Looking around I see a lot of friends getting married, children are on the way, everything looks fine. But there are a lot of people that don’t want kids. What could be the reason ? There is this one thing, that when you have kids, some might think their life is over, no “freedom” anymore … Then there are concerns about money, kids are expensive, well not the kids, but the products for kids. Clothes for kids are more expensive then for adults. But there is one last thing that some of us might be afraid of. What if the are problems? What if the child will be handicapped? Will you think of abortion? I think by now, if anyone reads this, there will be a lot of people thinking, oh no, abortion is bad. I agree with you. But do you know what it means to have a disabled child? That will always depend on someone to help them, what will be when you are no longer there? Do you know what it means to go from one doctor to a other and nobody really can help? Do you know what it means to go with your child from one operation to the next one, from one treatment to the next one? And what if you child one day says, “Next week I will have a operation and after this I will be able to walk like all other kids” can you look in their little eyes and tell them that this will never happen? Or look in their disappointed eyes after the operation when they will notice that nothing got better? Now, still anybody that thinks life is fair? What problems do we fight with? Oh, my iPod is to small, oh, my car is not shiny enough. All my cousin wanted was to walk … something that most of us don’t even appreciate. I have been through this, I have seen how hard my aunt and uncle tried everything for my little cousin, how every stupid idiot came up with some miracle and pulled the money out of their wallet. I don’t think I managed to capture my feelings in this blog about this subject. It has passed a long time since my little cousin died, but I will never forget that one day she said those words “I will walk like every other kid” that is all she wanted.

It’s has been quite a while since my last blog. I was quite busy since I came back from berlin. Had to finish a server, was sick, server made some problems, experimented with UCS and Scalix, started to hate stupid WindowsNT Policy files … and so on. I initially wanted to document my work on the PDC I installed and the troubles I had but having a bad cold at the same time and a lot of stress I didn’t really get to it and now it wouldn’t be any help since I forgot the most of it. So, to not get bored and maintain the stress level, I started to set up a new XEN VPS on which I installed Debian Etch, here I will move my current lcx server. There are several things that piss me of at the moment in the actual installation and I though it would be a good time to do it now and also upgrade to Debian 4.0, Apache2, PHP5, MySql5 … Well I hope I will finish it today, or at least this weekend.

Since I didn’t want to go to Romania to easter, because of the heavy traffic, I decided to go one week later. One of the few occasions when I went to Romania without my car, I went with my friend Razvan. This was also a good occasion to test my one HUI in the car and I must say it worked great! I was online, reading the VWclub forum, my email and using instant messenger even after the Austrian border, at least for some km. Once arrived, all of us starving, we tried to get something to eat at “Dracula” but unfortunately it was full and we chose plan B, “Casa Romaneasca” which was a very very good decision. The food was excellent! I just got hungry again only by thinking of that wonderful food, or maybe it’s just because I didn’t eat anything today. Anyway, Casa Romaneasca in Timisoara … anytime again. Saturday, party time at The Note, to packed so we left quite early and went for some beer and tequila sunrise in cafe colt. Sunday was grill day together with some members of VWforum.ro we had a great grill session, with great weather and also some crazy drivers and a frog concert in the background. For the next grill session it would be nice if one of us really takes a blanket with them or something else to seat on and not only hope that one of the others took something with them, but we can eat and drink also when sitting on the grass. Oh, I almost forgot, photos and Romanian shops don’t really seem to be a good combination. For some reason in no big shopping center it is allowed to make photos, not even in the parking lot. For example Metro … while we, or better said Rilu and Vlady, did the shopping, I took some photos and the security guy was very fast present to tell me not to make any further photos. Exaggeration? Paranoia? who knows … And what would easter be without presents? I got a wonderful invitation to Buena Vista Social Club.

Well, after I managed to fill 600Gigs it was time to get a new hard disk. I do still have some IDE Ports on that boad free, but why not get a SATA controller and a brand new SATA disk instead? Faster and it will also work if I switch the mainboard.

Well, there was only one problem, I still had my two big discs in a RAID 0 array which can’t be expanded by a third disk so it was time to switch to LVM. Lucky me that I had 4 SATA disks for the server I am working on where I can move my data to free the disks for the LVM. It took awhile to move 600gigs but now everything is done and my fileserver is back online with a nice and big LVM that could be expanded …. if I had more power connectors for the hard disks and space in the case for a new disk, the harddisk in the photo that is outside of the case is really connected and running

I went to the One shop and got a driver CD for the Mac. The driver is something under 200kb! Come on one … you could have sent me this trough a fucking e-mail!

Anyway, the speed is quite impressing! Check this out

1.3mbit … coooool

On Monday I received my One H.U.I (hell fast, ultra simple internet) A fast internet connection for my laptop, from wherever I am in Austria. One delivered real fast but unfortunately there no drivers for Mac, even though they promised that it works for Mac, of course the drivers for Windows are available on the Modem itself which has about 150MB space on it. After some research on the One homepage I found out that there should be a CD in the package, which seemed like they have forgotten. Well this can happen so I called One to ask if they can mail me the drivers or give me a link where I can download the drivers, but this is not possible, they will send me a CD with the drivers. This really pissed me of, how hard can it be to offer the drivers for download like for example Vodafone does! Since I didn’t have the drivers yesterday (Thursday!!) I called the hotline once again and the lady from the hotline told me that the drivers have been sent on the 6. April, which was today! They need 4 days to send out a cd? I still don’t understand why they don’t offer the drivers for download. They told me that they have send some thousand Packages without mac drivers and that’s why it took so long to send until they have sent me the CD. Look one, this is, from my point of view, it would have been easier and a lot cheaper to offer the driver for downloading then sending a CD by mail. I am used to stupid things like this from T-Com/T-Online in Germany, but One? Anyway, the problem was solved by the hotline by calling some One-Shops and asking if they have a Mac driver which they could copy me!

home sweet home, at last! When I think back that some time ago I was up to 6 months in Germany, then the 7 weeks I have been in Berlin now could be considered as a short duration trip, but it still feels good to be back home. My own apartment, my comfortable bed and let’s not forget my 10mbit internet connection. aahhhh that feels good Ok time go shopping and clean the car, I still have pieces of a ticket I got for wrong parking on the windscreen. It started to rain and it got stuck on my windscreen.

I recently got quite fed up of fetchmail. The problem is that there are mails on an account from invalid sender domains (like foo.bar for example) since my Postfix rejects such mail because it can only be spam fetchmail didn’t manage to delete them. So it looped leaving the junk mails on the pop account and flooding my logfiles. The solution was getmail. Since I use postfix amavis cyrus there was no example config that fits my needs so I did some experiments but finally a mail from Elimar Riesebieter on the Mailinglist solved my problem.