Last thursday our beloved right wing party offcially started their campaign for the upcoming local elections in Vienna. Like every year this convention was held at Viktor-Adler-Markt in the 10th district. Just because of curiosity which people will be appear there and still more interesting which topics will their top-candidate H.C. Strache pick out as their central themes I went there. Not surprising his speech was full of untruths (not to say lies) and absurdities.
One of his major topics, crime, is just ridiculous. I think nobody in Vienna would be scared if he would stop telling people that Vienna is insecure because of black or dark-skinned people in the street and subway. In fact, Vienna is one of the safest cities world wide and lately crime rate actually is decreasing.
He tried to refresh some old phrases of former FPÖ leader Jörg Haider like those subliminal anti-Semitic hints towards the US east-coast (unfortunately nobody in the audience got this jokes right, nobody clapped or laughed). Followed by criticizing the efforts to improve the situation for homosexuals and last but not least some quite crude arguments against immigration and asylum. Then I went home, enough is enough. Apart from that I got pretty angry about the things I just heard, I was wondering how people can vote parties like that. What would be the motivation to give them a vote? Pollsters identify those people as protest voters. Protesting against the current political situation. Or maybe unsatisfied with their personal situation and somebody has to be blamed. Parties like FPÖ always offer some easy targets to blame.
Still it’s incomprehensible, rethinking their agenda only for 5 minutes would show that most of their points (well, probably every single point) are simply, sorry, bullshit.
A little like kinder suprise, yes, the new album of Princess Superstar is somehow like kinder surprise – chocolate and toys forever!
Listening to it the first few times you hardly can guess what to expect for the next song. A surprising album, a fabulous and very fresh album! Princess Superstar never has been bound to a single style and she’s celebrating her musical freedom in My Machine. She finds her way through various genres – punk, disco, electro, hip hop, whatever, mixing it up and defining herself. In My Machine she crowns herself to become the queen.
She uses the album to tell you a little tale. A tale about the obsession to become a famous superstar. A tale about her rise and fall in the year 2080 when she finally rules the world with her clone army, when every famous superstar is a Princess Superstar.
Still one question remains: when’ll the next superstary act be in Vienna?
Embarrassment of the day:
The girl in the photo of the Windows Vista advertising site seems to be using an iBook, isn’t she?
What is it what Microsoft wants to tell us with that ad?
Update: They changed the image on their website! The girl is now typing on something grey! Isn’t it a real funny company!
Now it’s official: today my employer agreed that I can use internal ressources like software, data or my working time to edit Wikipedia content and articles.
Browsing through Wikipedia last week I found a few maps which are not 100% correct, nor are they wrong, they just need to be slightly corrected. Since I’m dealing with a lot of geodata during my day I thought I could revise them easily. But the problem is that I’m as person not allowed to publish the data because I’m not the owner, the data is property of my company. So I wanted to indicate my company as source of the maps in order that everything is legal with possible copyright issues.
This just makes me sick!
Austria is one of the richest societies in the world and even then or maybe just because of that fact some of us need to prove their power by abusing modern slaves. Apparently because those friendly guys belong to the so called upper class our “objective” public broadcasting company (ORF) doesn’t mention it with a single word. It’s an unbelievable sad image of ourself.
Sources:
“Einfach hinklatschen“
Trafficking in human beings: implications for the OSCE
EU action against trafficking in human beings and the sexual exploitation of children
Trafficking in Women
Update: Finally ORF mentions it at least with a short story on their website.
Yesterday walking through the 10th district of Vienna (Favoriten, like bookmarks are called in Microsofts german Internet Explorer) I witnessed an interesting spectacle:
In October we have local elections here in Vienna. During the past 50 years the conservative party never has been powerful, Vienna was and actually is more than ever before a deep red socialist stronghold. The current local government, the “emperor of vienna” Michael Häupl, has an absolute majority (52 seats out of 100) in the municipial council. Anyway, the strategy of the conservative party is to get more votes and to win the so called bourgeois bohemians (bobos) over. Bobos, “young urban tolerant free thinking” whatever people, used to vote the green party because of its certain “young urban tolerant free thinking” whatever politicians. We are not voting for parties, we are voting for personalities.
So the conservative party made some changes to their leadership, you see now younger unknown faces doing the interviews, they even hired a green politician and suddenly, out of nothing they were kind of cool & trendy (“see you at the summer beach” is one of their slogans).
And then I see a completely insane Schlager Karaoke in the middle of Favoriten. Somebody has to tell them that Schlager Karaoke in Favoriten is not the best method to get bobos interested in their politics. No, I guess this might even have some opposite effects.
Video games never attracted me. A few years ago, well actually it was 1998, I played Age of Empires for a couple of days. A friend showed me Doom but I didn’t like it at all, way too stressful for me. Since my little brother got his own Playstation we play car racing games together sometimes. But I never would have bought my own Playstation, XBox or whatever.
And then came PSP.
As I said I never was attracted by video games, but this little gadget (confession: I love gadgets) provokes one of the stronges “must have” feelings I’ve ever had. I don’t even have seen it yet, just read about it’s presentation in Europe, saw a few pictures and the TV ad (which has fantastic drums at the end btw). So far I think it’s a well designed mobile device, on the pictures and in the TV ad it looks beautiful. Fortunately it’s already sold out here, otherwise I suppose I couldn’t resist to buy one. Congratulations to sonys marketing department!
The other gadget of the month is of course the new iPod nano. I have an old one, a 2nd generation 10GB iPod which is with me most of the time, but it’s too big and heavy to just put it in your jeans pocket. In winter it’s no problem because I’m wearing jackets with many big enough pockets, in summer I always had to carry an extra bag for the iPod. Anyway, maybe for christmas I’ll get a little nano (when they release a working Camera Connector for the nano).
Accepting presents!
On my older machine I achieved a working installatin of Ubuntu Hoary. The installation process was easy and I suppose it can be done by almost everyone – hardware detection is working well and the software update function is impressing on Ubuntu. But there are still a few “cosmetic” problems with Ubuntu on my old PowerBook Titatium like not working volume up/down keys, brightness adjustments or the ctrl-click (right-click on the mac). I had not the time to figure out if this things can be corrected easily. Unfortunately I won’t be able to use Ubuntu on that machine any longer because it’ll be sold and on my iMac G5 Ubuntu won’t install (yesterday I tried the Preview Release of Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger with no luck).
