About half my journal ago, A-Day and I were in a hostel in Prague that contained a free internet machine which I used to get caught up on my journal entries. Much has happened since then, and much has been written in my journal about it. That makes me no longer caught up. Perhaps I don't have the patience to ever catch up. Being back in Kinlay House, Dublin, which also has free internets, I will make an attempt anyway.

2007-06-22 (Friday)

Slept in for a while this morning, ate breakfast and wrote a little prog to move my uploaded pictures to their proper places and auto-rotate them. A-Day took off to go shopping and I walked across the river to the park. Walking up the hill I found a cherry orchard and ate a lot of cherries. I also figured out what the 'flower' button on my camera does (it changes the focus mode, so I can focus on near things, like weird cherries that appear to be eating themselves. It sprinkled a bit while I was writing my journal. Now I will move on, I think.

On the other side of the hill I didn't find anything terribly exciting - just more of the same downtown streets. But on the way there and back were some neat stone/brick wall/cliffs. It started raining and I got pretty damp, but that didn't stop me from stopping to eat more cherries.

~

Been back for a while. A-Day's come and gone a few times, and I had some soup. I wish I had a book to read. Trying to pass time. I could try to draw a maze...

It's 21:13 now but feels like the middle of the afternoon.

2007-06-23 (Saturday)

I went out to a techno club called "Roxy" with our English roommates. It wasn't really my kind of music but it was OK except for there was this annoying guy there that keppt getting in my face. I got back at about 5:00 (after a guy on the street tried to sell me various drugs) so I didn't get any sleep. I worked on my scenery app a bit and then wanted to go sleep a lot, and then we had to pack our stuff and leave.

The benches at the Prague train station were very uncomfortable, so while waiting for our train I sat on the floor and sort of nodded off a bit. A girl came up to us and handed me a note with my picture (dozed off and with sunglasses on my head) that said something in Czeck. I have no idea what it means.

Now we are on our first of 3 trains to Rothenburg.

~

Either we missed our stop or we were on the wrong to begin with. We ended up in Munich and switched to another train to Nuernberg.

I drew mazes in my journal for A-Day on the train. Germany has pretty skies.

• We suck at teh R-Bahn.
• Europe smells like cigarettes.
• Now we are wandering the countryside outside Rothenburg looking for Aparthotel.

There is a show playing called 'Just for Laughs'. It's actually kind of funny. Right now they're making people look up a guy's kilt while he stands on a ladder under a tree.

If there are a lot of typos in this post it's because I'm typing without looking at the kybard in order to try and make it quick so someone else can use the compy.

2007-06-24 (Sunday)

After finally arriving in Rothenburg we tried to find Aparthotel based on a map at the train station and the address "Weisinstrasse 10". We ended up at some old guy's house, and he told us we were in the wrong town, and pointed us along some highways.

So we started walking through the country and the sun set and the sky was sooo pretty and awesome looking. We were up on a hill and there weren't many trees around, so the sky was very big. I took some pictures but they don't really show the bigness or awesomeness of it. I remember now that this was how I used to survive computering all the time. I'd work on a project for hours but then I'd get on my bike and ride out into the country and get tired and think of new projects to work on and get pumped again.

Now we are exploring Rothenburg (we walked back there from the little village where Aparthotel resides). We ate a schneeball. The wall here is fun to walk along. I bought a 'Flying Dutchman' backpack for 12.5.. Later we watched some slugs eat a pretzel stick.

2007-06-25 (Monday)

We tried to check out of our hotel this morning but it turns out we booked 3 nights there, not 2. So we rented bikes and rode to Rothenburg and A-Day bought stuff and mailed it and we checked out a sweet sticky-outy part of the wall overlooking the valley. And then we biked up north along the river and it rained on us, and then we went up a hill and got lost and mddy, and then we finally found our way back to the river and rung out our socks and ate some more food.

Then we went northward along the river path some more until it started raining on us again, and at that point we stood under a tree and watched ants herd aphids, and then went back to under a different tree where we watched snails climb (the tree).

A-Day was growing a beard and stuff and it looked awesome but tonight he shaved it off like a big jerk. :(

2007-06-26 (Tuesday)

Today was our checkout day. During breakfast the Aparthotel owners had us write in the gastbook and be in adverts and tell them how to upload their videos to YouTube.

Afterwards we started walking to Steinach to get on a train. It was a little bit rainy and pretty windy but it was very plesant. I thougha bout a remake of D5 (that I've been thinking about over the past few days, too), and how I could do it with one of my expr-web projects ('forp'), with some additions. Hopefully the same engine could be used to recreate other games such as TE3D.

• Opera-targetted HTML for display.
• JSON to represent rooms and data.
• I/O functions abstracted so that the game can be easily ported to different platforms, like Sphere?
• Don't worry about multi-player or saving to server at first.
• Data server should be entirely separate (as it mostly was with D5, but this time it doesn't need to support PUT)
• For the room/image generator, I'm thinking C++ prog with embedded JavaScript interpreter. Similar to TMapGen.

Good idea for basslines in Reason: use multiple instruments! Not all at the same time! Sort of like I did in Into Moria.

We walked to Englischer Park and are eating foods from Aldi. A-Day is again putting too much jelly on his bread.

I remember now a dream I hadd. I think maybe I was with a tour group, and there was this multiple story building with lights in it, and I had to go back and forth between downtown and home, aso I flew because it was faster than walking or the bus. Flying was sort of tricky though. I had to really believe I could do it and concentrate on flying, or I wouldn't take off. It became easier once I was up in the air.

Englischer Garten was nice. It had lots of ducks and duck-like things.

I would love to fix the typos in that previous entry, but with the new skin I cannot figure out how to edit it! (Note from the future: I figured it out and fixed some typos)

The day seems to be lasting forever. I've copied several journal entries down, eaten 3 bowls of soup, got the hang of doing sudokus, and seen at least 3 shows come on and off the TV since coming back from my walk to and from the Dublin airport. It is still light out.

I'm writing this entry as a gmail because it auto-saves.

2007-06-27 (Wednesday)

I was kept up for a while last night by the guys in our room talking about tooth thieves in South Afrtica and this Italian guy that talks like Borat.

At first I dreampt that the trip was over and I was flying back home. I thought 'what about the last 3 weeks? What happened in Munich? How long was I in Dublin? I don't remember any of that. Must be dreaming.'

Realizing that I'm dreaming tends to make the dream end and become a different dream.

So then was a dream that we were making fun of Microsoft for some business decision involving Apple and IBM. Then I was working at a company where people wore quilty black and red dresses. Anna from Widen was there (wearing a quilty black and red dress), and I asked her what I ought to be doing, but it turned out she couldn't talk to me at the moment because she was in the middle of a meeting (at this company meetings looked like a bunch of people sitting on the floor along a wall with clipboards).

I remember riding around on the DB for a while, maybe without a proper ticket. Later I was back in Chicago and I met up with YC and we had some hotel room booked. There was a big DB station there that we passed while walking around. It looked just like one of the DB stations in Germany, but the water in the lake nearby was a brighter color that I remember lakes in Germany being. It was hard for me to take a picture because everything was so bright.

We met up with Michelle. She was in Chicago to see some relatives.

In my journal at this point there are drawn a bunch of trig calculations. I was thinking about a ray-casting landscape renderer.

The toilet paper here comes in discrete unconnected units, like kleenex. I think that's a good idea. Otherwise most people use way more TP than is necessarry.

At breakfast (after the trig) I talked to the guy from South Africa (his name is "Peter") for a while about travelling. He lost his passport and is stuck in teh Deutschland for a while until he can get an emergency replacement. We bothe expressed that we were tired of paying out the butts to go see castles and statues and would rather just walk around. But he said I should check out Rome while in Italy.

I've had 'Your Eyes' going through my head all morning. Gotta do some internetting.

I wish we had spent more time checking out the west coast of Ireland. Also that I had brought a tripod and an N800.

TODO list

• Plan trip after Interlaken. I'll have 4 days of Eurail left, and will probably want to use the last one to get to Paris to catch cheap flight to Dublin. (Interlaken -> Rome -> nice beach town? > Paris)?
• Find out what that Czech says.
• Find night club with trance music in Munich.
• Maybe buy those plane tickets.

A-Day needs to sometime send those keys back to our last hostel that he forgot to give back while we were there. I should send a postcard from Germany.

2007-06-28 (Thursday)

Yesterday after breakfast A-Day took off to some castle and I, after doing some internetting, went for a walk...east. I walked across downtown Munich and through some suburbs and parks and things. There were some really neat bike paths and gardens.

Via my walk I learned the route to the starting point of the pub crawl advertized at our hostel. In the evening A-Day and I went on that. This is what I remember:

• Start at Traveller's Bar. Free beer for an hour. I had 3. They were large.
• Followed the tour guide to a place where they played covers of Michael Jackson songs (it was rawkin!)
• On the way out two of our fellow pub crawlers said they recognised us from the bike tour in Berlin (3 cities ago!)
• There was a guy from Finland that I was talking to. He liked to wear my hat.
• Followed him right through a pricy but famous beer garden.
• Stopped at a place with hookas. They were not full of hash, as the guide had told us earlier. He probably just said that to get us excited and figured we wouldn't know the difference since we were all drunk.
• We stopped at a corner somewhere where our guide poured a something into cups. We then drank the somethings.
• As we were entering the U-Bahn I had to change the batteries of my camera, but the zipper handle to the battery compartment of my camera case broke off. Somehow I got the batteries changed anyway, but I was very surprised when I realized I had done that. Anyway, I took a few pictures.
• I broke A-Day's glass. This woke me up enough that I realized we had gotten ourselves into yet another pub. There was a guy there playing folk music as I cut my fingers trying to clean up the mess I made. A-Day tells me that this was at the Irish Pub where we drank Irish Car Bombs and he tried to buy a pie.
• I threw up behind someone's car. Some folks down the street threw little bottles of mouthwash my way. This woke me up enough that I could take a picture of the sign down the road. A-Day got some good pictures of me throwing up, but I didn't realize that he was getting those at the time. I didn't realize much of anything, really, except that I was throwing up in the street and probably looked like a jerk.

I woke up with my shoes on, somewhat confused until I thought back to the last thing I remembered, which was taking a picture of a neon sign while sitting on a curb...and people were throwing mouthwash at me...because I had just finished throwing up from drinking too much.

The 5. that I had stuck in my sock was still there, but not the 10. I remembered putting in my camera case. I think I had given it to A-Day at some point to buy drinks. And looking back at the pictures, I found some really good ones from the U-Bahn station that I do not remember taking.

The experience of drifting in and out of consciousness and memory like that is an interesting one to have had. Now I know what some of the fuss about getting drunk is. I don't think I'll need to do it again for a while though. I feel lucky enough to have gotten home last night. A-Day certainly helped a lot. He tells me I drank those IEDs like they were water.

Talked to Peter again at breakfast. I felt somewhat sick still. A-Day and I went upstairs and napped.

I dreamt that we had gotten off a train at a touristy place out in the country. There were a couple of jerks trying to fight us but they were too stupid to actually hurt us. Also there was a big wave that came along the side of this dirt ditch. I stood in the ditch taking pictures of all the water going by and hoping there wouldn't be another large wave to come along and drown me.

~

"It's amazing how laundry can make the night last forever."
- A-Day

They say the laundry room is closed from 22:00-8:00, but we don't know how or why. We do our laundry in here anyway.

In another dream we were at some monument that was a metal platform surounded by red. It was outside, you could step up onto the platform, but a lady sould yell at you if you tried to take pictures.

After napping today we bought more chocolate and bread and then walked to, in, out of Englischergarten. As we walked I decided that it was OK to get off on designing software infrastructure so long as you go out and visit the country often and talk to girls sometimes. We got lost on our way back but then somewhat magically we stumbled across the road our hostel is on. From the west (Englischergarten is to the east of our hostel).

Met a gal from Dresden in the room, interneted, booked flight from Paris to Dublin. Now we do laundry in the laundry room. Which apparently is closed. There is some random German kid from a group I passed earlier walking around on the fire escape. You're not supposed to climb around out hter, but nobody seems to care.

2007-06-29 (Friday)

Dreamt about being in a big city, like Chicago. There was maybe a hotel and a river, and it was night time. At breakfast I got the e-mail address of Peter from Cape Town, since he's taking off today for Amsterdam (with a replacement passport).

I remembered then another dream. I had gotten a phone call from Amy Esry asking if I was coming to the company picnic. I told her that I had totally forgotten about it and that I was in Europe anyway. So no.

A-Day and I went to the Deutsches Muesum today. Phil from Australia came along, but didn't go in because he couldn't get the student discount. We spent too much time reading about things we weren't interested in, and then didn't have enough time when we realized there was cool stuff. Like, we looked at airplane stuff too long. And then I missed the mining exhibit, the bridge exhibit, the tunnel exhibit, and the model railroad.

The plan was to get back to the room, take a nap, then go to Kultafabrik, but Phil had found a good party downtown and he and our 2 new roommates from Japan were going there. So after getting our stuff organized A-Day and I headed over to find them. On the way we saw some shipping crates with "HOMELAND SECURITY" written on the side. Something about videos about Guantanamo bay.

We found our roomies at the party. Used a lot of camera battery taking flash pictures of Kuni taking pictures of her beer. Met a Muenchenite named "Markus" who showed us the way to a disco where the beats were fresh until a crowd showed up (the place we were at is called "Rote Sonne", and I have a sticker from it). By the time we had gotten sick of it, Mimi (other Japanese roommate that is not Kuni and whose real name is "Miwako") was throwing up from all the drinks bought for her by a leather-vested guy who we all thereafter referred to as "Date Rape Man". I got in a cab with Mimi and Kuni to make sure they got back alright (I didn't think we needed a cab. Phil kept saying that it'd be good for her to walk around a bit. The cab was Kuni's idea). Markus used a DB bike to get home. I'm not sure how that worked because I wasn't there. A-Day was there but he was a bit confused about how the bike rental worked, too. I am under the impression that it's one of those automated city-wide bike rental deals that is somehow convenient.

I made sure to have everyone's e-mail address copied down in the morning so we could exchange pictures. Phil's doesn't seem to work.

2007-06-30 (Saturday)

"A-Day does not 'spread' jelly. He dumps it until his bread is covered."

I was heading out to take a walk and reception gave me a package for A-Day, which was undoubtedly his journal that he left in the kitchen in Berlin. I gave that to A-Day (who was still post-breakfast napping) and then I took off again. This time I went west, as I had meant to since going east. I like Munich because if you walk far enough in any direction you will come to a park, and the parks are usually sort of chained together so that you can then walk around in parks pretty much as long as you like.

Eventually I came out of the first park that I found, which had a lot of people in it doing a lot of things, and also had deer. I sort of got lost after that. I walked along some boulevards and a very straight segment of river pointing away from a big fancy looking place. I found a bus stop with a map on it. According to the map, to get to a large green area, I should go south until I hit a river, then follow that west.

Thinking about server for my adventure game. Mostly about what scripting language to use. Probably be good to make my app and the script engine use the same GC scheme (cgc and neko?). But Tcl is a neat language and I want to use that, too...

I found a river and walked along to its end. Found another parallel river, which I think is the one I had seen on the map. This led me to the fancy building I had seen earlier, behind which was a fancy park with pools, and off to the sides was more park. Wandered the park for a while. Took a nap. Upon waking I felt weird to be in the middle of Germany all by myself. Then I ate some chocolate.

I walked to the west end of the park to see what was there. Railroad tracks and what seemed to be a construction site with a bike path through it. I walked along the path, under the railroad, couldn't really walk the direction I wanted...that's always annoying. Got turned around and found myself still walking west about half an hour later. This turned into a very long walk.

Eventually I found my way back to the Mercedes-Benz building, which I had passed early on in my walk. Nearby was a Subway shop, and I stopped there, having meant to try a German Subway sandwich for quite a while. Got back to the hostel and slept. I dreampt of camping with many people. Shanie and Davida were having a graduation party. Looking for Eclipse.

2007-07-01 (Sunday)

We rode trains all day to end up in Interlaken, where it is raining. I am sitting in a room that appears as a barn, and there are also a few other people in here talking.

Went out to the tent bar ("Space Camp", it is called) and hung with some Americans who bought me beer. I am glad they soon took off so I didn't have to buy them beer back. Also they left some fries that I ate. I do not understand how some people will not want to eat their fries.

Came back to the dorm in the barn and did some laundry. Sleep now.

2007-07-02 (Monday)

Got up after lying around for a while. Ate warm water soup with bread. Bought some cereal from the coop, went hiking around on the mini-mountain right behind the hostel. I found a little mall with an electronics store where I bought a new 2GB memory card for 40CHFs, and a grocery store where I bought some PB+J. I went to an internet place and poked folks and uploaded a day of pics from Munich.

I'm going rafting at 16:00. Killing time until then thinking about my game engine.

~

Went rafting. It was 100 CHFs and somewhat disappointing because the water was too high for us to go on the lower, more exciting part of the river so we just did the easy part twice. There were a lot of Koreans there. I was in a raft with a bunch of guys that I had met under the tent at Funny Farm. We called ourselves "Team America", and I was a little bit embarassed.

I headed southward to maybe go hiking in that direction or at least scout out the region so I could hike more effectively later on. But I ran into A-Day and we went back to Balmer's (that's his hostel, mine is Funny Farm) where he gave me a tour and we got fish and chips and beer.