Blehternets.

I'm stealing Wifi from a McDonalds here in Salzburg. I would've posted this morning, but we went to a new hotel last night, and those jerkmouths charge 5 euro an hour (like, $7.5/hr). On the bright side, I'm pretty glad that I brought my lappy with me. I won't be able to post tonight either, for the same reason. That aside; the new hotel is pretty nice, there's so many of us that Tim and I got overflowed into a suite in the guesthouse. Today has been a tour of Salzburg, and it's been very tiring. Most of our tour is focused on composers. We spent more than a bit of time looking at the Haydn museum at the Esterhazy Palace, then spent an hour or so at his house, looking at stuff they think might have been his at one point in time. Now, in Salzburg, we've been drowning in Mozarty information (Salzburg was his hometown). It's certainly interesting, but there's so much going on it's hard to find time to write. On the bus I'm often trying to catch up on rest. Throughout the days, we're rushing from one place to another, and it's quite tiring. Excuse the overall lack of cohesion, we're grabbing dinner during this batch of freetime, and I'm very distracted. I'll try to write more later and upload it. I do want to say that the churches and cathedrals have been a magnificent sight to behold. We've sung in several churches already, and this morning we sang for a local mass. The folks were very receptive, and the space was wonderful to sing in. Okeedoke, bill time. More laters.

MOAR!

Yesterday was pretty nice, though busy. We took some tours throughout Vienna proper, and got to run amok in the city for lunch. We got a quick peek at some of the palaces in the area (outside only). The layout, as mentioned in my previous post, is quite interesting. All the buildings are multiple stories, but keep to the original aesthetic styles. In WWII, Vienna suffered from multiple bombings and lost about 30% of their buildings. When they were rebuilt, they kept in line with the original architectures, making it still feel like a very old city. Side note, the Viennese are squeezing every possible coin out of Mozart's long decomposed corpse. EVERY BLOCK had a "Mostly Mozart" store. They were peddling all sorts of poorly fashioned crap plastered with Wolfgang's face. It was the equivalent to Classically styled 7/11's. I hadn't looked, but would not be surprised if they had Mozart Slurpees. We visited the Cathedral in town, dedicated to St. Steven. It wasn't the largest in Europe, but it was pretty huge. What was interesting was the fact that the Northern tower was never finished. The Southern tower was beautifully gilded and gloriously tall, but the north tower only made it about halfway up before they gave up and capped it with an Eastern-European styled dome. We snuck up towards the front of the church and performed a German rendition of Holy, Holy, Holy... then snuck out, given the fact that we never cleared such an impromptu performance with the clergy. After lunch, we visited Sch(umlaut-o)nnbrunn castle, the summer estate for the Hapsburg family. (Past tense, of course, they kinda stopped ruling after WWI and all....) It was impressively large with some very beautiful rooms. Among my favorites were the rooms for the Emperor Franz Joseph. They were quite simple and functional, compared to the opulence of the rest of the estate. Apparently, he did an incredible amount of work, and fancied himself a servant of the people; so he kept his personal effects to a minimum. Ack, I'm the only person left here at breakfast, and I've got to be in the bus in just a couple of minutes. I'll try to get some pictures up later, I know I promised.... sorry. I'm off to the Esterhazy to sing. More to come later.

One day down....

The initial flight went from Detroit to Frankfurt and lasted about 8 hours. We left at approximately 6 in the evening, and thanks to time zone magic ended up on this side at about 8 in the morning. We had a 4 hour layover before trekking off to Vienna, and our current accommodations will persist for the next few days. For fear of sounding cliche, it is quite beautiful, the bits we've seen. We did a bus tour of Vienna proper, but it was cut short due to some kind of municipal strike. The city is divided in an interesting way. There exists a road that circles the old portion of town. Inside the circle, the majority of the buildings are quite old and elegant, but outside the circle things get a bit more modern. Melanie has a very nice SLR camera, that can take snapshots in rapid succession, which worked out well for the unpredictability of taking pictures from a moving coach. It also totes a pretty nice lens, so we got some nice shots. Today is a walking tour of Vienna, and weather permitting, we'll grab some more pictures. I'll post the up when I get an opportunity to upload them to the computer. Our hotel is located in a suburb of Vienna, Modling. It's a small town with a couple of old churches. One of which was open and operational, an old (yet still very tall) not-quite-a-cathedral catholic church. In a fluke of reservation screw-ups, Tim and I managed to get one of the nicer rooms at no extra charge. I'm in the process of enjoying some nice breakfast, and we're going to get moving on pretty soon, but I wanted to throw down a quick update. If anyone needs to reach me, e-mail is the best bet. Photos up later!

2.5 Years

Man, a lot has happened these past coupla years. It's hard to believe that my last post was so long ago... Anyhoos, on to pertinent informations; I knuckled down and bought an Eee PC. I was pondering the purchase of said thing for quite some time, but I never really had cashbucks with which to buy it. Thanks to my shiny Tax refund, G.W. bought me a shiny new sub-laptop that continues to blow me away. Firstly, the default interface that was setup by the fine folks over at ASUS is mighty slick for those who don't have any familiarity with Linux. Everything just works(tm) and I could easily see buying something like this for the technically challenged. Of course, I'm not technically challenged, and immediately began taking the system apart. I booted into "advanced desktop mode" which is a slimmed down version of KDE. Again, things ran smooth and easy for me there. I was fairly pleased with the default Xandros install, but once I tried to augment the system with more apps the flaws became apparent. The Xandros folks make their monies by selling subscriptions to their software, which, besides providing support, also gives access to their repositories. I wasn't entirely repositoryless, because after a very brief stint on eeeuser, user-created repos were available. However, while they were decently comprehensive, they still lacked some packages I needed. I also took the time to install the build-tools chain in an effort to just compile the software I desired, but that created more issues than I was looking for. All said, I decided to run my stalwart warhorse that is Slackware. I could not have been happier with the performance. The solid state drive loads quickly and effeciently, there's a nice third-party kernel package compiled for the Eee, and compiling programs once again became easy and intuitive (as easy and intuitive as it can get, I suppose). The performance of the laptop is excellent. It's not at fast as my dual-proc desktop, but you'd hardly notice when using it. This machine has very quickly ascended to my primary machine with the exception of music and video playback (a total of 12Gb of storage is to blame for that). This machine clips at speeds that easily rivals my old laptop, a 2.2Ghz celeron. I mean, I'm using compiz-fusion at smooth and effortless speeds. The resolution seems like it would turn folks off from using it, but I can hardly get enough (and my vision isn't that great.. I'm supposed to be wearing glasses right now). All in all, this is one nice machine. I bought a portable DVD player case for it, which works quite well, holding headphones, wireless mouse, and the power adapter. I now have full internet capabilities anywhere, I love it. That's pretty much it on the tech front. I'll try to post in here more often now that I have endless internet access. -Dave

Inspiration

I am a lazy, lazy person. To add to that, I'm very good at just getting by. These two flaws in my personality are the predominant factors working against my ability to succeed in life. I am one of the most fervent workers when it comes to something that truly stimulates me. If I am working on a computer problem (which I'm interested in) I can work for hours straight and not even realize it nor would I care about it. I just immerse myself until a solution is found. Same thing at my current job: my goal is to see as many people happy and enjoying themselves as I can. I simply focus on having fun with coworkers and customers and the time just melts away. Unfortunately, however, if I am put up to a task which I don't enjoy or is not the activity I want to be doing, I find myself a terrible worker with the worst work ethic known to man. For example, the past couple of summers when I've been working at Triple "L," I always started off very interested in what I was doing there. Yet, after a few weeks, I became bored and my efficiency went from excellent to pure crap. Another example would include my schoolwork. I don't do homework unless I need it to pass. This brings me to the next subject of gripetivity: squeaking by. I always manage to squeak past large obstacles. I never really fail out of a class, I've never been evicted, all these things I do wrong I never really learn my lesson because I never completely failed at them.

The music in my life has also fallen victim to my foibles. I have never been a very good music student because, while it's been a big interest of mine, I've always had other things I wanted to be doing right then. As time goes on, however, I find myself moving towards the light, so to speak. I've been getting more and more interested in playing. I now find myself wanting to play professionally, and in my current state that's not a solid option. I'm getting serious... I'm just taking my time.

Tonight I went to hear the Brass Band of Battle Creek perform their Christmas concert. The ensemble is a veritable horde of world-class players, and the two Euphonium players are arguably _the_ two best Euphonium players in the world. I was duly impressed upon. So tonight I came back and played my horn from about 12:30 until 1:15ish, when Campus Security came and kicked me out of the music building. Now I'm listening to recordings of various rehearsals that I made and making critical decisions about my tone and style and what-not.

I'm getting motivated. I have what it takes to be stellar, sans inspiration. If my motivation continues at this rate, soon I'll be spending countless hours on Euph rather than on the computer.

I'm willing to put in the work necessary to excel. I'm ready, so here goes. Wish me luck.

Guns and Links

Well, I've got two quick things to mention. Firstly, links is now my primary browser on the laptop, and secondly, I bought a subscription to Cedega. I'm currently trying to get Counter-Strike:Source to work, which is really the only thing that keeps windows installed. So far, Steam works flawlessly, but the game lags some. There are some things that I have yet to try, so I'll keep things updated. Complete freedom from Windows would definitely make this fanatic happy.

Wow...

This is probably the silliest thing I've ever seen. I'm currently writing this blog post from inside links. ...and it's typing quite quickly. I may start using links more and more on the laptop. I'm a fan.