Geronimo89.dk

A blog about me, my doings and everything I think deserves attention.

London, fall 2008

My wonderful girlfriend Julia <3 organised a trip to London. I enjoyed the time with her and want to share what we did and throw in a few photos icon wink London, fall 2008

arrival, saturday
Our flight left early from Lübeck and got us to London without unsuspected events. From Stansted Airport we took a bus to Liverpool street and from there we walked to our hotel. It was a pretty long way,but the weather was nice and the sun shining.

the mind of a genius, sunday
The Dalí exhibition was enormous. I didn’t count the works, but the ad
claimed there were over 500 and that shouldn’t be a lie. The audio guide
was nice too, only Dalí’s comments were totally random and could have
been cut out without being missed.

blog dali 150x150 London, fall 2008

scare the shit out, monday
Monday we walked by St. Pauls Cathedral, the Tower Bridge, a wonderful piece of streetart and visited the London Dungeon. A mix between pepped up historyand horror show. When we just entered the dark gaol where it is set, I scared the shit out of Julia so she even was a little more scared than
she was anyways. The actors in the dungeon from time to time drag
visitors into their show. I happened to mention, that the girl next to
me might want to join in the lesson about torture in the torture
chamber. She was taken in front of our group of about 30 people and
various torture techniques were demonstrated on her (not painful, just
to make them understandable). The funniest part was when she was told to
bend over and she didn’t understand and blushed like the back light of a
car icon smile London, fall 2008 . She finally did and the torturer could demonstrate all the ways
you can hang prisoners on a hook icon smile London, fall 2008 .

still monday
After visiting the dungeon we visited the Tate gallery of modern art. The exhibition in the old turbine hall of the facility reminded me a lot of huge harvester from the matrix. It’s a model of giant spider over a lot of empty beds without blankets or pillows, just books in them.

blog stpauls 150x150 London, fall 2008 blog towerbridge 150x150 London, fall 2008 blog streetart 150x150 London, fall 2008

animal feeding (tues)day
Tuesday we were running around a lot in the Hyde Park, Julia feeding or trying to lure the squirrels, me taking pictures of it. Afterwards we saw a bit of marching, guarding and the Buckingham Palace.

blog squirrel1 150x150 London, fall 2008 blog squirrel2 150x150 London, fall 2008 blog march 150x150 London, fall 2008

by night, still tuesday
I managed to get a few good shots of the london eye by night. It was a
bit windy so I had to take some shots to be satisfied with the results,
but after all I was pretty happy that I had my tripod with me.

blog eye night 150x150 London, fall 2008

museum overkill, wednesday
Wednesday we visited the British Museum. A lot of the exhibited objects were stunning a lot of ancient culture. I especially liked the installation Cradle to Grave by Pharmacopoeia. It shows the pills people take in their lives with some examples.

blog pharma1 150x150 London, fall 2008 blog pharma2 150x150 London, fall 2008

Saatchi n’ walk n’ tube, thursday
Walking to the Saatchi gallery and taking the tube back was basically thursday without leaving out a dog show, taking a massive amount of pictures and looking through various shops.

blog tate3 150x150 London, fall 2008 blog tate2 150x150 London, fall 2008

Random stuff: There were NERD Cafés. Julia always insisted, they were “Nero” or some kind of thing, but how should she know!? Another thing is that Britains really must be barbarians. Who would kill orcs? Such peaceful and civilised creatures…

blog nerd 150x150 London, fall 2008 blog killorc 150x150 London, fall 2008

The best thing about this whole trip was: Walking around with the most lovely girl of Britain <3.

julia emperor London, fall 2008

PS: german translation coming.

2 comments already

LXDE, lightweight and sexy

lxde logo LXDE, lightweight and sexyI’ve been looking for a fast and easy to use desktop environment forever. XFCE was a bit too heavy and Fluxbox too minimalistic. The guys from Fluxbuntu did a good job on a minimalistic and easy to use distribution, but you have limited possibilities of adding all these features to a running installation.

A few month ago I heard about LXDE. LXDE is exactly what I’ve been looking for, it even seems familiar for Windows users. It’s easy to install on every running installation, like any desktop environment.

lxde screen1 LXDE, lightweight and sexy Here we see the PcMan file manager, the Gpic image viewer and the standard text editor leafpad. The startmenu is very small and easy to overlook

lxde screen2 LXDE, lightweight and sexy Through a middle click we can view all applications opened on all desktops. The graphical theme chooser of openbox, lxde’s window manager and a classic shell (lxterminal).

So the most basic LXDE apps are:

  • PcManFM, should look familiar to windows users
  • Openbox, combined with the panel a very need window manager
  • Gpicview
  • LXDEPanel
  • LXDETerminal, simple terminal without many effects, but with tabs support

With Gpicview I’ve found a new favourite image viewer, it’s really quick and functional.

Beginners might need a bit help with language and keyboard layout functions, I’ve not found build-in options for that yet. Maybe a small app for that would help. If you don’t know how to change your keyboard layout, have a look at the setxkbmap command.

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