Take a well known FLOSS friendly hotel located in the German region of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Take a bunch of nasty Release Critical bugs affecting the next Debian stable release. Add a dozen of Debian Developers and contributors (allocating slots for two Italians and a Spaniard). Add a couple of packs of Haribo, some Parmigiano-Reggiano, various liters of Club Mate and Salmiakki candies. Lock the doors (well, metaphorically speaking) for an entire weekend and mix all. You'll end up with a great Bug Squashing Party! On Monday morning, you'll wake up with:

• 106 bug reports checked
• 8 Release Critical bugs closed
• 6 bug reports updated with more informations
• 1 Unblock Request sent
• 1 Request for Removal sent
• 1 issue of DPN ready to be published
• a couple of contributors whose GPG keys are now finally signed by two or more DDs
• a new, funny, useless piece of code for trolling your friends and enemies
• some pics to blackmail Debian friends
• a renewed enthusiasm for Debian, both as operating system and community, and the desire to do more Debian work.

The only thing to do, then, will be to thanks Rhonda for organizing it and all the people who participated for making it a success.

Take a well known FLOSS friendly hotel located in the German region of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Take a bunch of nasty Release Critical bugs affecting the next Debian stable release. Add a dozen of Debian Developers and contributors (allocating slots for two Italians and a Spaniard). Add a couple of packs of Haribo, some Parmigiano-Reggiano, various liters of Club Mate and Salmiakki candies. Lock the doors (well, metaphorically speaking) for an entire weekend and mix all. You'll end up with a great Bug Squashing Party! On Monday morning, you'll wake up with:

• 106 bug reports checked
• 8 Release Critical bugs closed
• 6 bug reports updated with more informations
• 1 Unblock Request sent
• 1 Request for Removal sent
• 1 issue of DPN ready to be published
• a couple of contributors whose GPG keys are now finally signed by two or more DDs
• a new, funny, useless piece of code for trolling your friends and enemies
• some pics to blackmail Debian friends
• a renewed enthusiasm for Debian, both as operating system and community, and the desire to do more Debian work.

The only thing to do, then, will be to thanks Rhonda for organizing it and all the people who participated for making it a success.

Sometimes one stumbles upon artists by accident and immediately falls in love with them. A link to a video from Lindsey Stirling was dropped in a chat I was paying attention to at that time, and it immediately touched me. She's got style, and she's got great videos. Speaking of videos, here they are:

• Electric Daisy Violin: This was the song that was dropped. And it touched me, especially her dressing style. Maybe her legs will also catch your attention like they did to me. :)
• Crystallize: The subtitle Dubstep Violin of this video is what describes her style best. Great play.
• Shadows: Another great song with terrific video.

I hope her plans to come to europe might work out soonish. Enjoy!

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This poem was triggered by a discussion with a special person not special in the sense I address in the poem though.

My life's hating me
But it is not a one-way:
I'm hating my life Hate being special
I know I can help others
But what about me? All quite supportive
Respect for my openness
And encouraging Though, no step further
No clue how to handle me
Afraid to ask me Hooking up with me?
Suddenly embarrassing
Just scolding words left Want to be normal
Maybe I'll lie to myself
Though that won't work out I am what I am
And sometimes it just pains me:
Hate being special I'm hating my life
But it is not a one-way:
My life's hating me

Please refrain from asking whether I feel fine, I am in good mood. :) But I haven't written anything in a way too long time, I noticed how little actually during selecting poems for the International Poetry Night during debconf. So I picked up the idea and caressed it until I came up with the above piece about with which I am quite happy. Think about it, and ... try to enjoy. Potential interesting sidenote, if you wonder: the title refers to this snippet from the first Futurama episode: I hate my life I hate my life I hate my life. :)

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Wheezy is coming closer to the release, there though are still way too many release critical bugreports outstanding for it. Squeeze has already been released, but it has collected even more release critical bugreports than wheezy since. To be able to reduce these amounts I will be at the Linuxhotel in Essen at the weekend from 23rd to 25th of November, and it would be a great pleasure if I could convince you to join me in this effort. As readers of my blog might assume, my main aim will be those RC bugs affecting squeeze and I would be happy if some people interested to work on those could join me, I plan to give a quick quick explanation about the version tracking of the BTS and why we should care about stable too, but the event will definitely not be limited to squeeze RC bugs. Also, it will be a good chance to improve your key stats for the web of trust in case your GnuPG key hasn't got enough signatures yet or you want to transition to a stronger one. Please read the Community page of the Linuxhotel for what they offer for accommodation in case you want to use their lodging. Personally I'll go for the two-bed room with breakfast option, but you are of course free to bring your own sleeping bag and mat if you want to cut short on the expenses. In case of any questions, feel free to ask me right ahead. It would be great if we could help both our stable release and the next stable release during the weekend, and if you could join in! Please add yourself to the wiki page about the BSP.

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First things first: The issue with the feedback form is fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience. I'm not sure if you followed the schedule of this year's debconf closely, but there was an International Poetry Night happening. Given that Mermaids still is quite important for me, but also, that I like to write poetry every now and then, I had the idea spinning around in my head to present Mermaids there. The simple thought of that made me extremely nervous. Things happened as they liked to happen: the video streaming setup for debconf still was giving me a bit of headaches, and suddenly it was too late to print out the poem because I didn't even had CUPS installed on my new laptop. Also, having reread it recently I noticed that it wasn't flowing too well, so I was uncertain whether it would be possible to properly perform it. I attended nevertheless. It was rather cosy in El Panal, but still a fair amount of people there. And to my surprise, quite a lot of Debian people were presenting poetry. Some in Spanish, some in English, but also one in Japanese, one in German and even one Esperanto. I had the feeling that I really should present something too. I still was extremely nervous, but during the day I had opened some of my poems in the browser, so I started to write down The Girl and the Boy, and when Fito called me to the microphone, I think most people were able to tell how nervous I was about it. But it went well. It even went so well that I felt the need to perform another poem. I chose that's what friends are for, quickly scribbling it down in bad light. The choice was easy, given that it is one that means a lot to me and that an haiku already got presented. It was really a nice experience to not only write these poems and publishing them on deviantART and in my blog, but also to present them to a live audience. Then there was a break. Actually I thought it was over already, but they started a second round. And I somehow liked the way it worked out, so I started to dig for something else to present. I settled for Strange and Jonathan insisted on translating it into Spanish and present that version, too. His version wasn't in Haiku style, but I think it still was a very nice idea. It seem to have been received well, but given that I don't speak Spanish I can only hope he was able to catch the feelings that I did put into this short piece. I am confident he did well. :) As final piece I settled for another short piece, this time it was in German, Wahre Liebe. I think I was able to transport the feelings of it with adding pauses in certain spots, although I fear most people didn't get it because it was ... well, in German. Again, a fair amount of the people who presented poetry were from Debian, actually more than half of it I think. And I am wondering: When will the CfP for next year's debconf open so we can try to establish this event as regular debconf event? And who knows, maybe I'll find the courage then to perform Mermaids.

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It's almost seven years now since I wrote/published Mermaids. It was an important step in my life, confessing publicly what I've found out about myself, how I feel and identify myself. It definitely has been a certain turning point in my life. A year later, there was the Debconf6 in Mexico, which was just as important. I was wearing a skirt for the first time, and that for the whole duration of the two weeks. It was an enormous feeling of freedom, and I knew I was feeling at home. That was also the time I shaved off my beard. And since? Well, I sort of limited myself to these two weeks every year. Debconf is my haven, Debconf is my home. Here I allow myself to be myself. Debian is my family. And like in every family, there are people who won't understand, but that doesn't matter. I feel comfortable to express myself in this crowd in the way I feel. Being abroad seems to help with the confidence, and it seems like it also shines through. I haven't had lots of strange looks. To the contrary, when I went with a skirt to a homosexual acceptance event at home in Vienna, there was a group of gays who were pointing and laughing. Quite an interesting experience, one would assume that people who are wanting more acceptance would be more acceptable and tolerant themselves... But, I don't think I will ever take the step toward actually turning my body into a female one. It was an important step for me to find out about my inner self, and it actually managed to make me accept my male body; even though I can totally relate to people not being able to understand this both people not in the situation and people being in the situation and needing the physical adjustment to be able to be happy again. But this is what and how I am: Contents may vary from packaging. This though has an inherited problem: as I am not (usually) heading for a female appearance (besides my skirt during Debconf), people keep addressing me with a male pronoun, even, or rather especially when using my nick Rhonda. This is something that I consider a fair bit disturbing, especially when it comes from people that I consider to address with the term friends. One would assume that people who you share a fair bit of private life with would be the ones who can understand and relate better than others. But that's where we are, and I also can understand the troubles: I'm not giving them much visual help for fixing their thoughts. I found the confidence in my body, and like most of you know, I have a son I dearly love (and miss like hell these two weeks), so I know how to use the tools it comes with, frankly spoken. But I won't go the road to adjust my body to be a female one instead, just to convince people that I really am the female person that I identify as. It might be hard for you to understand that, it might be hard for you to accept it it is also hard for me, to fight for the acceptance that I thought are an inherent part of the term friendship. I have deepest respect for the people who feel the requirement and have the strength to adjust their body to their mind. It though just isn't the road for me. I already have enough uncertainties in my life to cope with, and I don't need another one to deal with, related to that I might not be able to accept my body after the transition than I am able to accept it now. It's just not important enough for me to find my place. My place is here, my home is Debconf.

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Participation and Results From June 15-17th we held a Debian BugSquashingParty in Salzburg, hosted and sponsored by conova communications GmbH. It was a fun and busy weekend, with 15-17 people from 5 countries being around, mainly working on RC bugs in Testing/Unstable. Gerfried Fuchs (rhonda) also worked on triaging the impact of RC bugs on the version in Squeeze, while Peter Palfrader (weasel) took care of Tor related things and Debian sysadmin work, including starting on the new bugs and udd hosts. Phillip Hug (hug) worked on the debian.ch infrastructure. Together with Miroslav Such from Red Hat Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) worked on the packaging of the necessary libraries and daemons to add (basic) Spacewalk client support to Debian. As soon as the packages passed NEW and #677871 was applied (thanks to the APT guys for working on that already), managing Debian clients with Spacewalk should work out of the box. Of course we also had a little keysigning party

Statistics

• about 68 bugs in unstable/testing were triaged/patched/fixed or at least pinged
• 54 bugs were tagged to show if they affect Squeeze, several other bugs were pinged to retrieve necessary information or to trigger an update in the next stable pointrelease.
• 5 packages were introduced into Debian (still in NEW, though) - the Spacewalk client related packages and libapache2-mod-auth-memcookie.

Accomodation Thanks to Debian funds we were able to provide accomodation for four participants in the JUFA youth hostel in Salzburg. We had paid in advance for eight, but changing to rooms with a higher category for only 4 people would have been equally or more expensive.

Press/Media coverage Additionally to being mentioned in the calendars on ProLinux and similar pages, we had some press coverage by the local newspaper and online magazines:

• Scan of Salzburger Woche / Stadt Nachrichten
• article on the Salzburger Nachrichten website
• meinbezirk.at
• Salzburg Cityguide - Photogallery

Fun facts We consumed 2kg of Leberkas, a big plate of "Buchteln mit Vanillesosse", about 16000cm^2 of Pizza, about 80 litres of coke, juice, beer and wine and I guess we drank at least the same amount of water. We had coffee made of 1.5kg coffee beans and managed to empty the (formerly well filled) icemaker in the fridge. Also we had successful training sessions of a standard Debconf game (rules won't be explained here obviously). Maybe we even successfully spread the game to the employees of a commercial linux distribution

This is the third summary of my squeeze RC bug squashing. If you take a look at the bug graph you will notice that the blue line went up a bit over a two week's period. I would like to claim that confirming the samhain RC bug 618728 did cost me the time (I actually gave it the time to finish), but the real reason was that I was looking at other stuff. I came back with a vengeance though, so here is the list of the bugs squashed for squeeze since the last report:

• 657004: libmusicbrainz in squeeze not obsolete
• 656178: missing found version
• 654264: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 644690: no nautilus 3 in squeeze
• 644692: no nautilus 3 in squeeze
• 644693: no nautilus 3 in squeeze
• 644696: no nautilus 3 in squeeze
• 644352: explicit about testing
• 654281: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654270: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654267: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654242: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654218: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 653664: no multiarch in squeeze
• 653625: boost1.48 not in squeeze
• 653294: python-twisted 11.1.0-1 not in squeeze
• 653231: libarchive 3.0.2 not in squeeze
• 659585: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 653418: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 660044: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 650631: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 660716: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 662807: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 662811: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 662622: php 5.4 not in squeeze
• 662116: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 662200: libcvs3-5 not in squeeze
• 662198: libcvs3-5 not in squeeze
• 661879: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661775: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661800: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661799: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661798: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663556: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663562: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663566: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 664188: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663943: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663671: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 663669: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 665218: php 5.4 not in squeeze
• 665003: clearly wrong severity
• 665218: libconfig++8 available in squeeze
• 662964: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661909: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661516: tm-align not available in squeeze
• 661450: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661449: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 661413: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 660488: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 665902: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666171: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666172: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666144: libmecab2 not available in squeeze
• 666112: fixing wrong found version
• 666417: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666009: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 666006: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 665678: doesn't fail in squeeze

Current stats: 119 bugs in 93 days, still got the margin up by five more bugs. :) Enjoy!

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This is the second entry in my series about squeeze release critical bug squashing. In response to my last blog post it was asked whether this is proper release critical bug squashing. Indeed there haven't been any patches or upload involved in this, only BTS handling, but this doesn't mean that these bugs weren't considered to be affecting squeeze. You can see this effort currently as weeding out the "wrong" bugs so that the list gets more useful and actually be able to ask maintainers to address the real issues. You can at least see in this graph that the blue line is going down constantly since the year change instead of rising up like before. And I hope I will be able to keep it below the green line for a while still. Also thanks to the release-team and ftpmasters that it was possible to keep the massbugs about waf binary blob not being preferred source for modification out of affecting squeeze and ignore it for the current stable release the required changes for those would rather be a fair bit intrusive for a stable update.

• 637213: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 648989: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 584568: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 624464: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632106: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632108: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632262: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632264: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632265: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 632266: most stuff (BTS, PTS, ...) use maintainer information from unstable only
• 595298: squeeze has linux 2.6.32
• 613732: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 616694: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 620264: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 620573: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 621440: libdb4.8 not obsolete in squeeze
• 624593: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 626868: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 628475: libdb4.8 not obsolete in squeeze
• 629838: boost1.46 not in squeeze
• 628475: boost1.46 not in squeeze
• 631623: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 639990: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 632763: no libevent 2.0 in squeeze
• 627000: not affecting squeeze
• 658216: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 654870: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 655115: this is explicitly about testing
• 657092: working in squeeze
• 655710: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 644691: no nautilus 3 in squeeze

I am glad that I managed to keep it up and even have a nice margin in case I can't put any effort into it some day but still have more bugs squashed than days there are in the year so far. Currently I am at 60 bugs in 39 days. This gives a warm feeling. :) Enjoy!

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The following announce is lazily copied from Paul Wise's announce. There is only one thing I like to add: the screenshots that are submitted and collected on screenshots.debian.net are visible on the packages websites (both Debian and Ubuntu) and are also used by the software-center package, so they help people to get a first impression of the package they might want to install. Have you ever wondered how to start getting involved in Debian/Ubuntu? Do you enjoy discovering new games and playing them? You might want to come to the games screenshot party! We hope that the party will be a fun, easy, low-commitment way to get involved. The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing a half-day screenshots party on the weekend of 25th-26th February for creating screenshots for all the games that are available in Debian/Ubuntu. If you are interested in attending, please add your availability to the poll linked from the announcement so that we can get some idea of attendance and when is a good time for the people who are interested. Look forward to lots of game playing, screenshots and merry time, hope to see you all there!

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As sort of new year's resolution I started picking up the habit to work on release critical bugreports for squeeze again. The number is way to high to be healthy, but at least it is (still) below the amount of release critical bugreports for unstable. It will be an uneven fight because it seems that there are quite some people working on weeding out release critical bugreports in unstable, but those who are interested in weeding out releasing critical bugreports in stable seems to be limited, even though it is one of our supported releases and thus should receive quite some attention, at least by the corresponding package maintainers themself. So here is the list that I managed so far:

• 651792: not relevant for squeeze
• 653520: builds on squeeze
• 654568: re-add version information lost in reassign
• 654276: not relevant for squeeze
• 654257: not failing on squeeze
• 654810: not happening on squeeze
• 654459: not relevant for squeeze
• 654406: not release critical at all, shipped as upstream
• 655007: python2.7 isn't default in squeeze
• 655372: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 527403: libjack-dev in squeeze provides libjack0.100.0-dev
• 622903: not relevant for squeeze
• 625764: squeeze has older version of libvelocity-tools-java, not affected
• 654818: does work in squeeze
• 647795: squeeze still has libahven1-dev
• 647796: squeeze still has libahven1-dev
• 636823: not obsolete in squeeze
• 628500: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629255: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629284: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629293: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636132: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636268: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636271: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636517: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636520: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636521: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636522: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636823: not obsolete dependencies in squeeze

That makes 29 squeeze RCs squashed so far, I hope I can keep up with it. Enjoy!

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No, my blog isn't dead, and neither is me. It's just that way too many things happened since this year's debconf that got me a bit off tracks. I managed to do daily business like keeping my packages in shape and the backports queue low, and that was mostly it. No clue if that will change anytime soon, but I guess I would like to keep you updated with an event where you can meet me next week: There will be the Global 2000 Birthday Party going on in the WUK on Thursday 20th, so if you happen to be in Vienna at that time, drop by and enjoy some great bands. ... which brings me to one of the local bands from Vienna: Heinz aus Wien. They are around for well over 10 years now and are still rocking quite well. Here are some examples of their songs, like always:

• Wir sind immer noch: A sort of love song for this great town, Vienna.
• Lieb im Prinzip: A very pithy song about relationships.
• Ich hab mit Tocotronic Bier getrunken: Quite funny song from their early days, and interestingly, people regularly claim that it was done by a different band ...

Like always, enjoy!

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Vim's habit of completing the full filename of the first match on :e has always annoyed me. Rhonda pointed me to wildmode - thanks!

set wildmode=longest,list:longest,list:full

For those interested in Sympa, version 6.1.4 has been uploaded to squeeze-backports. This version fixes around two dozen bugs since the version present in squeeze (6.0.1). I strongly recommend to use this version with squeeze as it fixes some very annoying bugs. How to install it: For squeeze users Be sure to have squeeze-backports repository enabled in your sources.list as explained on Debian Backports website then:

apt-get -t squeeze-backports install sympa

For lenny users For lenny users with a running sympa installation who plan to upgrade to squeeze and use sympa from squeeze-backports, it is recommended to upgrade directly from the version 5.3.4 (lenny's version) to 6.1.4. To do so, you just need to add some apt pinning in /etc/apt/preferences (see below) and then dist-ugprade normally.

Package: sympa
Pin: version 6.1.4*
Pin-Priority: 500

Sympa 6.1.6 is already out and should be uploaded in unstable soon, it should also be backported to squeeze-backports if all goes fine. Special thanks to Gerfried (rhonda) and Alexander (formorer) for their work on Debian Backports.

Yupp, it s this time of the month again! Rhonda has already spammed about it, but I think repeating won t hurt: the next (4th) meeting of the Debian/Ubuntu Games Team will be held in #debian-games on June 26th at 10:00 UTC.

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Another month, another Games Team IRC Meeting happening. This time it was decided to have it again on Sunday, the time was set to 10 am UTC. To find out the time in your localtime, issue date -d '2011-06-26 10:00 UTC' in your shell. The agenda can be seen as always in the wiki. If the time or agenda doesn't fit your ideas, feel free to join our mailinglist to be informed about the discussion of agenda and time for the next meeting and raise your voice at that time. Please notice that the agenda isn't final yet, you can still drop your ideas for that. Enjoy, and join if you care about improving games packaging in Debian and influence future development!

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Martin Pitt announced packages of PostgreSQL 9.1 Beta 2 in his blog. Following this, I am hereby announcing the availability of pgadmin3 version 1.14.0 Beta 1 which amongst other things has added support for PG 9.1. You can find it in Debian experimental and backports for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10 and 11.04 in my pgadmin3 backports for stable Ubuntu releases PPA. Enjoy!

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This is a very special person. He is a very well known songwriter, at least in German language countries because he sings in German. He was that special kind of person with his lyrics when I was still a kid, and is still around continuing to write his songs in his very own special way. This person is Reinhard Mey, and if you understand German and have missed him so far, you have missed a lot. The songs that I present to you are special in the way that they are all contained in the special compilation titled Mein Apfelb umchen. The dedication he wrote for the album is also very special:

Ich glaube, Kinder zu haben ist das aufregendste Abenteuer, das wir erleben k nnen. Es ist der schwerste Beruf und die gr te Herausforderung, die ich mir denken kann, und die gl cklichste Erfahrung zugleich. Ich bin dankbar daf r! Dies sind die Lieder, die ich bis heute daf r geschrieben habe. Mein Anteil aus dem Erl s dieser Schallplatte gebe ich der Hilfe f r krebskranke Kinder.

Rough translation: I believe that having kids is the most exciting adventure that we can undergo. It is the hardest job and the biggest challenge that I can think of, and at the same time the happiest experience. I'm thankful for it! These are the songs that I wrote up to today for it. My part of the revenues of this record go to Help for children with cancer. So here are the songs:

• Mein Apfelb umchen: The song that gave this compilation its title. Extremely touching, and it manages regularly to wet my eyes... Absolutely lovely.
• Keine ruhige Minute: This is actually a live version of the song with a longer introduction that is worth listening to on its own.
• Menschenjunges: A thoughtful song about the thoughts when seeing your kid for the first time.

Enjoy! And if you feel like it, support these kind of special people.

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Whenever someone asked me about a calendar application, especially for the textmode, I always encouraged them to give pal a try. I always loved the looks of it, the interactive mode is helpful, it has HTML output format to inject the calendar into a webpage, mail output format for a daily reminder cronjob, and other useful features. I even created a file with the Austrian holidays for it which got included in the original project for the benefit of all its users.
If you haven't tried it yet and are looking for a calendar tool with support for very flexible recurring events and categories, this might be a good look. I am still happy with pal, though someone recently suggested a different tool on IRC, and that was wyrd. From a quick glance it looked promising, so I started to dig into it. My first task was to convert the former mentioned pal file for the Austrian holidays into remind format. remind is the backend for wyrd, and its definition language seems to be extremely powerful. It though took me a while to figure out how to put in Easter date related events into it, the examples weren't really hinting me in the right direction. This is part of what I am using now:
REM [trigger(easterdate(current())-47)] +6 TAG noweight MSG Faschingsdienstag %b The look and view of wyrd is different to pal in several ways. Where the granularity of pal is a pure day view, wyrd scales in hours (or half, quarter thereof). Also, wyrd offers the possibility to color the days differently by busy level. Of course it's possible to exempt tasks from adding weight to a day. pal on the other hand is able to color events differently by category. Decide yourself what you actually need, test it, and ... enjoy!

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