BlaBlubbBlog

Yesterday was "One of these days"... No, not "I'm going to cut you into little pieces". More the general mixup. Yesterday morning I destroyed my vim by upgrading to the 7.0 version. First sign of catastrophe: When in insert mode using the cursor keys produced a new line with just on character (depending on which arrow, A, B, C or D). Second sign of the catastrophe: Backspace didn't work as expected. Third sign of catastrophe: After quitting vim reading an error about not being able to connect to an X display. WTF? I don't want vim to be linked to X at all, that's why I compile it with "--without-x --enable-gui=no".

Looking into the crystal ball I see a lot of smeared fuzzy mess sprinkled with white noise: The cold part of the year is coming up! No matter how nice and golden the late summer and early autumn is going to be, ultimately it will snow, storm, rain, hail, and not necessarily in that order. Allright, I didn't actually look in a crystal ball, I looked in bottom left corner of the shelf. Right were the reserves and antidotes for the gloomy, cold and – not necessarily – lonely evenings are stored.

Summer is miles and miles away
And no one would ask me to stay
And I should contemplate this change
To ease the pain
And I should step out of the rain
And walk away

— Opeth: In my time of need

Damit sich nicht wieder so viel anstaut, gleich Ausgabe Nummer neun der Ausbeute. Heute hauptsächlich Drachen und Glühbirnen.

Note: This is mainly a collection of links to a forum dealing with digital art. My side remarks to each link are not really worth translating.

Tristania is one of those bands I only stumbled upon by accident. I read a remark in a recension at Amazon that mentioned Tristinia as being something better than what the guy was writing about (forgot which album he was actually discussing). So I had a look, saw the cover of the World of Glass and just ordered it. I was hooked by the sound immediately and also got my hands on the older albums Widow's Weed and Beyond the Veil. That was somewhen in 2002. At that point Morten Veland, who – next to Einar Moen – was writting the songs, had already left Tristania and started to form his own band, Sirenia.

Okay, it is already laying around here for a couple of days. But as I was about to bring down the paper trash it fell in my hands again. This picture-postcard to the left was sent to me by my cell phone company (guess which one..). I am not quite sure what is this supposed to tell me? Should I be flattered because I got a personalized (hand-written by Nelly Furtado herself, yeah right), colourful, high-quality (glossy paper) advertisment which even wants to give me something for free? If so, that went really wrong. I am actually most annoyed. And when I think about that I am also paying for that utter nonsense... The only thing stuff like this does, is to convince me even more that I do not need a mobile phone at all. Great job.

Sooo... troubles resolved, we finally have a definition of what a planet is. Sharp as a spoon. As the most visible effect, Pluto lost its status as a planet and also nothing else new got added to the elitary club of planets. Lets have a look at the definition:

(1) A "planet"¹ is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape² , (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

(3) All other objects³ except satellites orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar-System Bodies".

¹The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
²An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.
³These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.

-- IAU Press Release

For those who don't look there regulary (like me basically *cough*): APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) has an amazing picture today. Not astronomy related though, but nonetheless impressive. My first association was actually "The Flying Spaghetti Monster!" but a Smoke Angel will do too, more conservative. And while we are related to military stuff, can anyone explain to me why on earth I dreamed tonight that Corea Korea (no clue if North or South) invaded Germany (coming from France), which delayed my train trip through Trier back home, but noone actually cared about all those armed asians because everyone was waiting for China to battle back? It gets a bit more complicated because I had a miniature catapult in my backpack. Gheez... this is approximately the weirdest dream I had in at least a year.