Last friday, I joinded the Critical Mass Graz. It was by far not as critical as I expected, but I was told there were normally more cycling enthusiasts joining the monthly ride. There was a demonstration scheduled for the same time, and the not soo nice weather probably did the rest.
Peoples reactions are mostly big smiles, but also (especially car drivers) occasionally call you a stupid jerk.

If you have never heard of Critical Mass, you may want to read the wikipedia article:

Critical Mass is a bicycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world. While the ride was originally founded with the idea of drawing attention to how unfriendly the city was to bicyclists, the leaderless structure of Critical Mass makes it impossible to assign it any one specific goal. In fact, the purpose of Critical Mass is not formalized beyond the direct action of meeting at a set location and time and traveling as a group through city or town streets.

The next Critical Mass in Graz will be on the last Friday of October, wich is the 31st!

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Writing for Metblogs has the potential to be the most rewarding experience in your entire life. It’ll make you rich, famous, good looking, will help you lose weight, make your clothes fit better, and get you a super good deal on a new car. It will make you the most well known person on the entire planet. Yes, each and every one of you. Really.

OK maybe not. Actually those are all lies, but it’s fun at least. The truth is Metblogs is the largest network of locally focused blogs on the web, covering almost 60 cities around the world and we’re looking to add a few new bloggers/writters/authors to this fine site. If you wanna know more about us check out this wikipedia entry but it’s kinda boring so I won’t waste time repeating it all here again. If you wanna write for us, here’s the scoop:

• All author positions are volunteer. That means you don’t get paid.
• You must live in (or very near) the city you plan to write about.
• Anything you post must relate to the city somehow. That means you shouldn’t post a movie review, but talking about going to see a movie at a local theater is fine.
• There’s no requirement for how much you can or should write, but we ask that if we set you up as an author you make about 3 posts a week.
• You can post about things you love, you can post about things you hate. It’s entirely up to you

Additionally, because of our global network, there’s plenty of options for things you write to be read by people all over the world. Interested? Want more details? Post a comment and we’ll be in touch!

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If Metblogs is a city, hub.metblogs is the playground. We kept hearing from people that one of their favorite parts of Metblogs was meeting and interacting with readers and writers from other parts of the world, as well as getting requests for more ways that readers could be involved besides just posting comments. We thought about this for a while and decided that with a network like this, a giant community area where folks from all over the world could hang out, post photos and videos, talk with each other, form groups, play games, send messages, and do about a million other things was probably a pretty fun idea. The Hub is that.

If you have any tech ideas or suggestions join this group and speak up. See you on hub.metblogs!

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The Fourelements festival is back, with the 4 ingretients: Rap, DJing, Graffiti and Breakdance, presented on 7 spots in Graz.

I was at a live performance of MC Klumzy Tung, DJ Dero and drummer Dr.Pheel yesterday at the Parkhouse and I loved it.

fourelements.at calls it:
packed with live turntablism, fresh lyrics, freestyles and energy loaded hiphop, mixed with oldschool, funk and drum’n'bass mashup(…)”

Their first CD will be presented on September 19th at the Postgarage, Graz. You better be there!

Check foruelements.at for a timetable of the upcoming events.

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There have beens several massive thunderstorms during the last week. Graz has been the city with the most rain/m^2 and the most lightning in styria.
Several thousand flashes hit Graz and the surrounding area during the last few nights.

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Yesterday was Austria’s chance to beat the Germans in soccer. Unfortunately they didn’t make it, although they did play a great game.

As expected, the two public viewing areas in Graz were crowded. What I didn’t expect was, that they wouldn’t let people in anymore, more than an hour before the game started. Since the Public viewing areas in Graz are commercial events, organized by newspapers and sponsors, they have blinds on the fences, which make it nearly impossible to view the game from the outside.

A few stood on trashcans and some even climed onto trees to get a clear view. The mood was great however. Too great to go watch the game at home with some friends, so I joined some hundred people, Austrians as well as Germans, sitting in front of a single TV, not far from the videowall we couldn’t see, but close enought to hear the outcry of thousands of people, when Michael Ballack shot the goal.

After a little over 90 minutes, the game ended, with lots of disappointed austrians heading into the city or back home. On the other hand, there were also some laughing germans, that celebrated the victory of their team.

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this is a blank city…

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We’re not the best in soccer, true, but after all, people seem to get in the mood for the UEFA Euro 2008. Especially after yesterday’s result. I guess everybody is looking forward to the match Austria vs. Germany!

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A little delayed, but still worth mentioning, a few impressions of the Synthesizerpark Presentation during the SpringEight Festival.

Countless Synthesizers from all decades, open for everyone to play. Loud and Fun!

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BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.
By “open-sourcing” the organizational process (=codifying it in a wiki and making that publicly available), BarCamp seems to have struck a chord. It quickly became a model for user generated conferences in other fields or for more specialized applications, ranging from WordCamp and PodCamp to Seattle Mind Camp, to name a few.

And Graz will feature the first PolitCamp… this week!

PolitiCamp will be a great opportunity to talk about the political dimensions of new communication infrastructures and to meet influential Austrian minds.

Don’t forget to check it out!

Link

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Remember “täglich Alles”?

Well, this newspaper box seems to be stuck in a temporal reflux continuum.

(near the Graz central railway station)

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this weekend lend is different…

you have to see it.

www.lendwirbel.at

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The bear enslaved by Coca Cola (see below) was only the beginning. Serfdom is now reinstated in Graz by temporary employment agency Powerserv in Annenstraße. “Tell me why I had to be a powerslave…” (Iron Maiden)

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Yeah, i admit it: Today me and my friend went to KFC. We just had to try this new piece of America right in our city. So we took our bikes and cruised to the beloved Jakominiplatz where KFC is directly competing with MCDonalds (and it’s “bubble-gum cemetery”) which is placed right next to it. Our Mission was to gain the all mighty bukkit

So we entered the chicken zone and as far as the competition goes, KFC seems to win:

The place was crowded like a japanese swimming pool. Seriously. I took that picture after 20 minutes and it took us another 20 minutes to finally get to the counter. That gave us enough time to think about the huge and tasty bucket we saw on the internet. 63 pieces of pure flesh wrapped in crispy coating. Nothing else but chicken.

The sad truth is, that, due to “whatever”, there are no huge bukkit. There were just 4 different types of buckets which included some flesh, a soft drink we didn’t need and some french fries we didn’t want. Disappointedly sad we ordered the “Variety Bucket” which suited our hunger the most. After the long discussion with our “waitress” about what the Variety Bucket contains (the usability of the overhead-display-menu isn’t really good) we finally got the nourishment to provide our hunger with pure satisfaction and let’s face it: he was pretty satisfied. The cost/performance ratio is comparable with KFCs fast food competitors but it isn’t worth the journy from Eggenberg.

Thus we keep waiting for Subway Sandwitch to arrive in Graz

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