europeblog

More europeblog … now at http://lorrimar.id.au/blog/!

Well, this will be the last europeblog post for a while. Not sure what to call the blog now.

Got into Frankfurt at 6:30 this morning after a gruelling 10 hour bus trip from Wrocław. Managed to fall asleep during the second horrible American movie only to be woken by a van full of polizei who came aboard to look at everyone’s ID. They took a few IDs (I think all names beginning with S) back to the van and spent 15 minutes comparing them to a list before handing back the IDs and arresting no-one. After that I sat uncomfortably and admired the German autobahns, including a tunnel about 7km long through what seemed like a fairly unmountainous region.

Those horrible American movies on the bus were — as most TV is — narrated by the Lektor. It has always amused me how the Polish Lektor is capable of emotionlessly distilling entire phrases of rich African-American dialect into one or two words. Often words starting with k or ch.

My hostel is just over the road from the Hauptbahnhoff, in the nice area with Turkish grocers and sex shops. So I don’t have to carry the bike box very far. It’s somewhere between 20-30kg so I’m going to get stung for excess baggage. The bike itself isn’t very heavy but the panniers, shoes, tent, etc, add up. Had to make a brown packing tape carry handle at the bus station in Wrocław. The builtin carry hole on the box tore out after walking it 100m, damn. Hopefully the box won’t tempt the destructive natures of Qantas baggage handlers.

Frankfurt is nice enough for a few hours of tourism. There is some nice old town architecture and the Main river banks are great. I think I managed to see most of it before sunrise. It was clear weather today but cold. At lunch I had a cup of glühwine by the old town hall and watched workers install lights in a huge christmas tree.

Tomorrow I think I will mostly stay inside, currently lacking the motivation necessary to visit the art galleries which will be open tomorrow. Hostel is nice in that it has a big luggage room and wifi for laptop nerds and facebook weirdos. On the downside my room really bloody stinks and I think I saw little insects jumping off the mattress. Hopefully I was just imagining them…

I wanted to implement a draggable save button in my GTK+ app. This lets the user save his file by dragging the document’s icon from the application onto the desktop or a file browser window.

Drag and drop (DND) is an intuitive approach to file management and XDS avoids the problem of novice users trying to use the file selector dialog as a file manager. However it’s not suitable for mouseless or limited-mouse users, so applications must also provide the conventional file selector.

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Well, now I know all about geographic datums and projections, and what’s the difference between WGS84, EPSG:4326, EPSG:900913. The answer is that WGS 84 is a datum, EPSG:4326 is a projection which refers to WGS 84, no hang on that’s not right, it’s a datum, the same one WGS 84. Actually I’m not so sure about that. Anyway, EPSG:900913 is the new name for a spherical mercator projection. Or is it a datum, I’m not sure? The important thing is that it approximates the Earth as a sphere instead of an ellipsoid, and this makes some geographers really angry.

I finally got around to obtaining and listening to two albums by an obscure 70′s experimental rock group. The albums are supposedly among the greatest of all time. This group should not be confused with Pink Freud, a free jazz project who are in my opinion tak sobie.

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I recently played a CD which was scratched and skipping, making a tick tick tick sound out of tempo with the music. So I applied toothpaste to the affected area and it fixed the skipping.

Super.

While on bike tour, my mobile phone charger stopped working. This was because of the way I kept it with the wire wrapped around it. So I attacked it with a knife, made it good again, then taped it back together with gaffer.

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Two Sundays ago, Magda and I went to Wielka Parada Rowerowa (The Big Bike Parade), which was held as part of European Mobility Week in Wrocław.

The “happening” was basically a planned and legitimised version of Critical Mass. I’m not sure what the official goals were, but for me the action served as a reminder of how awful it is to cycle in Wrocław.

Got back to Wrocław on Sunday evening after 9 restless hours on the train from Zakopane.

All up it was an 89 day tour, 5750km cycled, through 9 countries, estimated 36kg bread & 13kg cheese eaten, 600L water drank, 460 hours sitting on the bike, est. €2200 spent, stayed in 58 different campsites, about 1 banana per day on average, so 89 bananas…

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I’m in Torino this morning. I hope to leave this afternoon. Waiting for the DHL courier to show up to camping… I left my passport at the camping in Laiguegia — well they forgot to give it back to me. But I should never have given them the passport… prefer to pay in advance anyway.

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After a desperate rainy day reading sprint to finish Anna Karenin and — eyes still moist — put it in the mail before the post office closed, I was left with lighter bags, but wanting for reading material.

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