Coffee?
They want to take away our coffee machine! 
First they took our predecessors' sofa, and now this. This is outrageous. Waaaaiiiit… maybe I should start at the beginning. Maybe I should start by telling you who “we” are.
The final two years of Gymnasium in the classic, soon to have been replaced, Bavarian school system is the Kollegstufe. That's like sixth form, for all you English readers. “We” are the Kollegstufe at my school, and, some time in the previous semester, we were granted the luxury of being allowed to use a disused classroom for, on paper, studying, after having complained about not fitting into the corridors for years. Since then, we have turned it into quite a pleasant sitting room which has even managed to remain, for me at least, the best place in the building for actually studying, if only because we got hold of the most comfortable chairs far and wide.
In the region, it is traditional to have a gigantic party after the Abitur exams. An expensive party. So, as Kollegstufe, we organize legendary (for-profit) parties and whatever else we can think of that gets us money. Ergo, we have a budget. A budget that one could put to good use, one that could be used to finance a coffee machine. Best idea ever. What we bought is a Senseo-brand coffee pod machine—a system that works well and produces good coffee that costs less than 9 cents Eurocents, that is per cup, assuming you buy your pods from ALDI.
Naturally, there are quite a few students now that use the machine quite a lot, and drink quite a lot of coffee. It's great, we love it, and are probably addicted. There's always a great atmosphere in that room. Not surprisingly, there is a group of “regulars” that seem to always have a cup, or at least pod, of coffee on themselves. Interestingly, this group consists mostly of art students. And myself of course. Students of physics (sleepless geek zombies?), French (goes well with café) and, well, German, are also good candidates for coffee drinking. But—enough of that.
Creating the perfect keyboard layout
After having read this post's title, you might have though “ah, he'll be presenting [insert favourite subculture keyboard layout eg neo]! nice!”. If so, you'd be wrong. If, on the other hand, you're thinking “perfect keyboard layout? There's no such thing!”, then I couldn't agree more. Anyway, …
I have been using the standard US keyboard layout for years, almost always without actually using an American keyboard. The main reason I chose it over the German layout is that characters like []{}\|/`, used in many programming languages, are placed in a civilized manner, meaning I can type them quickly and without breaking my fingers.
The standard US layout has a certain problem, though: when it comes to typing in languages that don't happen to be English, it fails spectacularly. Since I have to write quite a lot of German and, nowadays, French, on my computer(s), this is quite a drawback.
Umn, I fixed it
It's not that hard to create your own keyboard layout, which I have done. I chose to use a standard US layout as base, leaving every single key binding intact, using level-3, i.e. AltGr, bindings to represent missing characters.
The German umlauts and ligature ÄäÖöÜüß? (the last character is the capital ß) I decided to map to the most obvious places imaginable: on the A, O, U and S keys, so AltGr+Shift+U produces Ü.
I created support for most romance languages by adding Çç to the C key (as above), Ññ to the N key, and a number of hidden dead keys: AltGr+' e renders é, AltGr+" e renders ë; the keys for `,~ and ^ act equivalently. The characters Ææ,Œœ,Øø and Åå are on the W,I,Q and Z keys, respectively, ensuring full support for French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and probably other languages. The Esperanto alphabet is completed by the dead circumflex ˆ and AltGr+y, rendering ?. Some other possibly useful characters, beside the quotes „ « » ‹ › “ ”, are ¿ ¡ € £ ‰ ? ? ? § ¦ - —. If you're really interested in the details of the layout, please, try it out!
Yes, you can have it
For X11 (Linux and other Unices): us_tj2.tgz.
For Microsoft Windows: us_tj2c.zip. (older version, missing a number of characters. German, French, and Spanish are supported equally.)