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It is now proven that I am visiting McDonalds too often. When I entered the local McDonalds today, i was not greated with the usual “Gruess Gott, Bitte sehr!” but with “Hamburger Royal TS Menu regular mit Cola ohne Eis zum hieressen?”.
So here are some facts about McDonalds Karlsplatz, where I am eating at least once a week. There are four groups of customers, pupils from the next school, students, tourists (like everywhere in Vienna) and junkies, as Karlsplatz is the meeting point of the Viennese drug scene. This McDonalds is unique, because it is the only restaurant I know, that has _no_ toilet. As McDonalds restaurants are famous for their cheap and clean toilets (compared to public toilets) around the world, half of the people entering look confused around and leave the restaurant without buying something.
I am still trying to find out, why seven out of ten junkies buy a FishMac. The others are either too stoned to order or notice after they ordered that they don’t have enough money.
Another important advise, if you plan to eat on the terrace, don’t buy fries. Because if you enter the terrace with fries, you will immediately learn that the birds, that look so peacefully are descendants of Alfred Hitchcocks’ Birds.
Other things I like about this McDonalds, one of the shop managers hates the usual US-Top40 music played at most McDonalds and prefers to play DrumNBass, HipHop and other “alternative mainstream” music. Additional they usually have Austrian Newspapers laying around, so you are not bored while eating boring food.

Yesterday, Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, visited Vienna. He took part at a discussion round at ORF with the title Digital Communites, because Wikipedia won a “Golden Nica” at the “Ars Electronica Prix”. The other participants were an austrian historian, a representative from Creative Commons, and Andreas Hirsch from Ars Electronica.
They discussed various online knowledge commuties, their past and future and special aspects like copyright, vandalism and the digital divide. Unfortunately i was already occupied with taking pictures with Jimbo’s Digicam, so I didn’t wrote down summary keywords. BTW, the UI of my Nikon is much better than his Olympus, and mine does not play an artificial “click”-sample when taking a picture.
To my surprise the historian didn’t attack the quality of Wikipedia articles compared of the articles by his project, so Horst would have been a much better participant :-). Later it became obvious that the historian was pretty clueless about Wikipedia and encylopedias in general, as he tried to persuade Jimbo that he should rewrite Wikipedia presenting a “European Point of View” (as in European Union).
The ORF also installed a livestream to New York, where representatives of other projects tried to take part in the discussion. Someone needs to tell the camera guy in New York, that it is a bad idea to do nonstop-Zooming, because the Stream was full of compression artefacts all the time.
The most useless participants were the director of the Austrian Culture Institute in New York and Franz Morak the austrian culture secretary. The moderator in New York introduced them to the discussion participants in English, but they failed to recognize that most of them did not understand German, and babbled in german how cool all these digital communities are and nobody except the ORF people understood them…
After the discussion we watched Portugal vs. England on a beamer, or more precisely the ORF people watched Football, and we discussed various Wikipedia aspects with Jimbo, while they tried to explain to Jimbo what this Football thing is about.

The highlight of this term is history, my first math exam, and it looks like there is even a slight chance that I managed to succeed, at least it looked easy and I wrote something to all four tasks. The results will be available in July and I really hope that I don’t have to do it again.
Oh, and note to self, I should practice solving improper integrals without a math book :-S.
One week left until summer holidays start.

No, I have not written a blogentry today, you must be dreaming. You can’t read this post, as it does not exist. Go away!
Instead of posting to this blog I am busy learning math. Hopefully I am back on Tuesday evening.

Thanks to Diman, who pointed me to the “Hochschulstatistik 2002/2003” a collection of various figures about Austria’s universities.
I now know that the average CS student at my university finishes after 14.5 terms. So I still have 7 terms or three and a half year to finish :-).
I have also found out that the new baccalaureate degrees are very unpopular. Although there are now tuition fees only one student at our university took the chance to finish university earlier with a “Bakk.” instead of a “Dipl.” degree.
The other surprise the many opponents of the tuition fees, who claimed that with the fees the proportion of female students will decrease, were proved wrong. Of course, never trust a statistic unless you forged it yourself.

Via Kris: The first useful Flash site: Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. Unfortunately the site is already DOS’d by the blogosphere and it is currently unreachable. And unfortunately there are no mirrors. (Probably because it is difficult to mirror flash sites).
I like to listen to the samples of the different styles, and the descriptions are funny, interesting and sometimes just personal and biased. Some of the styles seem to be invented by the author. (Have you ever heard of “Stupid House” ?). I was most astonished by the similarity between 2unlimited’s “Twilight zone”, KLF’s “What time is love” and Faithless’ “Insomnia” all categorized as “Anthem House”.
I was reminded of the time when i listened to music instead of sitting in front of the computer

This month I have to vote three times.
On Sunday the local computer club CNGW votes a new board. Recently the Mailinglist exploded as people discussed the clubs appearance on the recent Linux event, which turned into flames about the boards work. Although I haven’t been involved into Linuxwochen, this was the final kick for the decision to decrease my engagement. Hopefully a lot of motivated members show up, that are interested in working on the board.
The FreeBSD project’s Core Team elections are just about to start. Currently candidates are sending in their applications. At the moment most candidates are either members of core.3 or youngsters. Hopefully over the weekend a few more candidates will appear, as there are still empty seats in my dream-core.
And finally the Memebers of the European Parliament will be elected in two weeks. As always in RL-austrian politics the election campaigns are ridiculous, which makes it hard for voters with a brain to chose their favorites.

Today I had to do a small presentation about OpenSource for a university course. Slides are online. I did not invest much time, hopefully I will have more time in July for writing the document. But from my impression my presentations was one of the better ones (At least I had slides, I didn’t read everything from paper and I didn’t overrun much). And I really have to bang my head on the desk, when students, who have been studying for at least three years, state in a presentation on the topic “Economy and Internet Regulation” that everyone should buy at amazon.com. No matter how bad the presentations were, I bet 90% of the students will pass the course.
Courses at the IGW are such a waste of time and resources.

Horst is guilty of preventing me from doing university stuff. He wrote a grumpy rant about the shortcomings of Wikipedia.

I wrote several long comments trying to correct his picture of Wikipedia, among others

Another comment from myself, about linking in Wikipedia.

I really should do more research on this topic and write a longer article in the summer holidays.

This could be generalized to apply to the Internet or Publishing. And I really hope that this is not the future.
On the german Wikipedia Mailinglist there is currently a similar discussion on how to ensure the quality.
If you are a wikipedia contributor, I would really like to know, if you can confirm Horst’s claim that the quality of your contributions was decreased by the follow-up edits?
Update 2004-06-03: Horsts article is making a lot of noise in the german Blogosphere. Some articles and comments are interesting to read:

• Mathias Schindler – Why wikipedia sucks less than TROTW*
• Der Schockwellenreiter – Scheffredakteur!? We don’t need no stinky Scheffredakteur!
• IT&W – Das Web im Web

( *Wow*, Although I don’t understand the popularity and the general philosophy behind Schockwellenreiter and IT&W, this is the first time i link to them. The advantage of popular blogs are the many and high quality comments.)

Last weekend I visited Frankfurt. Nice weather, 25�C and i got a sunburn while watching the skyscrapers from the roof of Maintower, the second highest building in Frankfurt. My camera was nearly confiscated when i took a picture of the security checks at Maintower entrance. Luckily I was able to persuade them that I deleted the picture.
So here are two pictures:


You can find more and better pictures especially of the skyscrapers on Rob’s site.
Back in Vienna, it is raining again. So the best weather for starting the final part of this term. I will start learning Math immediately after writing this blog entry, so don’t expect much in the next two weeks.