Sterile state of mind is even worse than tamed indie.

Just for now

Hey, everybody needs a Christmas eve post. This one - on a more realistic side of the Christmas (check with the lyrics :)

You give colors to my nothing and now I want to wear it too

On Vienna's weather

Wet snow is the worst substance that ever comes from the sky apart from birds' s... and falling bricks

My plant - in memoriam

A couple of days arriving from Australia, I noticed that my plan doesn't look good - actually it had started to rotten - it definitely didn't like the extreme change of climate and returning to the winter. In spite of my tries there was no way how could i save it. So let this be a retrospective commemorative gallery. I ought to contribute somehow, cos the plant was always there - going around the half globe and back. In fact the aussie spring gave a real boost in it's growth. I doubt to have another one soon, cos it's too sad to watch it fade away. Anyway it's been one of the best gifts I've received lately and I hope that some of the guys who are going to find it under the christmas tree don't read this post :).
Here it is in my palm in late September. The first moment i had realized that those 2 small leaves there in the middle are new.

Here it's in Canberra, at the house I lived in. Surroundings is a typical Canberra suburb.

At the beach of Kioloa.

At the banks of the ocean...

In Sydney airport - the Sydney skyscrapers are in the distant background.

Comprehension grasp

If I don't sprinkle words around your collar, it doesn't mean that I don't have some under my sleeve. So don't rush stating me to be putting you into the opposite ditch. I know, I know that's the name of the game, but it's not mine - when you start - I call the time-out.

An overwhelming feeling

Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one here without a life plan.

Sometimes I feel like a portable rollercoaster

The matter of do

When you don't do what you have to do and when you have to do, then you have to do it when you want to do what you want to do, but then you don't do what you have to do, because you don't do what you have to do and then you never do what you want to do and never do what you have to do.

The effect of a new toy

We'll see what happens next, but I guess I know the paths - the sweet points are all the same.

Some tend to get it wrong

The fact that I speak their language is my prerogative, not theirs.

On rats

The right commander in chief

I guess that the most ridiculous fact about crisis in Latvia in particular is that the surname of the finance minister in charge is Slaughter (Slakteris). He is always there when the time comes - a while ago he was the minister of agriculture - nice switch btw - that's Latvia :).

On physics

The colder the weather, the faster the bicycle goes

wallabies

My last weekdays of stay in Australia I spent in a Australian university camping near the ocean in a place called Kioloa, where the guys from research center were giving talks. So I got a chance to wander around a bit. As I was taking some pictures around the camping, I met a local worker who took me up a hill where kangaroos and wallabies hang around, from there there was a nice view to the ocean as well and according to him - it is a good place for watching the whales - regretfully at that time he couldn't spot one. Of course my main source of interest was to see some wallabies, as I hadn't seen one in the wild and I got lucky... trice :).
So here is some teenager wallabie

This one has already grown up

They call them the red-neck wallabies, not because they live in country side, but because of the red neck. As it can be seen in the picture the fur quite differs from the one of kangaroo.

There is one hiding under the big tree...

And here's a muscle-kangaroo for comparison :).

The whole album here

Ok, now I know!

Powered by Southpark

Can't surf

On the morning of leaving Gold Coast, I took the second surfing lesson of my life - I did quite a bit better - almost managed to stand up properly, but still my clumsiness and lack of coordination played the major role almost all the way :). I enjoyed this lesson much more than the first one in Sydney - the weather was much better and the instructors were more useful. Anyway it was one of my top amusements during my stay in aussie.
And here are some pics...
Practice makes awesome!

Here we go...


Almost did it, though completely at the shore :)


Golden advice - you better watch your back while surfing...

Cos someone may take a hit on you :D

Wet, wet, wet

It's a bit nerdy beginner's board, but anyway... :)


And here's the full story

Pelican

During our touristing around the aussie resort called Gold Coast, we stayed overnight on a boat-house, so it was a nice opportunity to fish and to watch somebody else fishing... like pelican. The guy who hosted us, said that occasionally there turn up dolphins to fish as well. Regretfully that didn't happen during our stay.
Ok here's the pelican - seagulls give him lots of credit of knowing where the fishes are.

Fishing in action :)

And here's the panorama of Gold Coast. I was too eager to go for a swim, so meanwhile my mate took some s***load of pictures over an hour being up there on the top of a 100-stories tall skyscraper. Though bad thing about those skyscrapers is that in afternoon they overshadow the beach, so that it's a bit gloomy there, if you don't find a place on a rare sunny stretch.
View to the China side:

View to the Sydney side:

clumsy back-to-back

Second day in a row I spilled my jeans while stirring my daily load of espresso. I wonder when shall that end - when I'll run out of clean jeans or when I'll get rid of the habit of stirring while not looking what I'm stirring :).

Roo meal

Good for you - good for environment - no matter how ridiculous at the first moment it might seem while considering eating kangaroos, though having another look their arguments seem quite fair - kangaroos are part of natural fauna here; less grass is consumed to get 1 kg of meat as their organism processes the flora of natural habitat more effectively than the other domestic animals brought here do; as well they don't have such greenhouse gas emissions (or whatever that was); and it's 98% fat free (in aussie they write the fat all the time from the other end - not "only 2% fat" but rather "98% fat free"). Of course they keep and raise them in farms not hunt in the wild :).
I had to try sausages "Kanga Banga" as well :).

Input ----------------------> Output

The taste is like something between beef and goose - quite pleasant and enjoyable.

Like Frankie said :)

Once you screw it up again, you can always say: "I did it my way!", but what does it tell about your ways then?

Kangaroos

When visiting Tidbinbilla national reserve near Canberra, our two sources of curiosity were of course koalas and kangaroos in their natural habitat, our desperate tries to spot a koala somewhere up the trees resulted with disappointment - none of 20 people guided by 2 reserve rangers could spot one of 7 in 7ha reservoir over one hour. So we had to see some kangaroos at least - though not that hard to do here as I've spotted some in outskirts of the city.
Those precautions animals during the heat at daytime usually can be found hiding in the shadows of trees.

They kinda never walk...

Managed to spot the baby-kangaroo? :)

There were couple of emus as well, in the very background there is another kangaroo and a flock of parrots as well.

They don't like my company, much :(

And another vid

Kings of leon revamp

I'm still a big fan of their early stuff, but hadn't been impressed by them lately, but I guess this tops it all. I hope they won't go too commercial :). Unfortunately there are no embeddings allowed for the official vid of Sex on fire and I just got rid of that embedded creepy one.

koalas <3

Once you enter Sydney zoo, you got welcomed by bunch of koalas - I guess they got it right, what's the main purpose of visiting zoo in aussie :). Anyway at first I spotted one (down there on the vid) and couldn't take off my eyes for minutes thinking: "how cute is that ?"; only after a while I saw that family with a baby koala and a lone one on another tree.
baby-koala with sleepy koala-mama

baby-koala-mama shows some acrobatics

Later afternoon there was a bird show representing the birds of Australia - doing some tricks and demos and stuff. Of course this pic is not that much about the show than the panorama from there.

And here's the can't-take-eyes-off-object

koala 2

And here is the vid with the koala family

Latvijai 90

As Latvia celebrates 90th anniversary today, a couple of Riga's sites and buildings have got wrapped into some national motives by lights. Quite disappointing to miss out on it.
National pattern

This one is just great...

And just the flag on tv building...


P.S. Pictures are stolen from a social networking site - no Copyrights were respected :).

Hi, Martins

See you in 2 weeks!

Cheers,
Life

don't blame the game

You may want to blame the player if you don't have a game of your own

Noskaņai

Mazliet pamainīju savu ādiņu par godu Latvijas 90gadei nākamnedēļ ;). Pats esmu gandrīz vai cik vien tālu vien var būt, bet nu jā. Gan jau drīz salāpīšu beidzot savu slinkumu un ielikšu kādu bildīti ar ķenguriem un koalām, bet nu pagaidām ir jau 2 naktī un esmu aizsēdējies NICTA ofisā - šausmīgs slinkums tenterēt mājās - beigu galā miegs tomēr mani pievārēs šeit vai te. Laiks gan tāds, ka pa dienu negribas līst laukā - plus trīsdesmit un gaisa nav - labi, ka pēc 2 nedēļām ļepatoju atpakaļ uz eiropu - šitas laiks nav priekš manis, lai tie oziji slēpjas aiz savām platmaļu cepurēm un sanskrīniem - ledusskapī man patīk labāk, ļoti. Bet nu tie viļņi goldenkoustā bija neaprakstāmi - tā dēļ vien bija vērts palidināties, ūdens gan sāļš pēc suņa. Jā, un ja tiešām kādu bezgalīgi ziņkārība moka, kas te rakstīts, tad labā ziņa ir tāda, ka jau laiciņu gūgltransleits ir latviski arīdzen ;).

Te dziesmiņa par iedegšanos ;).

Jā, un Šļūka kārtējo reizi nav varējis saturēt savu sarkasmu :)

Need to get perfect

Traumhaus

My Leben ist hell

inferno efficiency of burning

Thinking dense; making bold moves

Sampling

I simplified things till an extent where I got rid of the truth.

remote

One of the most wonderful feelings is having a piece of it while not cutting a slice.

Adjustments

It's curious, I feel like my "r" is rounding up.

truth_probability = 1 / excuse_count

Sequences

Somehow all of that initial ease of communication eventually turns into annoyance, upset or unfulfilled expectations from one or either of the sides. So do we fail to work up on it right or we just stretch the truth from the very beginning, assigning too much of glorificational features to other person characteristics?

Cruelest code ever

void ExecWithIO::kill_child()
{
  if (running() > 0) {
   int status = kill(child_pid, SIGKILL);
   if (status < 0) {
    std::cerr << "error " << strerror(errno) << " (" << errno
    << ") killing " << child_pid << std::endl;
    }
  }
}

//Just received the code from my supervisor - it has to deal with piping or smthn, but essentialy this method just got me rofling for a while :).

Crap (a month too late)

Thanks a lot gov, but for me it took like a month of bureaucratic stuff plus the fees :/

Was?

"i AM staying positive... but im sick to my back teeth of all this german stuff! whoever invented electronics should have made sure that they wouldnt be taught in freakin german... its hard enough without all those 65 letter long words... ¬¬"
I hope that spanish erasmus girl doesn't mind me quoting her statement, I just found it so true and so amusing. In fact she was exaggerating on this - the longest verified german word in use consists only of 63 letters :) and is Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenüber- tragungsgesetz.
Actually I love to make those up, just because they are all valid whenever they are grammatically correct, but they are complete tongue-twisters when it comes to spelling.

Something sweet or something strong

Used to humm it for 24-7 and still it tends to get there on my tape all over again.

faith

Living is like drawing a picture while sitting on it. You see the colors, take the brush, paint, but never see the whole picture. You have some idea what are you doing and what are purposes of your actions, but the others see it better. Always :D!

exponential blow-up

We may argue about the ways some persons may express themselves. But as much as I've learned the cynic ones more often appear to be the fairest ones towards themselves and others - as long as the cynicism doesn't become a default for every thing that comes across. While being cynic people just mostly shield off some things that others may pretend to find acceptable - for those others it's fine until the last straw - when their acceptance strikes against themselves. So the issue is to be unrest or unbearable for a while or to be nice until getting yourself completely pissed off and explode internally or externally.

aussie for dummies

They tend to write much of a stuff on warning and road signs, often - too much of a stuff. Like on every "give way" sign making it explicit. And whatever you did on the road you shall do with a particular care.

There are some vicious birds and serious flooding threats:

And this one is just hilarious:

And these are some birds at my house's driveway (it's a vid btw :), they're quite active now. It's spring, you know...

No Canberra park

If any interest what else I saw in my ride around the park - spausk chia. Any of my other recent aussie amusements I tend to post here.

On kiddin'

I called a girl a kid and it got so much better ever since.
Once a girl called me a kid and only after a year or so I realized what she wanted to say and what she meant. She was completely right. I mean it's rarely the case when other people make some quality statements about you, and once they do you just mispercept, because you presume that they never get it right.

The same stuff

After several different occasions I'm convinced that taking on challenging commitments in order to force yourself to improve your work ethics is a wrong approach. But the opposite works even worse - you just can't motivate yourself for things that look graspable at the very beginning. Been there, done that.

wishful sinking

And the desire shall drive you

The sincerest compliment

I hope that you taste as well as you look

hāhā

I'm not trying to be funny here. I mean I'm not trying.

canlearning

Yesterday I learned, that sometimes you just have to appear to get someone freaked out.

Countdown

Sometimes we are given hundred goodbyes, because there are things to be sealed.

eli eli Librarized

Yesterday I was derailed from my lazy study tries at library by Artjom who was willing to take some pics at one of his last days in Bolzano.

Me with Artjom thereoutside

Me with Ļena thereinside


P.S. I know, I know that a couple of hairdressers around the town are chasing me :).

...

Some places, communities are like cages inhabited by somewhat pokemons that are being fed with a fresh meet twice per year.

9:23

Ok, I just had to make a record, that today at 9:23 I had a deja vu. It lasted for about 3 seconds, and I realized it in about a middle of the 2nd second. Actually the most irritating thing is that you recall it happening, but you don't foresee before it has happened. I can recall myself only around 7 of deja vu in my life as a fact and don't remember when was the last one, so it gives to it some kind of significance.

While watching CNN

Last Friday the key phrase was whispered, while commenting US gov actions: "they will turn dollar into confetti!"

Not outta woods yet

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where..."said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.