Do not mess with the cheapskate

I am currently posting from our hostel in Krakow, Poland, through their free internet service using a cable that I, er, found. Anyways, I just tried to post more photos to flickr, and I found that buried among the limitations imposed upon free accounts, one of them is you can only have 200 photos. Total. Any more, and you have to shell out 25 bucks a year for a "pro" account. Could I afford that? Sure. But this isn't a matter of affordability. It's a matter of ingenuity - me seeing how much I can get other companies to give me for free vs. how much effort it'd take me to roll my own solution. I mean, I'm a programmer (sort of - does being a CS major count?), and we do these kinds of things all the time. So I've tried the flickr thing. It worked great right up until I slammed into that arbitrary limitation. Now, once I've returned to Budapest, I will start searching for code that can dish out photos on a server in some sort of browsable web page, and code that can grab photos at random and display them in a badge much like the flickr one you see at the right already. Wait, scratch that. Once I have returned to Budapest I will start researching what it would take for me to troll around the Netherlands and stay at relatives' places for the long break in October, which is coming up a LOT faster than I thought.

I've barely time to catch my breath

I just got back from Transylvania, and by "just", I mean "about 48 hours ago". My head's still reeling from the experience, and not because I had too much palinka. Granted, I did have a lot, for both dinner AND breakfast, as well as some home-made 80-proof liquor made from prunes that should have had WARNING WARNING WARNING THIS WILL MELT RIGHT THROUGH YOUR CHEEKS AND DESTROY YOUR OLFACTORY SYSTEM on the bottle, but didn't as it was in an old Smirnoff flask. Suffice to say, it's 1:30 in the morning and I won't be able to talk about the experience at length. I did manage to keep a fairly detailed log of the journey by bringing this MacBook along, so you'll all hear about it eventually. You'll also see the hundreds of pictures I took. Eventually. Why am I so short on time? Why, because I and the rest of the group are off to Poland on Thursday night, and tomorrow I go to class, an allergy shots appointment, the bookstore, one last language class (at last!), and then to my room to pack, again. At least I had the foresight to do my laundry tonight, giving me all day tomorrow to let it dry. We have no dryers here, remember? I think I mentioned that before. So, in lieu of a proper entry with an actual topic, here's some bits that were too small to deserve their own post.

• In recent days I've noticed these tiny red welts on my hands. Are they bug bites? They don't itch or anything. I haven't noticed any unusual bugs at night, save for the nightly mosquito that likes to buzz in my ears when I'm just about to drop off. Right now, there are numerous mosquito carcasses rotting on my dorm room walls. There will be more, both me and my copy of Colloquial Hungarian can assure you.
• Update on the headphone plug problem: I tried soldering with a gas oven and a fork. My attempt was not met with success. However, I was struck by inspiration while riding the tram yesterday: what if I were to burn off the insulative paint from each wire, then bind each to its respective lead with some wire cannibalized from a twist-tie? I right away tried it after that day's language class, and what do you know, it worked! I have headphones again. Now I'll be able to drown out the noise when others in the van decide that now would be a great time to play another rousing round of 20 Questions. (That's a joke. Sort of.)
• Hi Marce... ah, funny story! We all thougth we were going to Vlad's castle, when in fact we were just going to his birthplace. Funnier still, I'm not sure exactly where in that town he was born. Oh well, that place was pretty interesting too.
• I'm on the photo committee with Nate, Aron, and Kyla. We'll be heading up the project of collecting the best of everyone's photos and compiling them into a CD. We may end up needing to put them on DVD. People have been taking a LOT of pictures.
• Being able to fix the router laptop and someone's MP3 player in a single bound is a great ego booster.
• This chair's front legs aren't angled, and it sits on a bare wood floor, so it will easily and without warning slip out from under whoever's sitting on it should they lean forward to reach something. This can be quite entertaining for onlookers though.

Well, I'm beat. Until next week, I leave you with a quote from my roommates:

"That bathroom at the university smells like rotting cabbage."
"I didn't mean to leave that rotting cabbage in there, really..."
   -- Aron & Cory

Holy cow, the city's aflame!

What do you get when you combine a political scandal with some young knuckleheads who like to destroy stuff? That's right: riots! Large crowds, police in riot gear, water cannons, torched cars, the whole bit. And I missed it all because I was sick.

That was a joke.

If you tend to skip over the international section of the newspaper, now might be a good time to look at it. Skip over all the stuff about the military coup in Thailand, which has already overshadowed what's going on here. To summarize: a recently leaked tape from a closed cabinet meeting back in May contained the prime minister admitting that their party had both lied about the economy during the last election and that they had not accomplished anything in the past year and a half.

Wow. Where were the angry mobs when the sponsorship scandal broke? Were there angry mobs? I don't know, I was in the US at the time. Either way, the people are royally pissed off and are calling for Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány to resign. They're calling very loudly, in groups of tens of thousands that have been massing at the parliament buildings ever since Monday night. I took the tram past the parliament last Sunday. It seemed so peaceful. Now the whole perimeter is cordoned off with some hastily-erected fencing, there's police everywhere, satellite trucks line the sidewalks all around, and anyone who usually parks their car on the street nearby would be advised to park elsewhere for a few days.

You see, these angry mobs have been getting out of hand almost every night. Monday night was the worst, when they broke into the TV station and torched some cars and anything else that would burn. Well over 100 people were injured, most of them police officers. We international students have been advised to avoid the Kossuth Square, Andrassy u., and wherever the TV station and MSZP headquarters is. Not staying out late also said to be a wise choice.

You see, this is no rehash of Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" where the people wrestled back their fledgling democracy from some less-than-upright types. These are more your 20-something, probably drunk hooligans who are the types to start soccer riots.

So how will it end? Will the PM bow to public pressure and resign, with his party supporting him but the people calling for his head on a stick (figuratively speaking... I hope)? Will the crowds tire of the whole issue and eventually fail to show up each night? Will this whole flap have blown over by the time I return from Transylvania on Sunday, or will it fester annoyingly like this cold I've had since Saturday night? I'm betting on the former, but I may be underestimating the tenacity of a Hungarian population scorned.

But don't take my word for it - go read up on it yourself according to CNN, BBC, or Pestiside , the last of which is a rather irreverent and snarky news source with a sense of humour similar to mine. I like its characterization of the whole affair:

As things currently stand, we are going to treat the whole "Uprising '06" for what we think it is: a colorful little street carnival staged for the benefit of bored right-wing nudniks, self-important politicians, and self-interested media types.

I think they're on to something, in that things will decelerate from here. I mean, on Tuesday night only about 50 people were injured.

But never mind all that. Last Saturday my sister Marcella called me, on the phone, here, in Budapest. Now why would she do that? Same reason that Hester called me personally at the beginning of my sophmore year of college: to let me know she's engaged. I knew why she was calling before she told me. I'm told that my dad's response to Steve asking for my parents' blessing was "You're welcome to 'er." That's some good news from home.

Warning to any girls I take home from now on: with my two older sisters happily paired off, everyone you meet at my house will automatically be wondering if you're "the next one".

Headline of the day

Panda bites man, man bites panda, man in hospital (from MSNBC)

More graffiti street art

Thought you all might like this little mural I found in Szentendre a few weekends ago. Later I'll try to get some shots of the spectacular works that can be found in the underground tram stations along the river. Good pictures aren't easily had down there, due to the low light levels and constant whizzing by of trams.

On graffiti

I just realized tonight that for the last several days the previous entry was titled "Does you use iPhoto 6". I've made a horrible grammatical error.

One thing that struck me that I really didn't expect was how much graffiti there is all over the city. You'll see it on any blank wall, mailboxes, trams, overpasses, underpasses, everywhere. This picture here is from the park on the incline leading down from Buda Castle to the river. It's so prevalent that I'm wondering if the city even sees it as a problem. On one hand, you get some really artful, colour-driven tags like you see here. On the other, for every well-done tag that adds to the landscape and the city's character, you have a dozen single-stroke scrawls that have little artistic content. Some may see it as a nuisance, or as evidence of underpowered law enforcement. I see it as a humanization of bare concrete. I'm wondering if graffiti was a way for the people to underhandedly rebel against the communists during that era, kind of like how telling anti-communists jokes was? Just a thought.

Do you use iPhoto 6?

You may have heard of iPhoto's new support for creating and subscribing to photocasts, which are syndicated feeds of pictures that you can view inside the app. Normally you need .Mac to create a photocast. But while playing around with this site's code yesterday, I discovered that my flickr RSS feed works as a photocast just fine! See, if you click on the RSS FLICKR button at the right, in Safari it'll slide down the little RSS sheet and show you some pictures (assuming you're running Tiger). But if you copy the URL that button links to and paste it into iPhoto's File > Subscribe to Photocast dialog, it'll do just that. I also found that OS X supports the photo: prefix and will treat any such URLs as photocasts. If you have a Mac with OS X 10.4 and iPhoto 6, try clicking on the following link... <photo://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne? id=38259594@N00&format=rss_200>

"But wait," I can hear you all say. "Flickr's feed only shows the last 20 photos in the stream!" Yest, that's true, and I don't know if I can change that - maybe they paying subscribers can.

"And you should know that you don't really need .Mac to create your own photocast," you're all saying in unison. "Haven't you heard that all it takes is the CustomHTMLExport plugin and an easily available template?" Yes, I have heard of that, but there's a gotcha in there: you need server space. Calvin only gives me 30 megs (I mean, really!), and although I could probably figure something out on another server somewhere, adding new photos to the feed would require re-exporting the whole cursed library, and that's a hassle I don't want to bother with.

Okay, that was a needlessly technical post that had little, if anything, to do with my adventures here. So: has anyone heard of how Stephen Colbert, with his readers' help, won an online poll to get a bridge named after him in Hungary? See the results for yourself at <http://www.m0hid.gov.hu/toplista>. Let me just say that I've seen where that bridge is being built! There's not much to see right now, just some huge floating docks and such. Even so, I now wish I'd taken pictures.

Oh, and I know that the Hungarian ambassador said that only dead people can actually win the contest. I suppose this story is still developing.

A wee problem

I managed to rip the headphone cord right out of its plug earlier this evening. The wires are the kind that HAVE to be soldered back on to the leads - simply wrapping them around won't work. How on earth am I going to find a soldering iron around here? Or could I maybe find some sharp piece of metal (the tine of a fork?) and heat it up in the blue flame of one of the gas stoves and attempt it like so, just like you used to have to do in the 50s... no, I doubt that'll work appreciably well.

I may have to make a rather unusual request to the student mentors at the technical university... surely there's an electronics lab somewhere that I can sneak into for a minute or ten.

Should I stay or should I go?

So I just got back from "office hours" at Prof. Fetzer's apartment (read: laid-back teatime with opportunity for light conversation and various good-tasting foody bits) and am feeling very funny right now. You see, he was offering coffee there. He likes his coffee strong. And not just "whoa, that's strong" coffee, I'm talking "stick a spoon into it and it'll stay upright" coffee. I had a mug and a half of the stuff, and on the way back I was wide-eyed, jumpy, and a little paranoid. That was about two hours ago and it's just starting to wear off a bit, but its effects are still being felt in a substantial way. It's a good thing I had my iPod, which allowed me to listen to certain music that I save for such occasions. It certainly didn't help that I still had not decided on what I would do for the weekend.

You see, there are three groups going in different directions these days. One already left at 7:00 this morning for Croatia. Another two groups leave tomorrow morning, one for Salzburg and then Munich for Oktoberfest, another for Vienna and Salzburg. In theory, I could go with either of the two latter groups, but would I truly be welcome? Actually, I probably would be. A more important question is, would I have a good time? Were I to jump in at the last minute, I wouldn't feel like a real part of the group. In the end, I've decided to echo Cartman's famous phrase of, essentially, "Never mind you guys, I'm staying home" and, well, stay home. Going somewhere this weekend... I'm just not feeling it. I think I'll use my free time (no classes straight from here 'till Monday!) to get some solo time just wandering around the city. Maybe go to the baths by Hero's Square... tag along with Karin and her family... plan coming weekends.

Right now I'm watching a chick flick. Well, sort of - I'm actually typing this right now, while on the adjacent bed, six others (all women) are watching it. Why am I in here? Don't know - maybe the dialogue and their laughs fill the silences nicely. I'm also feeling slightly hungry.

(goes off to get some of that bread I just got yesterday)

I just saw some Simpson's dubbed in Hungarian. Naturally, all the voices are drastically different from the English. I saw some of Meet the Parents a few days ago - Ben Stiller was given a much higher, more nasal voice. I found myself able to laugh at all the same times as the Hungarians, even though I didn't know the exact words that were being said.

So, I've returned with some bread and chips. The chips are paprika- flavoured. Sound interesting? It isn't, really... it tastes much like BBQ chips would, except slightly blander. The bread I just bought two days ago, and it's one of those large balls of cooked dough that you can tear off and smear through whatever spread you happen to have handy, rather than bothering with cutting and slicing and using who knows how many knives...

Speaking of which, what are my choices of spread? I pondered this the first time I walked through Auchan, the Meijer-esqe superstore a tram ride away from my dorm. Peanut butter was an obvious choice. I didn't find any, but I figured it was because I hadn't had the time to look for it completely.

I looked for it at the corner store a block down the road a week later. There was no peanut butter there either, but there was nutella... lots and lots of nutella. I picked up a container of it, which happened to be in these nice little glass containers decorated with various animals playing soccer, the kind of thing that would be great for me to take home for mom. I became concerned.

During my next trip to Auchan, I checked more thoroughly for the peanut butter. I found none, and now began to panic somewhat. Was peanut butter not known in this part of the world? Was I going to be peanut-butter-less until Christmas?

It was not until now that I realized how much peanut butter was a part of my life. I remembered all the times when I was too tired (or lazy) to fix myself something to eat, and peanut butter would be there for me, either spread on a piece of bread, a cracker, or just by the spoonful. Sometimes several.

Subsequent conversations confirmed my fears: peanut butter is rather non-existent here, although I've heard it can be found in health food stores for high prices. This explains why some had brought jars of peanut butter from home. And that's not the only item I've suddenly had to do without: as it turns out, brown sugar is also unheard of. A while ago I bought something that I thought might be brown sugar, but it turned out to be some sort of vanilla-flavoured sweetener meant for cooking. Whatever it was, it tasted horrible with rice, which is what I usually use it for.

So it seems that for the time being, nutella will have to serve as a substitute spread. Further conversations have revealed that this has been a common occurrence among past Hungary-ers. I've passed the first few steps of the peanut butter-nutella transition (naïveté, suspicion, panic, compromise). What comes next?

- Day 30 (honeymoon): Pining for peanut butter has long since ceased. Have now resorted to eating nutella with bread, crackers, in big scoops by itself, as well as less conventional foods like cereal, smoothies, and rice.

- Day 83 (foreboding): Starting to feel the accumulation of nutella in places where it shouldn't accumulate. Having heard stories of past semester participants not being able to fit into shorts from the previous summer, the subject makes a mental note to watch amount of nutella ingested.

- Day 85 (forgetfulness): An entire jar of nutella is consumed within the span of 48 hours after a particularly stressful few classes. The subject figures some jogging will take care of the extra calories.

- Day 86 (forgetfulness II): A sudden snowfall erases all previous exercise commitments.

How will it end? We'll have to wait and see. (Actually, it was starting to sound lame and I was running out of ideas.) For now, dear regular readers (all four of you): with my traditional rice with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon recipe no longer being practical, have you any further ideas for how to prepare rice? I could do soya sauce like the rest of the world, but there must be more creative ideas out there. Help me out here, I'm rather culinarically challenged.

You're kidding me

In the recent past I have been shocked to find that people other than my numerous personalities have been reading this thing. Don't you people have better things to do? Well hey, I'm sure I have better things to do also, but lately I've been wasting time in decidedly unproductive yet enjoyable ways.

(pauses momentarily to end the existence of a mosquito that's been buzzing around all evening)

(pauses lengthily to talk to sisters on MSN and to Mom who just called)

As have the others - they're all next door watching Gosford Park.

(pauses for a full 24 hours, which is filled with much sleep and socializing)

So... crap. Three days ago I was told there was no room left for me - for two different groups. One was headed to Slovakia this weekend, the other is heading north to Estonia etc. for the October break. (No hard feelings though.) It's rapidly becoming clear to me that if I am to ever do any outside travelling, I am going to plan and lead it myself. Screw the politics! Full speed ahead! My first order of business will be to plan a trip to Sarajevo, three weekends from now. Next weekend is too soon for something like that, although going to Pécs or another city might be doable, and in two weekends we go to Transylvania, the whole of us. I'm told that we need drivers. Who can drive vans. Through backroads. Who can drive stick. (Curses!) Such a journey will prove interesting, to say the least.

So there's a municipal election coming up here in the city. And you know what that means: campaign posters. Lots of them. On every saleable surface. Streetcar interiors, bus exteriors (and vice versa), hanging off lamp posts, bus shelters, billboards, and even these giant ones that get stretched across scaffolding that can be seen from several blocks away and probably from low-flying aircraft. And every single one shows the candidate's smiling - or sombre, if it's an MSZP* ad - mug. I am really getting sick of them now. Oh well, at least they're not as garish as those ads for Friskies that were there until last week.

A while ago I found an old post on a friend's blog where she said she wanted to marry someone exactly like me someday. There's a lift right there - I must be doing something right.

I just got Skype installed and working, mostly. Except for the two- second latency and the occasional failings of microphones, it's just like a normal phone! My username's the same as my Gmail name, call me sometime. Grab the program from <http://www.skype.com/download/>, any (major) platform. Ok, I'm going to bed now.

*Roughly translated, that's the Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Pàrt), one of the two remnants of the pre-1989 government. Enough said.

Those who don't learn their history

will probably fail the exam. Or something like that. Anyway, here's some interesting reading. I'll be back with more Hungary-oriented drivel tomorrow.

Travel plans

As you may already know, we'll be having three- or four-day weekends every weekend, due to how our classes are scheduled. This leaves us free to travel. A lot. As such, already numerous plans have been laid for trips outside the country during the coming weekends. Already last weekend a group (myself included) trekked out to Lake Balaton for a day, and things went relatively well. What's complex about all this is how to stay on the inside track of all these plans, lest one miss out on something interesting. I'm not saying I want to go on every trip - I just don't want to not go on any. Wow, that was convoluted. Anyways, here's what's coming up:

- The weekend after next, a 5-person group is heading down to Croatia. I found this interesting, but didn't bother trying to get in on it - most agree that a group of 4 is an ideal size for these kinds of things. I have heard that some unspecified others are hoping to make it down later in the year.

- Some others are talking about Scotland. Personally, I'm going to favour Central- and Eastern-European destinations, because they're a) more off the beaten path, and 2) cheaper.

- Oktoberfest is coming up, and some people are going to try to get out there for that. Ah... that's not really my thing. Besides, I've heard stories about what goes on there then... although if another group gets together to go visit Miriam, I'd be up for that.

- I heard that some people were going to Salzburg for a weekend, but I know of no details of that.

- I'm thinking about places I'd like to visit, and organizing one myself wouldn't be too hard, as long as I know where to look for the necessary info. I'd like to make it out to the Netherlands sometime, as I'm sure there's no shortage of relatives over there (mine or someone else's, i.e. Karin) who'd be happy to have us over. I've also found a few people who are interested in going to Sarajevo - that's a trip I'd like to do in the near future.

- Oh, and we also have a 10-day break in October, which leaves plenty of room for more extensive travel. Tonight there was a group of people who met to discuss plans for going to Greece. There's also not one but two other groups of 4-5 people planning on hitting up the Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania/Russia circuit. Someone just expressed a desire to drop out of one of those groups, and so I expressed my desire to take her place to another group member - the planners were out tonight though, so I'll see what ends up happening tomorrow.

And finally, there's the 3 "official" trips to Prague, Transylvania, and Krakow. And classes. Yup, these next four months are going to be a wee bit insane. It'll be fun, but also exhausting - but that'll make coming home for Christmas that much better.

Assuming I can find a ride home from G.R., of course.

Why haven't I called, you say?

So I've been here for about two weeks and I still haven't called home yet. No, it's not because I'm so callous and uncaring that I can't be bothered to call those who by and with I was raised, true as that may be. It's because... well... Ok, imagine that you're in a foreign country far from home where the default language isn't English, the phone lines were strung during the communist era, and no instructions were given to you with regards to how dialing an outside line is done, or if it's even possible. Right now I have a sheet with all the numbers I have to dial in order to call home, and the number of digits pressed totals to around 30, and naturally it still doesn't work. I also tried calling with iChat, but it whined about "insufficient bandwidth", which is utter ridiculousness. I've got TEN FREAKIN' MEGABITS HERE!! But let's not give up the ship yet: I have dispatched a request for help to one of our English-speaking Hungarian acquaintances who lives here in the dorm, and I have also considered trying Skype, which I KNOW works, if others' success with it is any indication. If any of my family members read this, they could try calling the dorm desk (before 6:00pm EST) at 011-36-1-2047-898 and asking to be transferred to "sawz-ej" (spelled szaz-egy, means "101"). ELENA, ARE YOU GETTING ALL THIS?? If you were to download Skype from <http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15805> and sign up for an account, that might be very helpful. Same goes for anyone else who wants to hear from me before Christmas - I know how high the demand is for me these days.

(sounds of crickets)

Hey, where'd everybody go?

UPDATE: It turns out my dorm room phone can be called to, just not called from, at least not without a card. So, I can be reached directly at 011-36-1-2040-449. In case you're wondering, Budapest is six hours ahead of eastern time.

More photos

I've been too lazy busy to pick photos to post to my flickr stream, so here's a link to my facebook album. I'll add more to it "soon".

<http://calvin.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2014170&l=00ca0&id=15302219>