First World Progress by mdumlao98 on Flickr

All day today I felt like a kid on the first day of school. Everything seemed new, I wanted to learn and do so much, and I was—funny that this has become to boilerplate to say—freaking hopeful.

As I’ve said before, I was a bit disappointed that I couldn’t be in the U.S. for this one. But walking around Jhongli today, I got thumbs up and wide grins from strangers. I ordered a lunch to go and the guy behind the counter pointed at the TV and said, “Obama!”

I concurred wholeheartedly.

My Taiwanese friends have been asking me what it feels like to have a black president. They don’t ask because they think it’s a big deal themselves, they ask because they’ve read that we Americans think it’s a big deal. Maybe it is, I don’t know. This election has never been about race to me. I think it’s fair to say that while it might be about race for many pro-Obama Americans, I think it’s more a racial matter for some anti-Obama Americans.

I’ll never forget how I lost my breath seeing the main page of the New York Times today:

Yes, I did select that picture to contrast the headline, because they had a nice little embedded applet for browsing pictures. So it’s not the New York Times’s message, but still, the juxtaposition of profound change and staunch, petulant conservatism really resonated with me. Maybe this will be a rocky start. Maybe it won’t be.

What I felt today reminded me of what I saw from the world immediately after 9/11. People looked at me on the street and wanted to share joy. “You’re America! Remember: we love you.” It was like they knew all along that we would do the right thing. They weren’t afraid at all.

There are many things America means to me. I don’t think lack of fear is necessarily one of them, but hope definitely is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have a beer with my friends.

In some ways, I’m sad to be away in a different country while this happens in the U.S. (Don’t worry, I voted via absentee ballot!) The joy welling up in me is something I very much want to share with my friends and family in the States, and it’s something that my Taiwanese friends very much respect and admire, but cannot understand, just as I could not hope to fully appreciate their hatred of their last president for betraying them.

Some Americans I know here in Taiwan are trying to withhold themselves from premature revelry, perhaps out of fear of jinxing Obama’s win. Yes, he’ll likely win, they say, but what if he doesn’t? They say they wouldn’t be able to deal with the disappointment.

But I look at it this way. Now is the time when the cheering should be loudest. It’s home team advantage. You give your man all you’ve got, and yell yourself hoarse as he comes down the home stretch. Trepidation now can cost the world so very much.

This weekend I was reminded of this lesson when I faced what was to me a deplorable lack of world understanding. It’s been ages since I’ve logged onto Facebook, but I thought I would give it a go and see if I could get in touch with any blueshifting friends—or acquaintances, I suppose, because I have an e-mail address for pretty much anyone I’d ever call “friend.”

I was met with the discussion that follows. Of course I couldn’t help but chime in. I warn you that at parts it reads like a series of YouTube comments, and at others like an introductory logic course.

At times in that discussion I think I was a real prick. That’s typical of me, and while perhaps not the best method, I do think there’s something to be said for shaming individuals into self-reflection. Some are more susceptible to this technique than others, of course, but I’ve seen some deep moments happen in other people when undergoing ridicule. I know I’ve experienced such magic myself.

Here’s to tomorrow. Raise your glass with me, won’t you? And don’t forget to debate!

On the page for The Human Abstract, I found this.

Well, I clicked. Turns out they’re a very, very small band out of Chicago. Only 97 listeners! (Well, 98 now, technically.)

Unfortunately the music is utterly aseptic Gothenberg-inspired American metalcore. I guess the “kick-ass” part is their aspiration toward “prog” tags because sometimes they let the bass player riff for several seconds.

Ah, well. I’m talking about them, aren’t I? Well played, Inocula. Well played, indeed.

Can you tell what’s wrong with this picture?

1. That man has King Leonidas’s head plastered on in a really shitty GIF way.
2. The title of the video implies there are other techno remixes of “This is Sparta!”.
3. It has over 17 million views.
4. I’m watching it, too.

In case didn’t cause you to hang your head in shame for being a part of this mess called the internet, try this one on for size.

Exhibit B:

What’s wrong here?

1. Over 19 million views.
2. Over 19 million views.
3. Will you look at these fucking peppers?
4. Over 10 million views.

The internet is dying, folks.

For the record, this particular YouTube excursion happened as a result of poring over the Internet Memes timeline over at Dipity. Requests were made to verify some of the claims laid out, and hence the “leeroy jenkins” in my search bar.

Hence also the flying spaghetti monster wallpaper. (For the record, the timeline credits the FSM as being born on January 14, 2005, while the website itself claims it all began in May 2005. It appears the domain name venganza.org was registered on November 24, 2004.)

And then I blogged about it. Sigh.

Since I don’t have a phone with which to produce and consume Twitter updates, I’ve been relying very heavily on ways to use the service from my computer. As with any oft-used process on my computer, I’m trying to optimize it.

Web interface

Let’s start with the basics. The first option is of course the basic web interface.

Unfortunately, this is way too blocky and inefficient. Worst of all, using it means I have to navigate to the webpage to view it; there are no “push” capabilities, informing me of updates when I’m paying attention to something else.

TwitterFox

For a while after ditching the web interface, I was using TwitterFox, and it treated me quite well. Since I more or less live in a browser, it was a convenient way to keep track of updates and post my own.

I find this interface very sharp, actually. The downsides were that it doesn’t function like a desktop application, as it lives within the browser, and therefore can’t be resized or repositioned. Initially I didn’t think that would bother me, but as I began to use it more often, I found myself really wanting this functionality.

Mitter

Cue Mitter. I found it by poking around on GetDeb and figured I’d give it a spin.

This interface is much more what I was going for, both sparse and pretty. And best of all, I can resize it and stick it wherever I want! I personally prefer to have Twitter communication located on the same virtual desktop as my e-mail client (in the absence of the up-and-coming Mozilla Messaging client, which should integrate the two), and now I can do that.

I’m currently using v0.3.2.2 of Mitter, so it should be obvious that the program is not without its problems. For example, the textbox does not resize for hefty tweets (like a twoosh):

Compare this with how the web interface handles it:

Pretty sad. In addition to that, there’s the silly problem of not being able to simply click on URLs. Rather, the user has to right-click on them and then choose an action from a nested menu. Gah!

This design decision definitely reinforces the “right-click everything” mindset of Linux that makes me feel like I’m playing Starcraft at all times.

Closing thoughts

I didn’t bother to include interfaces like the sidebar in Flock because right now they’re whining about changes in Twitter’s API. And while I’m sure there are very well polished desktop apps for Windows and OS X, I didn’t feel driven to try them out.

I think that for the time being, I’ll oscillate between Mitter and good ol’ TwitterFox. The former has a great presentation that integrates well with my desktop environment, and the latter is superior in terms of update notification. Ideally, I’d love to use both concurrently, but with the Twitter API only supporting calls every 5 minutes (and I often change my clients to update at 10 minute intervals, because I get blocked when using 5 minute checks during heavy load times), there’s no way I could keep both running.

I’ll keep an eye out for patches to Mitter, as I think it’s showing huge promise this early. But ultimately I think there’ll be a much more all-encompassing solution coming down the road in a few months, like a prototype for the Mozilla Messaging project I mentioned earlier. And that’ll really hit the spot for me.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/08/playing-with-twitter-interfaces/feed/ 4 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/31/ooooo-got-me/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/31/ooooo-got-me/#comments Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:31:14 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=589 I meant to post this a while back, when the article was current, but never got around to it. Its from an Ars Technica writeup bashing Google’s Second Life wannabe:

Apparently, a WordPress theme, Flickr photostream widget, and a Twitter Flash badge aren’t enough to show off one’s personality anymore;

I felt that one. May 2006 live forever!

Because of this work before me, I holed myself up in my room and got promptly to procrastinating. Unfortunately, I was met squarely with this for my efforts.

How the hell am I supposed to blow off work when I can’t even read my feeds?

Christ, how I hate downtime.

I’m glad to see that my university is going all 2.0 in order to get me to use its dilapidated portal service. I’m even gladder to say it’s working.

This seems like a good time to mention that Knol is a stupid idea and I’m against it. But I’ll probably also write a billion articles on all subgenres of death metal and try to make a buck.

What spurred today’s rant is that this morning I popped open my Netvibes page—before eating breakfast, as ever—and there was a damn Google search box cluttering up my junk.

Maybe that doesn’t piss you off, but it does me. Why do I need Google in my Netvibes? I don’t, that’s why.

Mashable has some coverage up about it, but the comment thread doesn’t have nearly enough pissed off people in it for my tastes. I’m all about a cool site like Netvibes making a buck, but can someone please partner with someone other than Google?

For the record, Flock is sponsored by Yahoo. That’s a point in their favor, I guess.

Ever since I started twitting[1. I understand that most people use the verb "tweet" instead of "twit" when referring to using the service, but only the latter satisfies my penchant for abbreving words.], I’ve been torn about whether something is more appropriate for a blog post or a twit. Some hold that it is possible—and perhaps even commonplace—to twit too often, and things too inane. I most certainly do not fall into that category, although I cannot substantiate that with examples of inane twits, because the damn service is down.

Trying to load the webpage, all I see is that damn whale graphic:

“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

Kind of embarrassing that I had to Google for Moby Dick quotes, because I never read the book myself. I mean, had the folks at Twitter decided to use an albatross graphic or something, I’d be all over that. But so it goes.

I shall suffer through this madness by constantly refreshing When Twitter Is Down.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/06/27/what-to-do-when-twitter-is-down/feed/ 5 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/27/poo-too-weet/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/27/poo-too-weet/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 15:49:56 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/27/poo-too-weet/ While in Vienna over the weekend, I definitely used my cell phone charger, because my phone is my only timepiece. I unfortunately had forgotten to load up on credit for my prepaid phone, so I couldn’t Twit like crazy while sipping Viennese coffee, climbing cathedral towers, prowling through used book shops, and drinking till I died. See? Only one link.

Well, that confounded charger is till in Vienna, at the place of the dude with whom we stayed. I have no desire whatsoever to contact that individual again (a much longer story, and one I would never go into in public), and I wouldn’t even expect him to actually send it, were I to contact him.

This means I have two weeks left in this country and no cell phone. Amazingly, my dumpy cell phone is one of the only models that the O2 store on Marienplatz, where I work, doesn’t have a charger for in their charging station. A friend had had the bright idea that I’d just charge the phone every day while at work, which would have been bitching. Alack.

So now I’m considering buying another cheapo phone, just to get my through the next two weeks. If I’m going to be doing a lot of traveling, I think it’d be a good idea. Especially so I can keep the Twits flowing.

But in the meantime, those of you who stalk me on Twitter are in for a dolorous dryspell.

Apparently at $40,000 a year, they can’t afford to make their own teaching aides. Then again, it doesn’t seem like they need to. I feel like I just earned a degree, watching this thing.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.

That in itself is fantastically impressive. Maybe we won’t see so much Hungry Hungry Firefox RAM-gobbling in the near future.

While I acknowledge that such massive code cleanups require a considerable number of man hours, I have to ask myself whether that’s really enough to keep Firefox 3 running so late. My theory is that although the code changes might be significant, the real drain on time is the constant reworking of the Mozilla robot for each new beta release.

I mean, don’t you think that’s a bit much for each release? I applaud their focus on presentation, and I’m sure it pays off to treat your beta testers well, but really now. You guys can’t think of anything better to do with all those ten of millions of dollars of Google bucks you’ve been getting annually? The bubble burst, my ass.

At least the newest beta (Beta 5 at the time of this writing) is rock solid and fast as hell.

There have certainly been times when I surfed without regard for my furry charges, and the results were morbid.

So, basically, be careful. Reading feeds kills.

Because 14-day-old embryos have such well-developed nervous systems that they can appreciate (nevermind even “experience”) pain?

So, it is not cruel when one does not “appreciate” or “experience” pain? You could then sedate a person to the point of being incapable of doing either in order to morally kill them?

Your argument is stupid and you know it, so why bother posting it?

If only I had mod points today. That wouldn’t be at only +3 Funny, I’ll tell you that much.

I wonder if the guy did actually know that his argument was stupid. That’s a question for the ages, I guess.

The Pirate Bay has recently hopped on the 2.0 bandwagon, adding spiffy Last.fm integration to retrieve similar artists, as well as discography information.

As TorrentFreak so delicately put it:

Here’s a screenshot of the artist details from Prince. I’m sure he will love this feature, since he’s one of the biggest Pirate Bay fans.

Burn. Anyway, this is an interesting utilization of open APIs of Web 2.0 sites. As several commenters on TF mentioned, Last.fm might object to this usage, and block TPB’s servers. I definitely don’t see that happening, though, as Last.fm, while now commercially owned, hasn’t proved itself to be completely stupid yet. Exposure is exposure, and they have to stay to some degree neck and neck with those at the forefront of internet music culture.

Let’s see how this trend spreads.

The Mashable article linked to above attempts to assign a name to whatever is after Web 2.0. The author scours the web and taps the most erudite troves of wisdom, reeling in gems like “Web candle + monkey.”

I swear that’s not my invention. It’s from the Ask A Ninja guy, and it’s apparently even higher than Web 4.5. Well, that rocks, for sure.

But in the meantime I’ll keep clunking along with my favorite websites, all of which happen to be Web 2.0 ones, and thus hopelessly uncool in this day and age of Web 57 or whatever we’re calling it.

Life is good, but I await the integration nirvana I’ve waxed dreamy about before. Recently Eric Schmidt was asked by some douchebag reporter when this integration was going to occur, and Schmidt kinda sorta didn’t really say anything at all.

I’m going to skip the dissertation on feeds, application launchers, and smart filesystem organization. Today’s topic is the browser Flock.

Based on Firefox and thus open source, Flock tries to maximize integration with the social networking aspects of the web. It provides out of the box support for major networks like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, but falls flat on spiffier, still hipper sites like Last.fm. (The list of sites it doesn’t support is of course massive, but striking out on Last.fm was a mistake in my book.)

The integration for Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter is quite striking at first. Flock imported my cookies and passwords from Firefox (once given my permission to do so), then asked me to re-login to those sites “to take full advantage of the features Flock offers.” The primary feature is the “People Sidebar,” which is a dynamically updating list of all your friends’ activities online. For instance, as I was sifting through my feeds after getting home from class, I saw that a friend updated their status to “is in FUCKING LAS VEGAS, BABY!” Once I saw that, I clicked on the person’s picture, then clicked “Wall post,” and was able to write an immediate response to the status update. (I wrote something less than witty about Fear & Loathing.)

Here’s an unpolished mock-up of the People Sidebar from the Flock site:

For Facebook, this is a tremendous time-saver. It keeps the information coming to me as I go about my life, and doesn’t make me seek it out by actually browsing to the Facebook page. In the past 24 hours I’ve participated more in the Facebook community than I think I have ever, but I’ve spent probably 5 minutes total on the actual Facebook site, thanks to this slick and efficient interface.

Unfortunately, the People Sidebar wanes in usefulness in regard to the other social networks with which Flock is compatible. For instance, do I really need to keep up to date on my “friend” on YouTube? I didn’t even know I had any friends on YouTube, but apparently I do. Maybe my social circle is just such that YouTube isn’t a frequently updated outlet of their expression, and other users will indeed find this cool. Flickr, for me, is the same way: I use Flickr more for myself than for its community aspects, though I do plan to change that.

Flock does try to compensate for this weakness in the People Sidebar, though, with the Media Bar. This eye-candy-licious feature reads content streams from websites like YouTube and Flickr and displays them in an orderly row, not too different in appearance from the look of a Flickr slideshow.

Flock Media Bar:

Flickr slideshow bar:

Certainly has that über-glossy, black-saturated, Web 2.0-gone-Vista-then-Leopard look.

Flock was launched a year or two ago, if I remember correctly, and I remember quite a bit of hype around it, as Firefox was rocketing to popularity in the media, and it seemed suddenly like the age of browser profusion to lazy tech journalists. I tried it then and was thoroughly underwhelmed. The implementation of the Flock philosophy is worlds better in this latest release, the big 1.0.

Recently I’d read a couple glowing reviews of Flock, so I figured I’d give it another go. The selling point for me was the promise of blog integration, meaning that I wouldn’t have to navigate to a webpage and compose my entries via a clunky HTML interface. (I have some plugins installed to add a few AJAX loads, but by and large the thing is slow as hell.) This had me particularly excited because I was unfortunately never able to configure ScribeFire correctly for Firefox, though it seems I’m not alone in that.

However, this feature has fallen flat on its face. It doesn’t work for me, and it doesn’t seem to work for anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog. Given that it does work well with Blogger and Xanga and other such freebie accounts, it makes me feel like Flock is more catering to n00bz. I don’t like that.

Another huge point in Flock’s favor is that it has without fuss accepted my most frequently used Firefox extensions, and maintained their functionality. I haven’t imported all my extensions yet, as I have a ton, but of all those attempted so far, there hasn’t been a hitch. That’s just marvellous, and I wish the same could be said about themes, but I understand why that’s such a different matter.

I’m going to keep using Flock for a while, if only to whine about things like Last.fm integration. I think that in a few months to a year, Flock will be a tremendously powerful browser. If they manage to keep the code trim and fit, unlike the hungry-hungry-Firefox, it’ll be a true winner.

I do wonder, however, about how much of this functionality can very easily be mirrored by way of Firefox extensions, thereby downplaying the importance of Flock as a browser separate from Firefox. By allowing users to copy features of Opera, for instance, Firefox has managed to grow its own marketshare at the expense of the often truly innovative Opera crowd. Richard Stallman would be pleased, I suppose.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more, especially if I manage to work out the blog editing feature.

Today I was confronted with the following error message above my inbox.

Peculiar, but at least it shows the dudes are Google are on the ball, and are using spiffy Firefox extensions like Firebug. So I click “Fix this” to find out what they think I should do, and I’m taking to a brief guide which is inexplicably forked according to operating system—not by browser, mind you.

How bizarre is that? The instructions for “Mac Users” are the exact same steps for “Windows or Linux Users,” only the Mac crowd isn’t given the choice of leaving Firebug running. Why separate the instructions by operating system? In this context it wouldn’t even make sense to separate by browser, given that Firebug is an extension for Firefox and Firefox alone. (OK, Iceweasel and Bon Echo too, but let’s not get into that right now.)

I guess the Gmail team believes that Mac users are so used to simplicity that they can’t follow more than two steps worth of instructions.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Of course, there’s a big different between the tags “notre dame” and “cat” when it comes to assembling 3D spaces, but hey. Give the technology time to work.

But this morning I read that Microsoft is trying to develop a competitor to Flickr, which would have made me thump my head against my desk, if it had been a surprise.

This may very well be an attempt to avoid litigation from Flickr, as building a massive project which leeches the bandwidth of an internet service is certainly dubious on moral grounds, and somewhat so also on the basis of business strategy.

But of course I really believe this is just a poorly conceived effort by Microsoft to make headway into a market that left them behind years ago. A new Zune, if you will.

To be fair, I should mention that Microsoft does have some interesting photo-related stuff going on in their labs, like Photo Tourism and Group Shot, both in addition to Photosynth, of course.

This doesn’t make me feel like my dream of a domain-independent social network is any closer.

So super, Flickr is more popular than Jesus. On some levels it’s absolutely awesome to be a part of the biggest thing going on, but obviously on other levels, it sucks. The coolest stuff always seems to be going on in the fringe. The mainstream doesn’t innovate.

I listen to metal, I use Linux, I still game occasionally. While all of those things are definitely climbing in popularity, they’re still weird, geeky things to like. Definitely not “cool” yet. Is Flickr cool?

I googled “is flickr cool?” and got only one page back, entitled “Flickr is fun.” Interesting. This research certainly doesn’t count much on its own, so I undertook to bolster the validity of it by running a Google Fight between “flickr rocks” and “flickr sucks”. Results were encouraging.

Now, Flickr being huge definitely affords some advantages. It’s absolutely the largest image repository on the web, so it’s usually tapped as a source for imaging data. For example, I often search Flickr tags when looking for a picture of a specific type of object. For certain things, it can be much more helpful than Google Image Search, as the tags are applied by humans. Check out this awesome project that mines and aggregates images from Flickr.

Networks all over the place are growing much faster than comfort dictates, as in the case of Facebook partnering with Microsoft and rolling out a new intrusive ad system, which kind of gives users the middle finger. And of course people are still talking about Google surreptitiously taking a stab at world domination.

Basically I’m trying to strike a balance between maintaining diversity and achieving critical for a userbase. I think that Ubuntu has done a wonderful job in rallying and organizing support for a Linux distribution, but I can’t help but wonder whether such success is harming the open source movement by catalysing too much homogenization. It’s certainly possible that Ubuntu is recruiting new users to Linux, rather than leeching them off of other, existing distributions, especially given Ubuntu’s n00b-friendly vibe.

It’s difficult for me to imagine what will happen after the great exoduses from the major data repositories on the internet. As it stands, places like Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and Last.fm would wither and die without round-the-clock content submissions from eager users. Once those users are gone, though, all the data they already submitted will still be there, unlooked at.

What will become of that data? It’s unlikely that it will simply be handed away to academic institutions to be pored over. Since a good deal of the interactions occur behind password authentication, it’s inaccessible to projects like The Internet Archive. I think it’s actually quite likely that it will just get deleted, as the costs for maintaining it will become too high, once the userbase is lost. No users, no advertising.

I guess what I’m waiting for is a flexible platform for social networking that is domain independent. I should be able to post my photos on my personal blog, yet still tag them with Last.fm event numbers and have them show up in group pools on Flickr. I envision it rather similar to how WordPress works: I download the open source software, upload it to my personal server space and configure it, then I’m part of the global WordPress network, without ever needing to interact with the WordPress site again.

Well, there’s always tomorrow.

I know I’ve promised several times before to provide a full schedule of classes, but of course I never got around to it. Such sloth is part of my charm, I like to tell myself. When I’m not too lazy to do so, I mean.

Expect sometime this year that I get around to relaying how things are going here in regard to classes, but don’t hold your breath. The truth is, there are just so many more interesting things going on! Obviously there was Prato (I know, I know, I still have to make a full post talking about the conference!), a night of cultural exchange among nations (*cough* beer pong), last night a heaping pile of chocolate-covered fruit brought home by one of the Germans from a job at a chocolate-covered fruit stand… it never ends, man.

I am kind of applying myself to my schoolwork, it’s just that I’m finally studying things that are so interesting, it doesn’t feel like work. Now, I’m not taking nearly as many courses here as I should be—I think I’m registered for only five or six exams, when apparently Germans usually take like ten or twelve classes per semester here (around 40 hours of class per week!)—but several of them are pretty 1337, believe me.

In particular, I’m fond of my Operating Systems class, for which I was in the labs for hours this morning trying to finish an assignment on understanding threads and interrupts. Also, there’s the famous e-society class, which landed me the trip to Prato, and after that, I absolutely love my Chinese II class. Even though I’m getting absolutely schooled in it.

And tomorrow’s Tuesday, which means three and a half hours of speaking Mandarin and getting yelled at if I speak any German. I guess I should be studying.

But there are still so many feeds to read….

I then decided that it’d been awhile since I’d had a breath of fresh air, so I went for a stroll. When I came back, I discovered pumpkins in the kitchen, evidently to be gutted and cooked. And one turned into a jack-o-lantern, of course. (The Germans didn’t know what a jack-o-latern was, so one of the German-speaking Americans explained it as essentially “a pumpkin with a face.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. No, really: I would have spent five minutes trying to figure out the best word for “carve.”)

So I stick around in the kitchen for a while and cook dinner, enjoying the spectacle of pumpkin preparation. Wine and beer flowed heavily, and yet no one chopped off a finger. Excellent!

Eventually I noticed commotion coming from Team Finland, so I walked down the hall to see what was going on. Evidently Jukka had invited over some gorgeous Finnish and Italian friends, who of course wanted to go clubbing that night. Jukka and his friend Joonas were busy entertaining the pretty girls as best they could, which basically meant they sat around while the girls put Halloween makeup on them. Obviously I didn’t want to miss out.

You know what’s great about Finns? They drink vodka. Like, a bottle each. It’s absolutely absurd.

So we get all tricked out, looking like the suave zombies we are, and decide to head on out. We’d heard that the International Club at our university was going to meet at a bar, so we figured we’d go there first and see whether we couldn’t appropriate any additional members for our entourage.

Found the bar, found the foreigners, grabbed some fun ones. Basically we are the most fun international students, but whatever. It doesn’t hurt to spread around the love, I suppose. We then hopped on a tram to Nachtgalerie, which is allegedly the club in Munich for students. It was very pricey to get in at 10€ cover (9€ for students), but thereafter beers were only 1€ or so, so essentially you pay the same price you would for a night elsewhere.

We stayed there from about midnight till 4am, then finally decided to come home, have some sandwiches and tea, and then crash. I slept until 2:30pm today. It was awesome.

I took way more pictures than anyone will ever care to look at, but hey, Flickr gives me unlimited storage and bandwidth, so you’re damn right I’m gonna use it. Deleting is a thing of the past!

View the other 128 pics from that night here.

This video has gotten a lot of mileage lately, but I thought I’d post it here for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.

I still laugh every time I watch it, though maybe not as hard as I do at misheard metal lyrics.

There’s a sequel here, but it’s not nearly as good.

http://lol.ianloic.com/feed/www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/feed/

Go ahead, add it to Netvibes. It’ll work. And the cute pictures even link to my original posts, which I find pretty damn spiffy.

Now that’s all well and good, but to have some real fun, one needs to take a gander at significant feeds, lolcatted. Check these out:

• New York Times
• siN’s Metal News
• Slashdot
• Savage Minds (anthropology blog)

Now that’s some fun.