January 2006 Archives

Maybe I'm becoming old, but my sleep schedule has been a mess since returning to college after two weeks in Vienna. First I wasn't getting enough sleep, then I was sleeping too much, and now I'm waking up three times a night.

Then there's my over-ambition to get up early to do work. This morning I had set my alarms to 7:30, but instead got up at around 9:45, after resetting the alarms in 15-30 minute intervals, which didn't allow me to go back into a deep sleep anyway, but rather really crazy disturbing dreams.

For some reason I thought my calculus class was at 12:15, so I franticly finished my homework for that class by around 11:15. It wasn't until I was putting up an away message (and calculating the time I'd be back home), that I realized the class starts at 2:15.

Living in the United States, you get to have certain expectations, such as free soda refills at restaurants and fast food places. In terms of internet connections, it appears Internet Service Providers don't really care how many computers are connected to your home network.

Here on the continent of no free refills, this doesn't to appear the case. If you use a broadband provider like Chello, you'll probably have to give them you computer's Ethernet ID, and that computer will be the only computer that can connect to the internet.

Well, a couple months ago my PowerBook's hard drive crashed, upon Apple replaced almost everything vital. When I arrived in Austria two weeks ago, I found out that I could no longer connect to the internet at home.

Here's the solution if you're on a Mac with OS X and you know the ethernet ID / MAC address that's activated:

1. Unplug the ethernet cord
2. Open Terminal (It should be in Applications/Utilities)
3. Enter the following code: sudo ifconfig en0 ether [Ethernet ID you want to change to]
4. You'll have to enter your computer's root (master) password
5. Plug ethernet cord back in

Depending on your computer, you might have to change en0 to en1. This is only a temporary solution, as your Ethernet ID will be reset upon restart to its original one.

From the day I arrived in Vienna, December 27, until last Sunday, I did not experience a night out that wasn't great. Just look at my photos from these nights. Unfortunately this all changed Sunday, when more than half of the people I knew here flew back to the U.S. or elsewhere. I guess a lot of colleges started back up Monday, while mine doesn't until next Monday.

Anyway, starting Sunday, my nights out have been pretty somber, probably because there aren't any more girls out! I guess I have to no realize that the end of this wonderful vacation is near. I went to my high school's alumni night tonight, which wasn't very well visited, probably because so many people who were here have left. Sometimes they schedule it before the start of the break, when many people haven't arrived yet, so I guess the best they can do is rotate from year to year.

I hope I can get something together for tomorrow night and/or Thursday night. I'll probably have to start recruiting early. My photo section will show the results!

It's been a couple days since I updated, I know. Once again, when I take a ton of photos, written commentary isn't as necessary.

The most important night of the last week was New Year's Eve. Overall, I had quite a bit of fun. It started around 10 when I met up with a bunch of my friends at Nightfly's. This locality is nice, but the 7-euro-and-up menu is ridiculous. In any case, we stayed there until 11:45, when we began to fight our way through the 650,000 people that were downtown, in order to get as close to the center square as possible. It was insane.

As soon as midnight came and went, we continued on fighting our way over to a less-traveled side street. This took a good 20 minutes. We then walked over to Lukas, where we spent around 30 minutes. Some of my friends split off and took a detour via Merry Monk, but we all ended up at Paddy's not too much later.

We spent quite some time at Paddy's, over an hour and a half. We then made our way to the Landstraße District, to go to a houseparty. We ran into everyone leaving that party shortly before getting there, so we then all decided to go back to Lukas, where we also spent over another hour and a half.

That's a pretty decent summary. I have posted 102 photos from that night here. A video will be coming out soon as well.