I have speakers!

Took another sojourn to the electronics store today. Carl, one of the geeks here (and naturally a DAAD/SIP scholar), recently scooped up a router to use as an amplifier for the wireless signal broadcast from the university building next to our dorm. After he bought the router and flashed the firmware, he went from 30KB/s down to 300KB/s down. His connection is also much more stable, with 5 out of 5 bars as opposed to 1 out of 5. He hasn’t dropped from the network once since installing the router.

I intended to do this same thing, but turns out good ol’ Carl bought the last router at the electronics store with flashable firmware that also cost only 20€. Can’t really beat that. I even trekked all the way across the city to another location of that store, a much bigger location, but it was sadly in an upscale neighborhood, and so it didn’t even carry the low-end brand I was looking for. Dagnabbit.

What I did manage to pick up, however, was a very nice set of speakers, which has me happier than I can explain. I had no idea that the quality of audio in my life so affected my moods! Just putting my music library on random and reading a Linux magazine in German is infinitely more pleasurable when it’s run through a decent 2.1 system rather than piping gratingly out of laptop speakers. I even took the time to set my speakers to different volumes and bass settings, then step outside and walk around the hallway and visit other people to see whether I could hear the music. Surprisingly, my room is pretty well insulated! And for late at night, I still have the marginally OK set of headphones I picked up earlier this week–which I’m wearing now, in fact!

Tomorrow I’m going to wake up early to knock out some work for Simone, then try to catch up on organizing on my whole room, from school stuff to play stuff to work stuff.

Thereafter there’s evidently a big wine festival in Munich, to be punctuated by “Night of the Museums,” where all the museums in the city are open till 3am or something ridiculous like that. Drunk and soaking in modern art exhibits sounds like a winning proposition.

More on that later, I’m sure.