ok, chris lands in vienna in about an hour, who knows when he'll get to the hotel. luckily i had to pay for tomorrow in the hotel as well (!) so he will at least be able to lay down for a little bit before we take the train to prague. he emailed me from the airport in amsterdam to say that he didn't sleep on the plane (eep) so i think he'll need the sleep for sure!! so here we go...into the czech republic where they will become part of the EU on saturday! i have no doubt that will be absolutely INSANE.

omg. i've been so careful with my money the whole time...and then...uh...a €40 meal...omg...i totally didn't understand that this meal was a la carte...and it was fish to boot...omg omg omg omg...

blogging at ya live from chi, down the corner from the google booth. hehe. gotta run to a session but i had to tell you that when i talked to the yahoo people earlier all i could think of was their damn commercial with the ya-hoooooooo-oooo obnoxious voice thing...

for microsoft readers...i have hilarious pictures of jun with ponytail holders all over his hair. classic stuff.

oh i forgot to say that i went up to the blogger booth at chi and said hello google i've been blogging just around the corner from you all week and the google people seemed very cool actually.

ok i woke up with a splitting headache today and maybe it was from standing in the smoking hall with jun and kevin at the city hall (rathaus) reception last night or maybe it was the half glass of wine i had or maybe my weird ass jet lag hours were finally catching up with me, i don't know...so i had to take a migraine pill but i only took half of one so that i don't end up totally doped up for the rest of the day...and it was brilliant catching up with jun, keith, kevin, and randy and it's really nice to know that the friendships that we formed years ago are still strong and even though so much time has passed so much still stays the same and that's nice to remember...

so i think i've finally figured out how to get tickets on the train for prague and the praguer that i met yesterday at the games sig said that it really isn't necessary to get train tickets ahead of time so that makes me feel better about not figuring it out until now and believe it or not yesterday i found one of those fabric shops with the austrian traditional fabrics and it seems that those sound of music style dresses sell like hotcakes and it was crazy seeing all the variety and it reminded me of going in to one of those sari stores last summer in london because it seemed amazing to me that these are everyday clothing stores because they seem so exotic...

service to feel well is my hotel chain's (austria trend) motto and what the hell does that mean? do i feel well? do they feel well because they provide us with a place to stay? baffling.

anyway the workshop that my csc* presentation was a part of was absolutely amazing so great to spend the day with people who really understand my area of work...some amazing amazing stuff is also happening in europe. the us SUCKS with regard to research in this area...

greetings from vienna where apple juice is the orange juice of the region! i woke up at 5am. yes. i did. and i#ve been drinking coca-cola from bratislava all morning, which has got to be good for me. coffee. now.

update: fucking cites and their fucking express email system upgrade that won't be done until 5 and a half hours ago vienna time...

fucking cites and their fucking express email system that is down half the time i try to check...what the fuck...

jesse...postmodern portmanteau...pass it on...

cold and windy and yet sunny so it was a perfect weather day for me and i learned that everything is closed on sunday, well, a LOT of things are closed on sunday including grocery stores, etc. but the museums were open and i went to the modern art gallery and saw the porträt exhibit, which was absolutely fucking amazing and when you get here, we will go see it because it deserves a second visit and the museumsquartier is like an art paradise and i learned for myself that you really can spend hours sitting at a cafe, outside, watching all the hipsters and pigeons parade past.

while the u-bahn is amazing and easy to understand, i cannot figure out how the hell one buys train tickets, say, from the südbahnhof down the street and, no, i don't want tickets for the bus to bratislava but where the hell do i get train tickets to praha from...ok, right, südbahnhof...established already. where where where at the station do i buy them am i missing something?

jun, keith, and randy have been sighted in vienna, going in to the austria centre as i went out and they were going to spend the day working and i was going to spend the day playing and so we parted ways and hopefully i'll catch up with them again later on but they seemed dazed beyond belief so i don't know about their plans for later on. if they had been with me, they'd have seen some of the amazing things that i saw like the lady at the wienerschnitzl place who parked her red car on the sidewalk, ran in to do her makeup in front of the mirrored walls, and ran out of there in her red suit and everyone, including me, got the joke...

btw, good luck tomorrow lucia!!! you can do it!

10:10am and i've registered and they gave me the giant ass proceedings book so now it looks like i'll be heading back to the hotel so i don't have to drag all this shit around with me for the rest of the day. i'm at the austria centre next to the vienna international center...but note that the two are not the same...i first wandered around some UN buildings for a while and finally someone from somewhere yelled at me from an intercomm that was located, uh, somewhere else "what are you looking for, go to the austria centre!" okok. damn everyone in vienna but me must know where i am supposed to go to...then again it could also be that i wasn't the first to go to the wrong building today and the guy was getting pretty damn sick of it.

hmm. for some reason this terminal at chi has u.s. keyboards. today is sunny and lovely, about 60ish and so i'm going to head to the museum quarter after i drop my shit off at the hotel. people next to me are bitching about the internet connection and i have no idea what they are talking about because it seems fine but then again they seem to be the bitching type...cranky.

on the u-bahn this morning i notice that no one looks at anyone but the thing that i can't figure out is what people are pretending to look at instead of one another? and now my hotel is filled with u.s. people and this morning at breakfast i got a bit freaked out by their presence and i wonder what that's all about, maybe it has to do with the fact that i've been hearing everything but english and suddenly realizing that the words around me matched the words in my head put me into a bit of a shock...and it's hard to concentrate on what you are thinking about when suddenly everything around you isn't just "noise," that it makes sense...your brain seems to cling on to that and won't let go and so you end up listening to stupid conversations just because you can.

8:25ish in the evening and it's raining and today it was freezing and hot and sunny and rainy across the region...i just ate some wienerschnitzl from some place up the street before i got back to my hotel that i finally found again after botching the street name pronunciation to everyone i said it to while making my way back from the u-bahn station that was a lot easier to get back from yesterday when i'd been up for over 24 hours and what the hell does that say? favoritstraße = favoritstrasse = favorite street. and, yes, i just wrote that last bit so i could write the ß.

so i spent the day in bratislava and i'm too tired to say much more than it's a strange experience to not hear the language that's in your head all day long and it seems that everyone in the world has seen that george w. bush cartoon that shows his picture next to a monkey, don't they look the same and all i can do is say, yeah...sorry about that...but central europe doesn't seem to buy the "but he wasn't REALLY elected" excuse anymore and they have a point...the election was a little too close to do anything but just apologize over and over about the whole damn thing.

black and yellowed welts on my shoulders from carrying my backpack yesterday and actually i think they are from my shoulder bag that has all my lomo cameras and that damn "portable" dvd player in it and tori amos is playing on the radio in the lobby of the hotel beim theresianum and it's raining out and i miss you but you'll be here soon and, truth be told, you are the one i've been talking to all day in my mind.

omg...ok it's 2:25 in the afternoon and i'm talking to ya live...from the hotel beim theresianum in vienna. yes i am still getting used to these german keyboards...it wasn't just a fluke back at that internet kiosk in düsseldorf. crazy. ok so i said that i got a passport stamp in düsseldorf...guess where i didn't get one? uh, yeah...here. there was like zero care in the world at the vienna airport. you just walked through either the eu or the non-eu door and there was no one there, no one standing there...nothing. somehow despite being completely exhausted and probably scaring the absolute hell out of the kid at the reception desk, i checked in and now the question is...do i go out and about or do i take a major major sleep session? damn it is so beautiful out though...it's about 70 degrees out, sunny, beautiful -- psst chris read that last bit again...and that train from the airport? you can't miss it -- it's called CAT and there are big green signs. take u3 to stephansplatz, switch to the u1 line you know the rest. the hotel is very close to the u-bahn station.

ah, so it's crazy beautiful and when i typed crazy just then i spelled it like crayz because the y and the z are reversed on the keyboard...you know...i'm going and taking a shower. i stink.

dusseldorf airport where the space bar on this internet station that is smack in the middle of the friggin' terminal says "leer" and i am discovering that the qwry keyboart is the qwertz keyboard here in germany and oh...looks like i could have written düsseldorf earlier. üöä
OK SO:::UGH IM IN ALL CAPS WTF how...ok how did i reverse that? i´m lost in translation...this is insane. and it is so damn quiet in this airport...oh and i got a düsseldorf stamp for my passport...they dont give you much choice in the matter so, no, i didn´t play a game of jump through passport control just to get a stamp.

last post before i leave for vienna (e - got your note, will do)...so i can't fall asleep last night, can't sleep, can't sleep...then when i must have passed into a trance state of some sort i apparently went out clubbing because now i can hardly move my neck, right arm, and my back's all locked up. so to pay homage to "the daily show"...that was making fun of "the view"...this is just like a reality show! yes, my real life is just like a reality show...and i think that i'm up for this week's survivor (tm) tylenol (r) push through the pain (c) contest...jesus christ this is not good.

happy three year anniversary of my blog. apparently it is also the five year anniversary of columbine.

for those of you not hanging around in vienna next week, i'm telling you now that i may be the first person to do an academic presentation EXCLUSIVELY using not one, but TWO xboxes. no powerpoint, no laptop...yes, still a MS product but not exactly the usual choice...

the three-year anniversary of this blog is coming up next tuesday and it seems that i haven't been super great about updating this in a long while and i wonder why exactly that is and that maybe i should start updating it again more frequently like i did when every day still seemed like an adventure, like it still had possibilities...before i woke up one day and saw my shadow and it's been winter ever since. but maybe this time the spring feels like it could be spring once again...notice how i said could...uncertain, as everything is...but possible, a potential.

driving up prospect around 9pm and i hit a red light. sitting there...i notice that the guy in the car next to me has his windows down and i can see something flickering and i see that he has a tv mounted into the front panel of his car and he's the only one in the car and i look more closely and he has on a friggin' porn movie and i remember reading how drivers watching porn in their cars while driving was now illegal in new york and i thought, pfft, right, who is doing that...but now it seems that the craze has hit fly over country and now i can't remember anymore if we are a red state or a blue state...

ok sorry about the break in posting here...nightmares again...spring...the eerie thing is that when i looked back to what i wrote in my journals (not this blog) a year ago...i realized that i'm having the exact SAME nightmares that i had this time last year...what the fuck?