Gulio's tattoo and 22, Nürnberg x 2, and Thanksgiving too!

For Gulio's 22nd birthday he decided a tattoo was in order, I went with him for moral support and to photo-document the occasion. The experience provided me with a reason why I don't want to get one.

The first snow of the season started when we took a trip to Nürnberg for the first time. Electricity was in the air, and I feel like I'm finally going to be able to experience a winter. We went on a Sunday and there was not much to do except ride the U-Bahn and drink Glühwien. The Weinachtsmarkt opened the next weekend so we decided a return trip was in order.

Since this would be our first Thanksgiving away from home for most of the Americans, we decided to get together and make it feel a little bit more like home. Although most of the time we weren't really sure what we were doing, everything turned out to be quite delicious. Mary has an excellent writeup along with some great photos. Check them out, and just to clarify: Team Bacon wears hats.

That weekend almost all of the exchange students went to the opening of the Weihnachtsmarkt in Nürnberg. It was fun and crowded, so we spent most of the day alternating between Glühwein in the Weihnachtsmarkt and coffee.

Snow

I had to create a blogger thing to post

Ama wouldn't let me post on her website unless I registered with blogger. :( www.ericrose.net

Echt deutsche Hausparty

I set out this weekend to answer the age old question: "Do the germans know how to party?" From my observations, the answer is a resounding "Yes." I started out by crashing a patry hosted by friends of people in Mary's English conversation class... who happen to also be friends of Wes ...through Mary's conversations friends... class... german... OUCH. Anywho, check out Mary's blog for the pics.

Good weather for air strikes

Last weekend Wes and I went to see Sigur Rós perform in Dresden. We kind of got off on the wrong foot; we missed our first train and our third train. Meaning we spent much longer on the train and in train stations than we should have. When we got there we noticed that there was quite a bit of construction going on, and a lot more vandalism than we were used to in cities like Munich and Bamberg. We made our way to our youth hostel and found out that we would be sharing the room for the night with four students from the Czech Republic. It just so happened that they were going to see Sigur Rós as well, and that they knew where the venue was.

The concert was hosted in an actual concert hall called the Kulturpalast, and it looked like they were more acclimated to showing concerts and plays than shows. Although Wes and my seats were near the back of the highest balcony, we still had a great view of everything that was going on. Sigur Rós went to great lengths to match their stage presence with their music, and anyone fimiliar with their work knows that is no small feat.

The next day we wandered around Dresden taking pictures of everything we could. Although we didn't go inside we visited the recently reopened Frauenkirche. We also visited an art gallery where various works depicting the city were on display. As most people fimiliar with the history of World War II, or the works of Kurt Vonnegut already know the city was completely destroyed by American bombers in what was one of the more questionable decisions of the war in which an estimated 25,000 were killed. Much of the cityscape of Dresden is still chared giving it an eerie ambiance. All in all the trip was fun and profitable, with the Schönes Wochenende ticket (costing only 30 Euros split between the two of us or 15 euros per person) and the youth hostel (costing 16 Euros per person) we were able to keep our expenses down.



edit: Wesley just uploaded his pictures from the Sigur Ros part of the performance. Check them out!

Parent visit Redux

I added the photos that my parents took, and reworked the thumbnail page so that it plays well with the other pages. This time instead of using Google Labs' Picasa, I went with gThumb, an Open Source tool that comes with Fedora. I was able to customize the web album template rather easily, and I am quite satisfied with the result.

As always, comments make me happy.

EDIT: I moved the picture galleries to gallery2

Classes

My course schedule is as follows:

• Phoenetics Monday 10.00-12.00


• Deutsch Grammatikkurs B Tuesday 08.30-10.00


• Mobilkommuikation und Mobile Computing Tuesday/Thursday 18.00-20.00


• Hörverstandnis Wednesday 8.30-10.00


• Nichtprozedurale Programmierung - Übung Wednesday 10.00-12.00


• Nichtprozedurale Programmierung - Vorlesung Wednesday 12.00-14.00


• Text arbeit und Schreiben Thursday 12.00-14.00


• Nietzsche: Genealogie der Moral Thursday 14.00-16.00

And yes, that means I have one class on Monday and no classes on Friday.

Parents

Parents, believe it or not I have them, and this past week they visited me here in Bamberg. I took them around to all of the sights this city has to offer and I even made them spend a night in Munich. Here are the images (in a new format no less).

Change is good.

I'm trying a new Wordpress theme, unfortunately it ate all my comments on the non-post pages but I'm on a quest to get them back. At present it is (mostly) uncustomized, expect small changes over the next few days.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

Sojourn in Cologne

Two weekends ago Kristen and I made a trip to Cologne (Köln) to visit our friend and former german Teacher, Ama. Ama recently graduated Clemson, and is currently a Fullbright Scholar at the Universität Köln, the Harvard of Germany. Kristen and I decided that we were going to do quite a bit of travel over the coming weeks and months, so we started our journy by purchasing a Bahn Card 50, and because of this we missed our first train to Cologne. However, because the public transportation system here is awesome, we were able to grab a cup of coffee and catch another train an hour later. It ended up being about a 5 hour train ride, and it was a scenic ride so it went by rather quickly. Walking out of the Cologne train station was quite impressive, as we were immediately greeted by the Kölner Dom. Ama found us and took us out for a bit of food, I was able to sample the kölsch Bier (which comes in much smaller portions than beer found in the rest of Germany). Then we went back to Ama's place (which is awesome) and talked, debated, listened to music, and generally enjoyed each others company, so much so that we ended up falling asleep around 6am.

The next day we wandered over to the Rhine and checked out the most important part of the chocolate museum (the gift shop). That night we walked to Gebäude 9 and saw Brendan Benson play his heart out to a german crowd. Unfortunately we were too late to catch the opening band, but Brendan Benson's performance more than made up for it. His melodious popy riffs were a nice contrast to the hardcoreness of As I Lay Dying the previous weekend. Afterwards we wandered around a bit and found ourselves some delicious Cologne Dönner, and like the previous evening we stayed up all night talking, and I even got more than a handful of concert recommendations (most of which I have marked on my calendar). I really had a wonderful time in Cologne and am still trying my hardest to convince Ama to visit us in Bamberg so I can repay her hospitality (and so I might be able to justify a second or eighth visith to Cologne).

Netgear WG511 v2 made in China on Fedora Core 4

I have been in Germany for nearly 2 months without a steady internet connection. This changed today. To spare the reader the pain of explaining exactly what I have tried and failed (rest assured, it was quite a bit) I'll cut to the chase and share with the world how I got it working. ($ means issued as a user, and # means issued as root).

1. 16K stack

The stock 2.6 kernels provides the option to disable the 4K stack. Fedora's kernel does not. This means that in order to use most Windows drivers I had to download a kernel that would support a larger stack. This I found here: http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/full/downloads-fc4-kernel-i686.php
In order to get ndiswrapper working you'll need to download the kernel and the development rpms, and after decompressing them install with:

# rpm -Uvh kernel-*.stk16.i*86.rpm 

Now reboot into your shiny new kernel and you're ready for the next step.

2. ndiswrapper

Simply download the latest version of ndiswrapper from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper.
Inflate and extract the crap out of that tarball with:

$ tar xzvf ndiswrapper*.tar.gz

cd into the newly created ndiswrapper directory and build the executable:

$ make distclean
$ su
password: yourrootpassword
# make
# make install

3. Drivers

If you haven't done so thus far, examine your card and try to figure out the manufacturer and the card type (in my case it was a Netgear WG511 v2 specifically made in China, normally this isn't important but for some reason Netgear wanted to put a different chipset in the cards made in China versus the cards made in Taiwan). Once you know what kind of card you have find it in the list at: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List.
Unzip the archive and you're ready for the next step...

4. Configuration

Next you need to tell ndiswrapper which driver to use. Simply cd into the directory where you extracted your drivers, and give your computer one of these:

# /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i yourwirelesscard.inf
# /sbin/depmod -a
# /sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper

Now you want to see if everything went okay, a good sign is if the lights on your wireless card are blinking. A more accurate indication is if you get some reasonable output from:

# /sbin/iwconfig

Next you can scan the wireless channels for available access points with:

# /sbin/iwlist wlan0 scan

If your Access point doesn't broadcast the SSID, check here for some help. Otherwise give your computer some of these:

# /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed

If you have yourself a WEP key

# /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 key restricted XXXXXXXX

Where XXXXXXXX is your key. Next you want to pick out which network you want to connect to using one of the results from the wlan scan.

# /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 essid YOURESSID

Now let's get that baby an IP address with:

# /sbin/ifconfig wlan0 up
# /sbin/dhclient wlan0

And finally you should be good to go. If everything works okay save the configuration to wlan0 with

# /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -m

I hope this helps someone somewhere. If you followed my instructions and still can't get it to work, try the guys who wrote ndiswrapper at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page.

enjoy!