Tobi Waves

All Friday Regula have been packing our stuff into cardboard boxes. On Saturday morning at 8:30 10 of our friends arrived in Aarburg, ready to help us move all our belongings from the flat at the Feldstrasse to our new house at the Aarweg in Olten.

We had packed 90 boxes which had to be carried down 3 floors at the old place and up 4 floors in the new place. And this was only the beginning. The boxes alone filled the Van we had rented. A further three rides were necessary to transport all our furniture. I had hoped we would manage with two rides. I was so wrong. I promise, I will never buy anything new unless I give something old away ...

At 4pm all was done and everybody had had a gracious share of lifting and stair climbing. Thanks to the delicious lunch my mother had prepared for the whole crew we were tired, but at least well fed. (Thanks Mom!)

A big thanks to Alexa, Claudia, Doris, Gabi, Regula, Christoph, David, Fritz, Manfred, Manuel for their help. If you are ever going to move house, count me in.

I was searching google groups today when I lumbered onto this post from February 1998: (groups.google.com ...)

Amazing, these days many people blame W but six years ago, the Clinton administration has proposed a war on Iraq as well, only that they did listen: (www.cnn.com ...) It seems CNN has not edited their archives, even thought these days, US media don't report anti war rallies unless many hundred thousends attend. They rather bring an extendes feature on the few people marching for the war. It seems that independent and critical journalism is "out". Remember Watergate?

Today Akamai kicked Al Jazeera off their network. The Register has some thoughts on this (www.theregister.co.uk ...)

I got up at 4:15 am today. In order to get to Eindhoven on time, I had to take the 7 am flight from Zurich and thus the 5:20 train from Olten. Guess I am lucky to have no problem with getting up early.

In Schiphol I met Rudi and Alexios. Together we rode to Eindhoven and arrived at the TU/e just in time for the meeting. The other members of the program committee were there as well: Walter, Edwin, Brenda, Peter, Bastiaan, Xander, Jos and Fred. And there was also Marielle and Sabina from Iconic who will be doing all the actual organization work for the conference.

This is my first time on a PC. What I found the most difficult part, is to figure out which talks would be relevant 1.5 years from now, as the conference will be held at the end of September 2004.

At the meeting we did not really decide anything fixed, apart from the meaning of SANE: System Administation and Network Engineering Conference.

We tossed around a ton of names of potential invited speakers, had a short discussion about the deadlines, debated whether we should demand 400 word abstracts or extended abstracts like LISA. We also collected places where we wanted to distribute the Call for Papers.

I guess most things will get sorted on our PC mailing list, as we move on.

A week ago, a journalist of the swiss NZZ Newspaper had been directed to me by the universities press office. The guy was looking at writing a story on Open Source software and the press office people knew I had some projects in this area. It was the week of the Blaster worm. So after talking for about 40 minutes to the journalist on Wednesday he calls on Thursday to let me know that the story on Open Source had been shelfed, and he had to write a piece on Blaster. Oh, and by the way, would I know anything about the worm. I had been battling it for the last two days, so I said yes. With the effect that I was quoted in the article on Blaster.

The following week a guy from Swiss national television (SF DRS) called, they were doing a piece on Blaster too, with a 'confront MS angle'. They had read my name in the newspaper, I agreed to the interview. I organized coaching from our press office, as the TV people were from that hard hitting investigative show, and I didn't want to be caught in the middle. I was really careful not to make any too harsh comments. They have not yet broadcast it, so I don't know if I am going to look good or bad.

In the meantime Sobig has come back to haunt us, now in its F incarnation. The press office sent the local TV people straight to me when they inquired about a person to talk to regarding Sobig.

As you can see in the screenshot, I am the IT expert now. I picked that profession after the TV people told me that "Systemmanager" was way too complex and the press office people insisted, that "Security Specialist" was going to cause trouble with the folks from CS or central IT Security. Just in case you ever wondered how you become an expert.

I guess I just had my 15 minutes of fame :-).

I have known it for a about a year. SciFi has not renewed its commitment to Farscape which essentially meant the end of the show. I am sure none of the folks at SciFi who made these decisions had watched the show. How else could it be that they killed the single most captivating, intelligent, humorous, sexy, thrilling, emotional and realistic sci-fi show ever conceived. Almost every episode I watched left me tingling all over, ideally wondering how they were able to come up with these great episodes over and over again.

It's almost a year since the cancellation, the Farscape fan-base still seems to be going strong at (www.savefarscape.co ...) plotting away on a strategy to get the show back on the air. Never loose hope.

Today I also went to the website of SciFi wondering what they were doing regarding Farscape. And indeed, they have this page "Farscape Memories" with articles from different actors remembering their time shooting the series. What hypocrisy first they pull the plug on the show and then they act all bleary eyed.

If I was rich, I mean real rich, I would just order a few more years of Farscape from the Creature Shop ... I guess I should not have gone into OpenSource, but rather have turned commercial at an early age, sucking in big bucks during the Internet Bubble then I could do more than keeping my fingers crossed for another network picking up the show again.