Just read Chris Toshok’s blog entry about his experience with airport security. In it, he had the bravery to confess he had taken a bottle of visine on board. I commend you for you bravery Chris.

As it turns out, I also have a confession to make.

About a year or so after the September 11th attacks, I inadvertently took a Leatherman multi-tool on board my flight across the Atlantic. After I arrived home from the airport and started unpacking, I discovered it. It was in the front pocket of my carry-on backpack. I would have thought something like that would have been very easy to spot.

After looking at and thinking how crazy it was that it got through, I got this huge sense of relief that they actually didn’t find it. I had visions of marathon interogations and some FBI agent grilling me about why I had it. I’d be saying, “I forgot it was there.” He’d say, “Who are you working with?” And that would go on and on till they were convinced I was harmless. Of course, the plane would be grounded and the airport would be shut down. You know, the usual stuff they do when someone forgets they are carrying a camping tool with sharp edges.

Also in line with the subject of this entry, the RyanAir boss also thinks the security measures are a farce.

Tonight I went to a Padres vs. San Francisco game and while the game itself was very eventful, even more eventful was the dispute that came about after the guy sitting in front of me semi-shouted out, “Go Home Homos!” in response to some Giants fans chanting “Let’s Go Giants.”

The dispute started just after the go-home-homos guy’s friend was yelling out “STEROIDS!… BALCO!…etc.” extremely loudly at Barry Bonds about 15 times and caused a guy next to me to quite aggressively tell him to stop the yelling. Well then the steroid-yelling guy stated his rights and mentioned that thing about living in a free country and all. Well, I took this opportunity to tell the go-home-homo guy that I found what he said to be much worse and that it was offensive. He said “Sorry, if I offended you” and I said he probably offended more people than myself. So after the 2 other guys got finished everything simmered down and the guy who told the steroid-yelling guy to stop left.

A while later the two guys go on and on about how everybody around us, shouting anything at all, should just shut up. This was meant sarcastically of course. Eventually, I remarked (which I probably could/should have refrained from) that I think it was more the way he were yelling and the repetitiveness of it that ticked the guy off. –I was REALLY annoyed too but I’d have probably never said anything.– Well, he took the repetitive thing and ran. “The guy with the popcorn is repetitive. He should shut up.”, “The people over there are repetitive. They should shut up.”

We somehow got talking again and I mentioned that the only reason I got into it was that I took offense to the “Go Home Homos!” remark. During the little discussion about whether “homo” is offensive, the go-home-homos guy brings up some guy’s name that I’m not familiar with and repeats, “You don’t know who so-and-so is?” disbelievingly a couple times. I tell him I may not know the guy because I’ve been outside the country for much of my life. He asks me, “where I was?” and I reply, “Berlin.”

He rares back with his eyes widened, as if he’s gotten me now, and blurts out something to the effect off, “Germans fucking burn people over there!” Taken aback I tell him that Germans, including my wife, would take offense to that, being that we were on the subject of offensiveness. He then said something to the effect of “Your wife burned 6 million people in gas chambers.”

At this point I took out my still/video camera which actually helped to intensify the encounter because I simply had to get this stupidity recorded. The steroid-yelling guy says he doesn’t want to be filmed and I tell him he’s in public and I have the rights in this country as he had taught us earlier. He then precedes to tell me to “Go back to Germany and kill some people.” and then insult my wife, which I was later told by our self-appointed mediator, was an attempt to start a fight. Being that I haven’t been around aggressive people in at least decade I didn’t detect this intention. Looking back at the video it was very much an attempt to start a fight. I later explained to them that a fight with me would be the other guy hitting me, me falling and me being hurt.

It basically goes on and on in circles with the “mediator” talking about how I started it (which could be true if you think people shouldn’t object when people say blatantly offensive things) and that the go-home-homos guy was only responding back to an insult by the Giants fans. Our “mediator” claimed that an opposing team rooting for their visiting team in a home stadium is an insult to the home-tea fans. Therefore, insults such as “Go Giants”, “Let’s Go Giants”, “Come on Giants” warrants counter insults such as “Go Home Homos!”

Basically, the three were against me and our “mediator”, who wasn’t there when the “Homo!” comment was made by the way, got the others to apologize and then demanded that I do the same. I didn’t, due to the fact that they were suggesting I apologize for objecting to the “Go Home Homo!” comment. I should have apologized for taking out the video camera, though. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time because it had long been turned off. The camera was a little much and if you guys are reading this, I do apologize for that. And no, I’m not putting it on the net.

I guess the question is if one should even say anything when someone says such things. I think one should. The way I judge it; if you can’t say it to someone’s face, it’s a pretty good sign its insulting and offensive. When this is based on race, sexual orientation, religion or similar it becomes a societal issue. That’s my justification anyway.

Now to answer the question of whether “homo” is offensive; according to these links, “Homo” is very much offensive. “Gay” or “Lesbian” (for women) are preferred and “Homosexual” is acceptable.

One of their arguments was that “homo” is the equivalent to “black”. Of course, I dare say you’d here anyone call out “Go Home Blacks” without hearing some objections. This is explained well here.

True, gay people aren’t widely hated. But fear of a way of life that is foreign to a large part of this country plays a huge role. A lack of understanding prevents empathy, which is why homo doesn’t have the same taboo attached to it as “wop,” “kike” or “chink.”

As an aside, I found it very odd that during the steroid-yelling guys attempts to make me a fighting man, his tactic was to ask me if I liked to suck cock, take it up the ass and so forth. I seems to me that being that the whole point of me saying anything in the first place was to fight homophobia in my own little way, that that wouldn’t be very effective. Doesn’t the fact that such “insults” are used to make “real men” fighting mad show how ingrained homophobia is?

These guys are basically good guys and I know that. I heard quite a few things about George Bush I would agree with, for example. My one insult was that I called the guy an asshole after the “Wife burning Jews” comment and the other guy too, I think, after his insults. The justification of this I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader. Everything got really heated, extremely stupid things were said and my bringing out the camera probably made things worse.

I’ll end by listing things we agreed on:

1. The Padres should’ve won.
2. Bush is an asshole.
3. Germans gassed ~10mill people.
4. Barry Bonds juiced.
5. Food is way too expensive at the ball park.
6. We probably don’t want to encounter each other again.
7. There are homosexuals in San Francisco.

By the way, The Padres lost in the 13th inning. Bummer.

I’ve been in San Diego nearly a week now. The heat wave that was still in effect the first couple days I was here has seemed to have passed. It was still not as bad as it was in Berlin, though.

The first day I had my lovely little scooter (Vespa p200e) on the road a lady backed into it and knocked it over in front of Big Lots near 30th and University. I was coming out of the bank when I saw her struggling to get it upright again. It caused damage along the left side as well as big dent on the right side. Two days after this happened my new neighbor did the same thing. The second fall caused a few additional imperfections. I now have a short clutch lever, which I actually like, and a big dent on the left side to match the right. I hope that was it. Poor scooter.

I went to the city college to get all the info I need about signing up for courses. I’ve got some special issues with my transcripts and was glad to hear that everything will be ok. I’m looking forward to getting back to school. I’ve been brushing up on my algebra and geometry skills. I’d like to transfer into the Computer Engineering program at SDSU although I’m also thinking it would be nice to major in something like Physics in order to widen my possibilities. I’ve got time to decide, still.

I’ve had to take more time off my current project than I’d wanted to. The move is of course one reason. The second reason is because Annika is giving in her thesis tomorrow and I’ve been going through it each night making sure the structure is right and reading through it. She’s in Berlin so there is a 9 hour difference. In a couple hours it will be printed and she’ll be free. Oh…. then she’s got 3 oral exams over the next 6-8 weeks. Then she’ll be free!

Anyway, I’m in San Diego and I’m sure everything will be wonderful from here on out.

So last week I completed migrating Sprachenatelier Berlin e.V. to Ubuntu 6.06 (codename Dapper). Everything is working quite well and they are pretty happy with it. They definitely have noticed a difference for the better over Ubuntu 5.04 which they had been running. The Nautilus changes (path buttons, places, etc.), the Ubuntu updater (only for the admin of course), Tomboy are among the things they’ve mentioned. One thing that needs to be changed is the location of the shut down/logout button. It’s way to easy to inadvertently click on it when trying to close an application.

One of the pc’s has instability problems. It crashes (actually freeze) about twice a day. I’ve tried all available kernels and 3 different (vesa, radeon, fglrx) xorg drivers both with and without dri enabled. I can get it to crash each time by running OpenOffice‘s document format converter on a large (~1000) number of files. I’m next going to try the 2.6.15-21 kernel once I find it. Switching to the 21 revision fixed my wife’s Thinkpad T21 which was having the same problem.

In other news…

On Monday I got finished with 90 percent of going through my stuff before the move; deciding what to take/keep, ebay, or take to the flee market. This was made very easy this time since when I did my “real” move last July I sorted everything quite thoroughly. It’s so nice to know exactly where I’m going to stay and be doing once in San Diego. Last time I flew in without any connections, rented a car, went through craigslist on my laptop while outside of a house with wireless and after about 21 hours and only one night sleeping in the rental car I had an almost perfect, for me, place to stay with really nice folks.

Less than 2 weeks before I go now. Yeah!

This guy has found a really nice way to vent his frustration at seeing obtrusive ads everywhere you freakin’ look.

On Sunday I installed Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) at Sprachenatelier Berlin e.V. a small language school in Friedrichshain. It took all night and I’m still not finished. Someone had installed a Tomcat server that was serving a custom jsp app. Having never installed tomcat nor having ever developed Java Server Pages and only finding out about it when I arrived I didn’t have enough time to do all the other thngs plus learn about tomcat and install jsp apps. So I installed Ubuntu on the 4 “student” computers and left the 2 office computers for some time in the next couple days. On Monday in the comfort of my own home I learned about Tomcat and I had everything running in an hour or so. I also wasted a good amount of time ridding the single duel-boot Windows install of viruses and spyware.

I’ll do an Ubuntu 6.06/Tomcat install how-to soon. No, really… I promise.

On Tuesday Annika and I packed a picnic and went to the Fan Mile to watch the Germany vs. Italy match. Of course, Everyone knows the outcome of that. I was so looking forward to the penalty shoot-out. Oh well. May Italy suffer a humiliating defeat in the finals. They are such whiners; falling at the slightest touch. I’m hoping Portugal wins it all now.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has a short journal entry and also a video of his take on Net Neutrality.

He is just one of many people who support Net Neutrality. In my last entry on the subject I quoted Scott Cleland of NetCompetition.org, an opponent of network neutrality. He listed in his NPR article a couple supporters of Net Neutrality. Here I would like to link to a fuller list of supporters on both sides.

Net Neutrality supporters ..and even more.

Net Neutrality opponents ..and more.

You decide who has the more genuine (read non-money) interest in internet freedom.

You can see the Net Neutrality proponents answers to the opponents arguments here.

Slashdot has and interesting post about Net Neutrality. It deals with one pro and one con article published by NPR. The con article is written by Scott Cleland of NETCompetition.org, a telecom-funded org. Astroturfing comes to mine. The pro article is from Craig Newmark, creator of craigslist.org.

The first question I ask myself before reading the article is, “who do I trust more?” Craig wins here. He has more than proven his integrity. Scott, as a paid mouth-piece of the telecom industry doesn’t get my trust.
In Cleland’s article he says quite a few things that are misleading and obviously intended to instill fear. Some examples…

They want Congress to pass a new law to ban that practice by regulating the price of broadband service and the way it’s sold.

See the last paragraph of this post as a comment to that.

First, net neutrality is really a misnomer. It’s really just special interest legislation, dressed up to sound less self-serving. Did you know Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are lobbying for net neutrality?

Um, and who finances your “cause” Mr. Cleland? The Net Neutrality proponents seem a little more eclectic than Clelend’s telecom-funded cause. The last sentence is easy to counter. I’ll try… Did you know AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. are lobbying for net ‘competition’?

Now, net competition proponents, like me, believe that the best way to guard a free and open Internet is to maintain the free and open competition that exists today, not create a new government-monitored, socialized Internet.

So free and open are the terms for his cause and government-monitored and socialized are the terms for the the Net Neutrality folks. Has any one heard about AT&T allowing government-monitoring without even a court order? Oh, I think they are referring to another type of government-monitoring here.

Amazingly, the proponents of this radical change in policy don’t even have any real evidence of a problem, only unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems.

Actually, such unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems have led to much greater actions in the US. For example, a war. Of course, these unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems have proven to be wrong so it’s admittedly a a bad example. But what do we have from the telecom side to assure that these unsubstantiated assertions about hypothetical problems don’t become true? Only your campaign to make/keep these possibliities around.

And it would also mean less privacy for all Americans, as net neutrality would require more government monitoring and surveillance of Internet traffic.

Have I already mentioned that AT&T and friends allowed government-monitoring without even a court order? So how exactly would this reduce my privacy any more than your funders already have?

If they’re successful, they’ll get a special, low-government-set price for the bandwidth they use, while everyone else — consumers, businesses and government — will have to pay a competitive price for bandwidth.

Actually they already pay for their bandwidth. I know I pay for my server’s bandwidth. The price is currently quite low. I have never heard google complaining that there bandwidth cost is too costly. In fact, they consider the cost to power their data center more of a worry than bandwidth costs. What the content companies and a huge majority of content consumers don’t want is a toll gate as Craig mentions. I want to be able to choose what I want to see at a speed and quality not regulated by a middle-man.

I as a consumer pay the telecoms for my usage and the content providers pay for the bandwidth coming from their servers. As more users and content creators get online the telecoms make more money. The traffic demand per entity will also grow and this will require more infrastructure. This is exactly what both sides are already paying for now. If it’s not enough it’s only because the telecom shareholder’s demand for higher margins is to blame.

If you ask me, government regulation is better than the corporate regulation that Mr. Cleland supports. Governments by definition are there to govern. Corporations are there to make money for shareholders. Yes Google, Microsoft and Co. are also corporation but as I said before they are only a small part of the Net Neutrality supporters where as the Net ‘competition’ supports are by and large telecoms.

Give me an internet without toll booths.

Ok, Germany winning it’s opener is old news but I haven’t blogged it yet. So I’ll ignore that.

Yesterday I went down to the Fan Mile, between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory column, to watch the World Cup opener, Germany vs. Costa Rica. The weather was absolutely perfect which is a fortunate change from the last few weeks of cold (it snowed in the Allgäu) and rainy weather. Once the match started the atmosphere was really good. Everyone just stared up at the big screen until a goal fell, then threw there hands in the air, turned to there friends, jumped around and waved thier flags till it was time to start staring up at the screen once more. When the match was not being played there were unfortunately a group of drunken teenagers beside me who kept falling into everyone around them and spilling beer. Otherwise the people were quite alright.

What annoyed me the most about the Fan Mile is that it’s all basically a big commercial. Before and after the match and at the half, the sponsors are pretty much given the stage to do what they want. There was the Hyundai quiz show, Coca-Cola Heimspiel, MasterCard half time crowd quiz. Being someone who absolutely hates to be sold stuff, I found it ruined the whole atmosphere. But like I said earlier, once the match started everythog was really enjoyable.

I probably won’t be goin back there to watch another match, though. The atmosphere is much more cozy and intimate at the many cafe’s, open-air viewings or just the TV’s that are sitting outside for people to gather around. I did buy 2 tickets to the Adidas Arena for the Italy vs. USA match. The tickets were only 3 EUR a piece and I though it might be interesting to see what it’s like in there.

Well, the next 4 weeks I’ll probably watch way too much football and get way to little work done. Ahh, life is good!

I just read an article about common grammar mistakes that occur in blogs. I hope a lot of bloggers read it and it has a positive affect on blog grammar. Its always been one of my pet peaves. If your interested in improving your grammar, then their are many sites on the web to help out (i.e. Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style).

PS: I should of mentioned that I taught English in Berlin for 5 years. So I consider myself somewhat an expert.