…. und plötzlich werden von irgendwo her mit Erde gefüllte Badewannen im Uni-Innenhof auftauchen und die herbeiströmenden Menschen können nach Lust und Laune einen Grashalm, eine Blume, einen Samen hineinsplanzen …

Wann? Do., 3. Juni, 11.00 Uhr
Wo? Innenhof des Campusneubaus
Mitbringen? Blumen, Pflanzen, Samen …

Wieso? Diese Aktionen – manche nennen es auch “Guerilla Gardening”, also eigenmächtiges Gärtnern im öffentlichen Raum – dient dazu den Innenhof der neuen Unicampus provisorisch zu begrünen, um erstens schon jetzt mehr Grün an die Uni zu bringen und zweitens die Uni-Leitung dazu aufzurufen, das vorliegende ausgearbeitete Begrünungskonzept umzusetzen.
v Desweiteren: spread the word! bitte weiterflüstern, weiterleiten, vorbeikommen …

[www.myspace.com/pflanzmob]

Es grüßt,
der PflanzMob

PS: Wer zu dem Zeitpunkt nicht kann, soll gerne zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt pflanzen.

Find ich persönlich eine sehr coole Idee…

Sadly, this won’t happen in one, five or even ten years. Maybe within the mid of this century, when there have been enough Tsunamis, Hurricanes and Typhoons killing people, and enough floods, ground erosion and slash-and-burn have taken place and have wiped out enough farmland to let the remaining poor people die on hunger, then maybe some leaders will open their eyes and come to the conclusion “We’ve fucked up in Copenhagen ’09″.

Update: I’ve stumbled across a noteworthy article of The Guardian from Mark Lynas about the conference and the blocking position of China:

[...] China’s growth, and growing global political and economic dominance, is based largely on cheap coal. China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower [...] Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to. [...]

History tells us that a single human life – or even hundreds or thousands of them – doesn’t count much in China. I expect this won’t change in the future.

Besonders erschrocken hat mich hier die breite Plakatierung von NPD und REP auf fast allen Ausfallstraßen und vor allem auch in Innenstadt-/ Bahnhofsnähe. Es schien sich ausgezahlt zu haben, Umfragen zufolge erreichte wohl gerade die NPD in einigen Gebieten zweistellige Zustimmung.

Dass die hiesige Regierung unwillens oder unfähig ist, diesen “Parteien” auf rechtsstaatlichem Wege den Garaus zu machen, ist hinlänglich bekannt. Eine viel größere Farce ist für mich noch, dass dieses rechte Gesindel sogar noch aus der öffentlichen Hand mitfinanziert wird. Richtig ist aber auch, dass rechtes Gedankengut durch bloßes Verbieten nicht aus den Köpfen der Leute verschwindet. Viele Landespolitiker gerade in der Provinz sehen nun die “Früchte”, die das fehlende Budget für Jugend- und Sozialarbeit in ihrer Region getrieben hat; rechte Blender lauern an allen Orten auf die Unwissenden, Zurückgelassenen und Wütenden.

Ein Ärgernis sind wohl vor allem auch die Hetzplakate, die überall hoch an den Lichtmasten hängen. Der Gesetzgeber erlaubt die Wahlwerbung an bestimmten öffentlichen Plätzen (ausgenommen sind bspw. Ampelanlagen) und unter diesem Schutz kann bpsw. die NPD ungehindert agieren. Anwohner direkt am Ort der Plakatierung stehen dem meist ohnmächtig gegenüber, denn sie machen sich lt. Gesetz sogar strafbar, wenn sie Wahlplakate abnehmen, auch wenn diese erheblich das Stadtbild verschandeln und ein schlechtes Licht auf die Nachbarschaft werfen (“schau, sind ja alles Nazis hier!”).

Was könnte man also nun konkret mit wenig Budget in einer Kleinstadt wie Eisenach dagegen tun, gerade gegen die übermäßige und ekelhafte Plakatierung? Mir kam hier der Gedanke des “public private partnerships” – wie wäre es denn, wenn die Stadt die Grundstücke ihrer Lichtmasten an die Anwohner verkauft und sie von diesen für einen “symbolischen” Betrag wie bspw. 1 Euro / Jahr pachtet? Da der Eigentümer nun nicht mehr die öffentliche Hand, sondern eine Privatperson ist, müsste die NPD bei jedem Eigentümer einzeln um Erlaubnis bitten, ihre Plakate an “ihren” Lichtmast aufhängen zu dürfen. Wird wild plakatiert, hätte der neue Eigentümer sogar das Recht, die Wahlplakate auf eigene Faust und völlig zu Recht zu entfernen.

Mich würde wirklich interessieren, ob das klappen könnte. Wenn ja, wäre der NPD ein Schnippchen geschlagen und sie hätten vermutlich ein großes Problem, noch geeignete Stellen für ihre Plakate zu finden. Nicht einschätzen kann ich hingegen den Verwaltungsaufwand, jedem Anwohner seinen “eigenen” Lichtmast zuzugestehen. Vielleicht gibt es hier auch die Möglichkeit des “Sammelkaufs” – es käme auf einen Versuch an! Was meint Ihr?

While I don’t envy the US americans for their past eight years of Bush and all the other problems they have, I’m certainly envious of them about their current president Obama. I wonder if somebody like Obama would even get as high in the political triangle in one of the countries of the “old world” – I’m sure that there are a lot of good, political driven people here as well which could do a similar good job, but I doubt they’d ever get the chance to “run for chancellor”…

The outbreak of the disease seem to have started sometime in Summer of 2008, after he was visiting my parents in Eisenach and his relatives in Zella-Mehlis (both located in Thuringia). It was kind of his “final tour” where he was looking for known people and locations one last time. One event seem to have troubled him very much back in the day, the day when he tried to find the grave of his mother in Zella-Mehlis, but couldn’t find it because it was removed long ago; something which nobody of his siblings told him about.

The following months from August to December were horror for my grandmother, which is also already in her seventies. She cared for him all day, cleaned him and his clothes, went with him to several doctors, and while he was sleepy most of the time, he got active overnight and prevented her sleep.

On January 23rd the situation got unbearable for her and they took my grandfather into a nursing home nearby the garden where both used to live. And this was also the place where I met him on Sunday: He sat in a wheelchair in the corridor, his head hung down to the right. His eyes looked glassy, I think he didn’t recognize me at all. No smile, no words, almost no reaction. My grandmother and me sat down on his side and talked, while he was drooling on his pullover. Some time later, after he regorged the last meal, we brought him to his room and I put him into his bed with the help of a male nurse. He fell off his bed just a few days ago and got hurt on his right arm and hip, so he seemed to have big aches with every move that we made. It was more than brutal to see this once proud and strong man in this situation.

I talked to my father the other day about this and he told me about his last visit in mid January. Back then he still had some “light” moments where one could talk to him. After my grandmother left the room, my father was alone with him for a short time. He reassured him that they’ll give him some treat which makes the disease sufferable, but he just responded “How long should all this still last…?”

I don’t wish anybody to die this way and I certainly don’t want to die this way. Time will tell us if researchers will finally find something which treats this disease (there seem to be field tests at least with some special protein blocker) or if I have to put a special paragraph for this and similar cases in my testament later on: “Kill me, I don’t want to live on!”

[Update] My grandfather died on early Tuesday morning, on February 10th, 2009, after he stopped eating for a couple of days already. I’m sad; at least I had the chance to see him one last time before his death. [/Update]

Actually, the only thing which comes into my mind here is a combination of Portable Firefox and FireGPG on an USB stick (possibly encrypted). This, of course, bears a couple of problems:

1. If you don’t know which OS your “target” computer has, you need to have this “tandem” in at least three different binary versions, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. While this doesn’t sound too hard (three partitions on the same drive), it’ll probably harder to encrypt all three and have something like “plug-and-mail-ready” for the target OS.
2. If you use a non-standard webmailer (i.e. no public service, but an own setup, like I have with roundCube Webmail), you won’t have a really good integration with FireGPG (i.e. no interface buttons, auto-decryption and other stuff) unless the webmail software plans support for FireGPG. (roundCube targeted it for “later“.)
3. And maybe the greatest show-stopper is the question: Is it really secure in untrusted environments? After all, GnuPG needs to load your private key into RAM to decrypt your message, and if it resides unprotected there (does it?), it could be, at any time, be read out by some hidden daemon and boom, your private key would be compromised…

How would you solve this dilemma? A VPN to a trusted PC from which you send and receive emails?

If there are no other good solutions then I guess people will have to choose between accessibility from everywhere and email security. And I bet they don’t choose security…

(Source)

Michelle was missed since Monday after she did not return to home from hoard and was last seen with a man in the upper Lene-Voigt park, a place I go through almost every day with my son when I bring him to the kindergarden.

This strikes me very much. Its always bad news when young children get kidnapped and killed afterwards, but if this happens directly in your neighborhood and you’re having a small child yourself, this touches you even more. All the love and time you’ve invested – gone forever. And everything will remind you at home – the nursery of course, the toys which may lay around in some other room, the paintings you’ve got as a present, the kid’s food in the refrigerator, everything.

What would be my reaction if I was told that my little son was found dead, murdered? What would I do? I don’t know. I’d go mad, I’d scream. I’d try to find the guy who murdered him and kill him, for sure. But what if he’d never be found? Could I live with that? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Let me tell you that I feel very much for Michelle’s parents, and I probably cannot even imagine the pain they feel just right now and in the upcoming weeks, month and over the next years. I very much hope that I never have to go through this. I’ll try my best and promise to prepare my son for this cruel world as much as I can…

But what happens if upstream does not accept them? What if the whole patchwork you’re doing cannot fix the ground architecture of the software, so it would be better to rewrite it from scratch, or, move to another, new fancy software which apparently fixes all the issues of the old one? Maybe you don’t give up on your old, beloved fellow so fast, so you look for and hire consulting for the software to better understand the inner workings of it. But, what if you still don’t get the grasp?

Of course its not that easy to switch to another software, you’ve got very used to it over the years, even developed a particular plugin exactly for it, which would probably not fit into any other look-a-like. And you really love your plugin, since you’ve written and cared about it for endless hours, but its almost sure it would keep plugged into the old software. How would you decide?

Unfortunately, the decision to move on is incredibly harder to take in real life than with computer software:

$ apt-get install new
Warning: new conflicts with old
Deleting packages: old
Installing packages: new
Do you wish to apply these changes [y|N]?