...or similar for those who enjoy the hopefully silence part of the year. May you have someone to cuddle you to sleep... and also wake up again with. ;)
Haven't written anything for way too long, I tried to put something down again last week, and this is what I came up with. It's not influenced by anything special, it's not as well as I usual prefer, but still, I thought I should share.
life is strange
it starts off without knowledge
in the end you die
love is strange
it starts off with bad heartaches
in the end - alone
things are strange
still we try to survive it
go on day by day
One says the eyes are the mirror of the soul. I made this experience back in easter for the first time. I was over at my brother's place for easter celebration when I got up in the morning, went into the bath and looked into the mirror for morning toilet. I washed my face like always with cold water to refresh myself, and when I removed my hands... I was sure I was looking into a female face. It quite a lot bewildered me; it was the first time this happened. And I wasn't even properly shaved...
An experience like this is something special I guess, and it happened more and more often in the meantime. I guess this is one more proof that what I feel is the right thing.
... even though still some others seem to be immensly ammused by it. When I went to the ceilidh at the debconf in EDI I received some pretty nasty responses to my outfit, which I didn't expect within a project about Freedom and Openness. Though, I give the people the doubt of not knowing what they have done. It's too much in human nature to joke about things they don't understand, not knowingly insulting others. I'd like to dedicate this fine tune from Garbage to them: Bleed Like Me. If you listen closely to the lyrics you might be able to find out why...
There has also been a genderfuck night in the club next to the night venue which on the other hand was pretty nice. It was attended by quite some people from Debian, some expectedly, some to my happy surprise. Thank you again guys, for making this evening to something special. I hope you keep it in as nice remembrance as me.
My former SO drew a while ago a pretty nice picture about me. I didn't ask for it, or did hint it, which makes me even more happier about it. Thank you Babsi, really. :) I switched my hackergotchi on Planet Debian to it just in case.
Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. I stumbled upon it in the Venus Envy comic I got notified about earlier this year, you might want to check its contribution, but beware, it might as disturb you as it does to me. I'm thankful that Erin dis survive it, because she gives so much strength with her comic to me and possibly also others...
Today I have been to the "Bourne Ultimatum". I bought myself the first and second part on DVD just recently to remind myself of what was going on, I even planed to watch it with some dear friends but all I received were meaningless promises, and before it stops screening I went on my own—just to stumble upon an old friend in the cinema who was going to watch the movie himself with his brother. Anyway, I was really looking forward to this part, given that I really enjoyed the former two parts—and I wasn't disappointed at all. It is a really worthy final part of this trilogy. Julia Stiles had a bit bigger part in this one which was an added enjoyable addition, and the scenes in Madrid were really quite thrilling. All thumbs up!
Next round of catching up. Two more concerts I had been to since Texta. First of them was Wir sind Helden. They played again in the Gasometer, but the entrance wasn't as bad as I am used to at that location. The accoustic in the hall still hasn't really improved, though. But aside from the location the concert was truly worth it. The support band Polarkreis 18 was unknown to me but are worth keeping an eye on, and if you don't know them neither they pretty much reminded me of Radiohead. Wir sind Helden themself did rock the hall totally, it was true fun seing how the band themself enjoyed the concert, played with the fans, and when they sang Bist Du nicht müde nach so vielen Stunden ("Aren't you tired after so many hours") as encore my shouting of "NOOO!!" got Judith offtracks and laughing. ;)
Last week at Halloween Grossstadtgeflüster had been to the B72 again. What can I say, I just love the band. I was though pretty impressed that they remembered me—hell, Jen even remebered my name Rhonda D'Vine without me mentioning it... It helps that they aren't that famous yet and thus one can just approach them frankly without much fear of annoying them or being pushed off by some security guy. It's sad though that they sill haven't got any record label since they were last here and that their fanpage has been closed for the second time. I am thinking about helping to fight the latter problem at least, it's pretty useless to buy domains (gsgf-fans.de, gsgf-fanpage.de) and then return them after a short while, making it mostly unusable again. :/
Some people say, write it right ahead or you won't write it at all. I fear the latter, thus I'm trying to catch up with things that happend in the last months. Not that I didn't mention some aspects, but I haven't written about some others and want to keep them at least for myself in good rememberance.
There were some movies I went to, and some of them I totally enjoyed. First thing was "1408"—a horror shocker with John Cusack, and I really enjoyed it. I'm not a big fan of splatter horror, and this wasn't, it's a pretty nice done psycho shocker. If you still have the chance and like the genre, go and watch it. :)
Then there was "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" which I watched even twice, with both my best friends. One would expect it being more cliche, more shallow—but it isn't. It really astonished me a fair bit how well it tackles the topic, and as an additional benefit the soundtrack of the movie is yet another must-have.
Which brings me to "Lissi und der wilde Kaiser". Don't. Just... don't. This one is cliche, this one is shallow. Some small jokes, weakly connected to some story... Bully, you did way better before.
Alright, first round of catching up, more to come. After all I'm syndicated on some Free Software related planets, and people might be interested in what's getting done in those parts, too. Not that I would do things in secret...
Alright, a bit late. But it was hell of a concert, really enjoyed it. There were two support bands: First there was Hinterland with their new album "Zwa Seiten" and then there was Die Antwort, both of them quite interesting. Finally Texta came onto the stage and gave a great concert. You might want to take a listen to the two free mp3s they have linked from their LastFM profile. The version of Hediwari isn't the best but should give you and idea about their style—austrian hip hop at its best.
As added benefit you might want to watch So könnt's gehen on youtube. The interesting part of it, though propably noone cares, the guy from the first band (shy) without an instrument is a working collegue of mine. ;)
Yesterday it was "The Simpsons Movie" time—and it was hilarious! Don't miss it, you'll regret it. I had a pretty good laugh at quite a lot scenes. There is also the obligatory celebrity starring, this times it has Green Day and Tom Hanks in it.
What are you waiting for! Stop reading and go to the cinema!
Since quite a while gettext has support for a feature which I was waiting for since ages: --previous. It means that when a string gets marked fuzzy it adds the previous original string as a comment so one is able to see the difference which led to the fuzzy marking. This makes translation of po files much much more comfortable because one can easily find out now what has changed. Let me give you a reallife example:
With out the previous string (in the "#|" line) you would propably be puzzled about what has changed because the string gets stripped off the everything before the ^ for displaying it in this case.
Though, not all translation tools behave correctly. One of them is unfortunately poedit. It moves the previous string to a wrong place and thus breaks the parsing of the file. A bugreport has been filed about it—but unfortunately it also means that upstream projects that already support (like Wesnoth) it are considering disabling it again because of this. So I wrote quickly a perl script that is able to fix that for you: pofix.pl. It's quite simple, reads from stdin and writes to stdout.
Go and support --previous before your competitors do it and hijack all your translators! ;)
Two movies again this week: first we went to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" which was quite nice. For people who have read the book and know how things work: quite some parts got reduced/removed. Who am I kidding, I mean, the book is immensly long, noone was expecting to have everything in the movie, did they? If they did, they were fooling themself.
For those who haven't read it: the remaining parts were mostly consistent and well done. There was just one thing that iritated me a bit with respect to the Thestrals on which they flew which Hermione and Ron weren't able to see—I expected to have at least a small scene with their scared faces and/or when mounting them. But appart from that it was pretty nice. :)
Second movie was "Live Free or Die Hard". I really was looking forward to it, being an longtime Bruce Willis fan—and I wasn't disappointed. At. All! Everything was great. The action was nice but not the sole part of the movie. The dialogues were more than just interesting, and the story had it's nice parts, too. And I liked that Kevin Smith was in the movie. His role was great. :D
Looked two third parts of movies this weeks. Started off with "Ocean's Thirteen". Was pretty nice and funny, including the usual strange dialogues between Danny and Rusty. The style of some parts of it was a bit too 70ties and psychadelic for me, though. Pretty worth watching anyway.
The second third part had been "Shrek the Third". Was quite worth it, and the way they picked on the King Arthur story and some other fairy tales was well done, too.
Now I'm just looking forward to yet another third movie; though that one was originally planed and not done just because the previous ones were a success: The Bourne Ultimatum—I hope it will let me enjoy the evening, too. :)
Yesterday we had first night for the play Lysistrata in which I also have a role. It can be called a success—people congratulated us and laughed a fair bit. Babsi and me even got a special applause for our scene. I was a fair bit astonished to see Bamschabl from the Austrian comedy duo "Muckenstrunz und Bamschabl" in the audience. It seemed like he enjoyed it, at least.
If you don't know what to do tonight or tomorrow—there are still two nights left that we play. It's shown in the Scala (no, not Mailand but Vienna) on Wiedner Hauptstraße 108, starts at 20:00 and the admission fee is € 5,— (or € 3,— for pupils and students). See you there!
Not sure if you remember my blog entry about Xing. Anyway, something interesting happened again which I don't want to keep for myself. I've taken a look at the english version and well, it said Gender—not Sex. So I requested to have it changed to match my Gender, don't want to lie to them. I even noticed this meaning difference in the comment field about those changes which needs to get approved by the team.
Guess what, it was denied. With a template answer including the possible reason of that "it doesn't fit our guidelines". But the most interesting part of the reply was in the first line:
Sehr geehrte Frau Fuchs,
... which means something like "Dear Ms. Fuchs". I guess the change was possible at least in parts of their system. ;)
I later sent them some support request asking about maybe a non-template answer why it was declined, including the links to wikipedia again. Well, I was a bit astonished to find out that it was accepted and changed. Yet again, there was something funny with this mail, yet again in the first line of it:
Some small impressions of Sunday that made it the happiest of my life: spent the day with a very special person—good indian food for lunch—Spiderman 3 in the afternoon which I enjoyed quite a bit—meeting up with friends in the Metalab, have a nice chat and quick dinner—moved over to B72 for the concert of Grossstadtgeflüster which was absolutely great—received a "Sudoku for Dummies" book from Berk with whom I did Sudokus at lunch at work until he let the company—received a pink-fluffy handbag with matching riveted belt and a mini tartan skirt—received a Mermaid mousepad from Alex—received a Grossstadtgeflüster patch from Raphael.
Hope you don't take the list of some presents as belittling the others. It's just that these meant something special to me, not that I didn't enjoy the others.
Some friends were still a bit puzzled about the tickets I bought—they tried to give me the money for it. They weren't aware of the try to at least thank them with them for that they were and are there for me in bad times, giving me support and strength when I need it. And I can say that most of them enjoyed it, even though I was distracted quite a bit... And be sure, this is what you get when you let me do some birthday arrangements on my own. ;)
Kind reminder right at the start: the Grossstadtgeflüster concert on my birthday is going to happen coming sunday—if you want to celebrate with me or just enjoy nice electro pop, get your tickets now.
But this entry is meant to be about another band that I love quite well, Chumbawamba. You most propably have heard some of their songs somewhere, Tubthumping was aired quite well. But I guess many people don't know much about their political background, which makes them even more interesting. Like their Enough is Enough (Kick It Over) which they wrote at the time when the austrian government was put together not by the main voted party but by the second and third, where the second is a rather right winged party, to make people start thinking again. Or their Pass It Along which they put online in a rather genious mp3 remix containing some quite interesting quotes and point of views from some of the "important" people in music business.
Hopefully you'll like their songs (including the other non-album tracks they put online for download) and agree with me that they are worth the support.
I'm not sure if you have heard about Xing (formerly known as OpenBC) yet. It is meant to be a platform to keep in touch with your business contacts, by having them update their contact data on them own. It also offers additional services, including discussion groups, because since Orkut we know that such a platform won't work without. (But I don't want to rant about Orkut here, thanks for asking.)
I stumbled upon a group called GayBC. I guess from the name of it everyone is able to find out what it's about. And it is a closed group, so people who are afraid of discrimination because of stating there preferences publically can feel save. I though that might be the group I'd like to join, having no real problem with my own sexuality of being Bi. (Although, I say it myself that my poem "Mermaids" isn't about the sexual part at all and people who seem to read this in it are not understanding it.) Given that there wasn't too much information on the group page about what they want in the join info I didn't provide too much informations and was rejected of course. I say of course, because that just gave me the impression that the moderators do really care.
Alright, I told myself, I'll answer their mail with all informations I could provide. I'm not sure if my fault was that I did that offsite per email or what, but it was never responded to, at all. So I tried to look on the site again for the group page, only I wasn't able to find it anymore through the search. After some digging around through the system and other groups I found out the schema of how the URL has to look to see that I just see on the page that I was rejected. No informations on how to contact the moderators anymore, no information on if this is permanent or whatsnot.
So I tried to contact the site support, asking if there is a timeout to such a reject and posibility to reapply, or any idea how to go on. Well, they first tried to tell me to contact the moderators (and ignored the other question). After I told them that that's not possible and teaching them about their own system, they finally forwarded a mail from me with more informations to the moderators. After a while I got a response from one of their moderators saying that as a Bi person I'm not gay enough to join the group...
I was like... Uh! A group, that is about people facing discrimination in quite different ways is discriminating themself. I wasn't able to think straight for a while after I read that, trying to find out about what's going on...
Well, I thought to myself, the group is German language, and doesn't want to have Bi people in it—so I thought I should turn the anger into something productive. Turning emotions into something productive/creative is the way quite a lot of conflicts can be avoided and good things happen. I applied for creating a group called LesBiGay with the intended purpose of being a closed group too, but not discriminating against Bi people and being English language, and explicitly stated in the comments that the existing GayBC group doesn't want Bi people amongst them.
Guess once what happened. The staff from OpenBC rejected the request with the reasoning that GayBC exists already and that I should get in contact with them. Interestingly that message was sent in a way that doesn't allow a reply...
The much I like the feature of having all the contact informations for the people available in a nice way and having them current the much I have to make you aware that the rest of the system stinks. Keep away from it, it works against you, doesn't offer minimal informations or features and flexibility.
On a sidenote—a dear friend of me showed me Venus Envy after my last blog entry and it really made my last days. Read it all! :D It gives me quite a lot of strength, and there I found this beauty that I dedicate to the GayBC group on OpenBC. Enjoy.
I think it's time to start blogging more often about this topic, and fill this section a bit more. I mean, Mermaids was a long time ago... And debconf in Mexico with my first try on skirts, getting rid of my beard and dying my hairs red is history in the meantime, too.
In summer I met upin Bratislava with a longtime friend from a MUD I played way back, and enjoyed running around in a skirt there, too. Gladly it was a sunny day. It was though... people back here in Vienna looked more awkward at me than in Bratislava. At least that was my impression...
Had been to Extremadura for the i18n meeting which was quite nice. It was quite productive, even though I have to admit that I haven't done much on that front since. Even in Spain people didn't look that strange at my skirt as over here in Austria...
At our company's Christmas party I got into a talk with a work colleague about the topic and she informed me that a former working colleague of us is starting with hormone treatment after the year change and if I'd fancy a meeting with him. I was quite happy about that offer so we arranged a meeting on December 23rd. It was a bit strange at first to address him as he, and we didn't know how to start talking because said working colleague was late, but after a while we talked about various things and even were finished with the more interesting topics when she finally appeared. We arranged to visit the next Trans-X meeting after the year change.
I left them for leaving home, but I wasn't able to catch my bus on time—the subway had serious problems. Well, I thought I might spend the night in the Flex so I called another working colleague who usually hangs out there about what was going on that evening, and interestingly he told me it was Gay Heaven night. I stopped believing in coincidence long ago... Anyway, was a nice evening all in all, they had a Christmas rabbit handing out "I love you" stamps with pink ink-pads. :)
The Trans-X meeting wasn't too bad. It was some discussions about various topics. After a while my first shyness dropped a bit and I started to join in the discussion at some points. After the first started to leave I had some more direct talks with two of the women from there, one of them had mostly the same trip home as me so we talked on in the subway.
A week later they had set a transgender weekend—no wonder, it was the weekend of the Rosenball. They were meeting in a cafe on Friday and I joined them, a bit less shy now that I at least knew some of the faces. Maria was quite ill and was sitting in her jacket within the cafe, shivering like hell... But all in all it was a nice meeting too, got to know some more nice people.
I was a bit lazy from there on, didn't join another meeting... But another working colleague did invite me to the carnival party of his sister. I thought I could try a bit more than before, in the disguise of the carnival party, so I used a bra my former wife left behind, filled it with some socks, and put up some eye makeup (quite discreet, I hate overdone makeup already on natural females...) The light there wasn't the best, so they just saw my tall body at first. It took them a while to even notice the skirt, and only after I put off my long-sleeve they haven't noticed my breast. But well, I don't really blame them, my working colleague has announced me as a he, and given the low lights it's not too bad. Though, after the host noticed my breasts he asked if he could touch them and I even received a quite nice kiss from him. :D
I stumbled upon the Gaia TG Guild on Gaia Online—a quite interesting web-based community. In general Gaia is filled with mostly kids, many of them immature, not able to spell and considering that even cool, but there are some quite special guilds that are lots of fun. But still, when I stumbled upon the TG Guild I was in awe of that such a thing could exist there. What I read made me feel totally happy and more confident on the path I'm having ahead of me.
Last week I finally had been to an Trans-X meeting again, and Maria showed some quite interesting reportages about transsexual people—including one that was on TV just the day before about a 14 year old girl who is already on hormone treatment and has the absolute support from her family since she was 4 and confronted them with cutting "it" off when they don't allow her to wear skirts when going out, too. All the best to you, Kim! I so envy your strength...
I'm sorry about the length of this entry—but I'm sick of people who tell me that I'm only playing it, or that I would hide... And I also see it as a chance to document my path for myself. I promise—the next entries will be more often and thus shorter.
For once I know exactly what to look foward to for my birthday: I will spend the evening at a concert of Grossstadtgeflüster. They are a German language band from Berlin, and I really started to love their lyrics. You can download a very fine remix of Ich muss gar nix — the song they are best known for. Today was the day: I received the CD I ordered (just listened to them before through a copy of a friend) together with some stickers, an autograph card and a small button, and also today I bought ten tickets for the concert! *bounces*
"10?!" you might ask. Well, for a start they weren't too expensive, and I also want to have some of my closer friends around me and at least thank them for being there for me all the time. I also want to make sure that they don't miss the chance of buying tickets — it happened to me too often, so this is also a bit of a precaution.
I take this as a chance to finally write more about the propably most important part of my life: the music. I have totally neglected this love over the years, but I want to change that and at least reinitiate this part of my blog. Let's see how it's coming along.
ccr has uploaded a new beta version of his fabulous xmms-sid extension for the X MultiMedia System which now also supports localization. I have prepared a package so you can test it, start localizing it for your language, or just enjoy it. I have noticed some possible wrong implementation of the i18n infrastructure, I had to do the msgfmt for the de.po myself — if you know what goes wrong here any input is absolutely welcome.
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