be told, what I really want is something that looks and feels like an iPod.
• My biggest gripe - no VOIP apps. Well, there is sipDroid, but that's only useful if you've got similarly geeky friends with SIP phones, or if your Skype friends don't mind accepting calls from unknown users. No Skype app, and no VOIP hooks for Google Voice. Since Google bought Gizmo5, I can only assume that this is in the works, but so far no joy. Man, it would be nice to have a way for folks in the U.S. to reach me without dialing a long-distance number.

Other than that, loving it - this will definitely keep me geeking out for a while.

Travel decisions

So, as everyone knows, most of Europe is closed to air travel and the ground-based travel options are overflowing trying to compensate. As it happens, my flight is broken into two pieces; Lisbon and Munich. Right now flights to Lisbon are still going, but Lisbon is understandably a zoo since it's one of the few mainland European cities that you can still fly to from the Americas.
So, what to do - take the flight to Lisbon then go through what is sure to be a very unpleasant experience getting from there to Munich? Or just wait it out?
Since I'm in Rio I think I'll be going with the second option. Really, really wish I'd brought my laptop to Brazil with me, though...

Die Ärtzte

One of the best ways to learn a foreign language is to try to get into local music. Germany doesn't have a ton of great music, but there are some gems. My buddy and countryman Steve gave me the "Bäst of die Ärtzte" CD for my birthday last year and I'm actually really getting into them - lots of fun and really my kind of music, also of course it helps me learn German.
One of my favorites, below, partly because it's one of the first ones I understood (more or less):



Anybody else think these guys looks awfully dour considering the happiness of the song? Then again, that's another reason I like this song so much; it's so out of character for this band.
Another one of my faves, which is more typical of them:



I'm learning German!

Brazil in t-minus...

So Clau's in Chicago, attending some bigwig corporate thing - she's going to be there at least 3 times this year, including for our anniversary (sniff). She also got to go to NY, which makes me very jealous indeed.
Heading for Brazil on Thurs morn, Clau has a meeting there so we figure it's a chance to see her family for half-price. Plus, some friends are getting married, and hey, while we're down there, may as well. Plus, I finally get to see the south!
Down to 85kg, just in time to pig out on churrasco, caipirinhas, escondidinhos, and whatever specialties they have in the south. Not like I've been working all that hard lately, but I'm totally ready to relax.

Latest public service / safety campaign

So it seems there's always at least one PSA-type message being pushed in the city at any given time - I mean, in Bavaria there's always some "do you have a drinking problem? Call XXX"-type messages, but then again it's Bavaria, where until pretty recently it was socially acceptable to drink beer with breakfast.
So, the latest? "Know your limit!". My favorite one of these:



For the two kids on the left, it says: Tonight she loses all her inhibitions...and later he posts her naked on the Net.
I like it how that ad would never fly in the U.S., because it would imply that when a drunk girl's naked picture is posted on the Internet, the girl herself might share some of the blame for posing naked for a guy who would post the pictures on the Net. Although, to be fair, the Germans may be interpreting it as "he gets so drunk, he actually posted that girl's naked pictures on the Net!".
The others are more somber, but thankfully this is the one that's posted all around my neighborhood.

Oh, and another one that amused me - this one an ad for a newspaper insert with parenting tips:



(Translation: "What now, dear parents?")
I'm guessing that one might also face some opposition in my home country.
Gots to love Germany....

Stupid Mac Mini

The hard drive died in my mini this week, I ended up spending almost the entire day Sunday replacing it. The physical replacement took a couple of hours (not particularly difficult, just tedious getting around all the screws and crap), then the process of rebuilding and restoring took even longer than that. I couldn't get a decent rescue disk to boot on the Mini for some reason, so I ended up doing it the hard way: installed Linux fresh on it, then added the dump/restore utilities and moved the latest dumpfiles over to the O.S. disk, then booted on the live Ubuntu disk and did a full restore from there. While I was at it I updated the O.S. since it had been about a year since the last time I did any updates (when you have no KVM you tend to develop a "if it ain't broke..." kind of attitude).
Given the relatively low crunching power of the mini (and the even lower amount of power I require), it's probably
So, kind of a wasted day - after replacing the HD I made some stew. Clau and I have both been fighting various ailments since we got back from Brazil, plus we both packed on some serious pounds over there, so we're going for light soups.

Resolutions

So, just for the record, NY resolutions this year:
1) Better health. I say this almost every year, but this year I mean it. I've put on about 10 pounds since we move to Germany and I want to get back to my pre-move weight. Ideally, I'd actually get into shape to the point where I'd be happy taking diving photos of myself in my swimsuit, but I'll settle for losing 10 pounds.
2) Practice more German - I haven't formed much of a relationship with my German colleagues, mostly due to the isolation of my office and my inability to speak German. Now that I can speak some more German, I want to make an effort to reach out to them and make some more / better connections at work.

Let's see how it works out...

Enjoying Rio

So, Clau and I are here for another week or so - it's been really great to actually have some time to just relax as well as see all the family and friends. Brazil, and Rio in particular, is really changing rapidly before our eyes. For one thing, there's an obvious explosive growth in the middle class, and the number of really, really impoverished people is decreasing. Everything is now considerably more expensive, especially considering the exchange rate, and you can just sort of see the place becoming more prosperous. The mayor and governor of Rio seem to be collaborating on cleaning up the city, and they seem to be taking a page out of Giuliani's book, in particular by focusing on some smaller-level crime. There are endless police checkpoints to make sure folks are wearing seatbelts, and checkpoints for drunk driving. The police have lots of shiny new equipment and kevlar. There are a slew of new laws (and old laws which are finally being enforced) regarding the beaches designed to make them more sterile and tourist-friendly (no umbrellas with beer labels, no glass, no dogs, etc etc. It's actually quite nice.