16:07

Code
Wrote a little perl-script to convert pine's .addressbook and mutt's alias files to VCARD format. You can get it here.

17:30

Life
Amazing as it may seem, life goes back to normal -- it always does. I'm compeltely amazed by how New York and New Yorkers deal with this desaster; this truely is the greatest city in the world. Several articles in Thrusdays New York Times captured many sentiments prefectly.



As incomprehensible as it may seem to non-New Yorkers, the way the city managed to maintain at least some normality (garbage-trucks running, mail coming etc) is touching in its own way. Mayor Guiliani has demonstrated extraordinary leadership (something that just can not be said of the current President). Again, another article in last Thursdays Times expressed my feelings as well.




Job
Exactly one week before the catastrophe I was granted my H1-B visa -- paying the $1,000 bribe, uhm, "premium service fee" obviously yielded a quick response. That means, that since that day, I'm officially System Administrator for the CS Dept. at Stevens Insitute of Technology in Hoboken. So far the job is fun: almost all of the departmnets machines run NetBSD, and we have plans to build a 30-Node High performance cluster. Unfortunately this leaves me once again with less free time for free software. But thank $your_deity I'm back to a normal (in contrast to unemployed) life.

Being employed by a university allows me to take classes at night (for free) and to get my Masters degree. This semester I take Object Oriented Database Systems and Interactive Graphics (using OpenGL).




On another note, I got my skateboard which I had ordered a few weeks ago and took it out to play today. For the last four years, I've only been riding my longboard, so it was kinda weird to be try tricks on the small one. Even though I suck big time after such a long time it was fun. Fell on my ass, though, so it hurts a bit.




<cheese>Life, again, amazes me. As Guiliani stated, New York will come out of this even stronger.</cheese>

[em?16:40

Went to work this morning. This
means walking across Manhattan and taking the Path to
Hoboken. While walking I saw the first tower being on
fire - nobody was sure what was going on. By the time I
arrived in Hoboken, the second plane had hit the second
tower. I actually watched the collapse of the second tower
from across the river. It has been the scariest thing I've
seen in my life.

22:24

MakeMan
Fixed a few bugs in makeman.pl and made a new release. Some people are apparently using it now, so that I do get some feedback. Good. Go get it and let me know what you think. (Sorry, jfleck, haven't had time yet to investigate the XML/XSLT thing.)



Movies
A short recap of the last few movies:




* a perfect Murder - soso. Gwyneth Paltrow (sp?) sucked, I thought and the guy that was hired to kill her blew, too. M.D. was fine, though - as usual: playing a rich arrogant bastard suits him. Memorable quote: "The only thing that keeps you from bloting out right away is bad genes and greed." Pretty average movie - the last scene is ridicolous as in so far that the people appear to have super-hero powers, throwing each other through the room.

* Funny Games - not bad. Another weird movie. Strenous. But ok.

* Pollock - while I most certainly will never understand "artists" per se, this was an enjoyable movie. Somehow some szenes left a foul taste, but in general it was good. Anyway, I really did like the paintings, though.

* Happy Accidents - my SO dragged me there. Being a "Romantic Comedy" I would have avoided it like the plague, if it was up to me. Turned out to be not so bad. Well, I guess if you go in with low expectations... Anyway, of course it had to be all cheesy in the end: I would have much preferred if the guy had been just a nutcase. Oh well.

15:05

m2p2
Finished more man pages. Now there are 100, so I made another tarball-release on [fm]. Should show up there soon.




MakeMan
Communicated with jfleck, who said he successfully used makeman.pl. It seems it would be helpful/desirable to modify it so as to use XML [(instead of)