Gajo Simpático

Random drunk post

2011-01-31T23:11:00.004+01:00

Note: I am not really drunk, but drunk enough to philosophise...

Strange enough we claim to live in a capitalist society (well, mostly. It's called social market economy, but de-facto it's capitalism with healthcare). Yet most of us work in huge centralistic organisations, with five year plans, which are organised like any good communist party with a central commitee, a glorious leader and where you can only raise in hierarchy when you please the local district commander. Nepotism is a bit better disguised than in the usual post-communist states, but yet it exists. And then there is government, which I take out of this argument because they don't really have anything to say.

Yet we all repeat the mantras of the free market, the self healing power of free trade etc. If you look closer, most of the companies employees don't produce any value. They produce power point slides, excel files and all that kind of stuff. They do the same which lead to the downfall of the eastern block: tell the leaders that everything is fine, make plans which look nice but don't solve any problem.

Inside the company there is no market, no free trade of ideas, no capitalism. There's pure old what-people-claimed-to-be-communism (it's far from what Marx originally thought, but close to what the USSR and other states made of it). Would it work if you remove all those structures, let the markets reign and get rid of all the central commitees? Wouldn't that lead to everybody moving to the place where they can contribute best? Wouldn't that lead to enough wealth to distribute it so that we can all live better? Isn't that what real communism would be, getting rid of the parasitic rulers and all power to the people who do the work?

And please don't take the idea to the logical end, because that kills every idea. And probably tomorrow I'll have a comletely opposite idea. So don't bother to comment :-)

And of course this has nothing to do with my employer, this is just some random thought after reading too much newspapers and drinking too much beer.

Studentenpack

2009-08-05T23:10:00.002+02:00

Sometimes I wish I could write.

Next to me in the bar two students of philosophy and german, reasoning that democracy with it's tolerance and with demonstrations being allowed, leads to all protests being in vain, as allowed protests are no protests at all. We need a totalitarian system to be able to really protest and to articulate discontent. From then on it went somehow downhill, occasional highlights were the insight that professors are not really the scholars of childish imagination but real people who do spend time away from books and sometimes do say stupid things and the insight that most students try to construct their biographies to appear as some kind of intellectual (the insight went not as far as to self-awareness).

A table further away a group of teachers, discussing everything. From the difference between canoos and kayaks, passing the geography of Erlangen to who has the orange CD. Everybody very convinced, very intellectual, very distinguished.

The third table was a frustrated physicist and his (new) girlfriend, those two were a bit boring compared to the other two tables, just like any new geek couple they were just awkwardly trying to be romantic.

Any decent writer would make a whole book out of this personnel. My Inaptitude just allows this blog post...

Something positive

2009-06-23T23:39:00.002+02:00

Originally I wanted to post my thoughts that we are currently slippering into a new Weimar Republic, the large political parties losing ground, small come up, economic crisis is there, political turmoil will follow etc.

Originally I wanted to rant about the german internet censor law, also something which Weimar was good at, creating stupid laws which restrict civil rights and will backfire soon; and I wanted write about a letter that I am writing to our regional deputee in parliament.

But something positive would also be nice: it's amazing how much better a document looks if you TeX it! Having to work everyday with word and framemaker, seeing a TeX document after some time is really an enlightenment. It's so much better to read, it is so much better to look at! Linux Libertine is a nice font and LaTeX rules! (And yes, the letter I wrote contains footnotes)

Incompetnce

2009-06-19T20:07:00.002+02:00

Yesterday the german Bundestag passed a law which requires internet providers to block access to sites depicting child pornography. Which sounds like a good thing to do, child pornography is bad. But what it really shows is the inability of our politicians to handle things. During the last four years they have not done a single thing which would go the roots of a problem. Child Pornography is solved just by putting the blinds on the intarwebs. School shootings will be solved by prohibiting paint ball and computer games. Economic crisis will be solved by paying huge amounts of money to banks which proved not being able to handle money. Exercise: find more examples of this.

Germany is governed now by a coalition of CDU and SPD, conservatives and social democrats. Opposition is liberal FDP and greens. None of them, neither government nor opposition showed any competence at all. When watching any discussion, they showed a complete ignorance of the facts, couldn't even talk well. So, why are they there? Is there nobody left in politics? Where did all the competent people go? Industry? Emigrated? Abducted by aliens?

Why did we even vote for them? Just out of habit? Lack of alternatives? Probably the latter...

So, join a party? Which? Will it make a difference? Or just accept that the world is going downhill and turn into an egotist collecting riches and let rome burn? Current mood: the latter. Let it burn, maybe in 2000 years it's a tourist attraction. I'll go looking for a lyra...

Prostitution

2009-06-07T14:46:00.002+02:00

I have just signed up with adsense so I can get rich with this blog. Click on all ads. Read it often. Search often. Make me an internet millionaire!

(Google has your data anyway, so why hide?)

The future

2009-04-24T20:51:00.002+02:00

If you ever wanted to do minority report gesture control and own a mac: this is your first step.

I use for movements to the left the script tell application "System Events" to keystroke (ASCII character 28) using command down to switch to the workplace to the left. To the right use ASCII char 29. Be sure to set the thresholds right for the motion detection, else it drives you crazy...

Too old for that shit

2009-03-28T02:59:00.002+01:00

Just returned from a night out. It started with a bunch of old physicists getting drunk, chatting about cars, computers and ye goode ole times at uni(TM). So far, so good. At about 1AM we left the bar and entered a club, tonight a special appearance by Bukovina Club - remixed music from the balkans.

I started listening to that kind of music 10 years ago, remembering one of the best concerts of my life, Emir Kusturica live at a castle in portugal. This music was cool till about a year ago when it starting to get popular. So tonight, when we entered the scene, the music was blasting too loud for the speakers, only leaving a frequency range tolerable for people who have blasted away their ear-drums by mp3 players injecting the best of charts into their ears at a volume which silences a jackhammer.

The dancefloor was filled with drunken kids whose motoric abilities were only topped by their self-esteem and their conviction of being the future elite of germany, just because they made it to a provincial university. Those frustrated youths were so indulged into their egocentric movements that every movement on the dancefloor was interpreted as an attack, a sexual assault or at least an aggressive gesture. This only was interrupted by couples who seemed to have no place to go to be in private and needed to fiddle around on the dancefloor, dancing with a vulgarity which you cannot find in a peep show.

Probaly I have to find some new kind of music which is still so uncool that I can enjoy it. Or maybe I am just getting to old for that shit and should stay at home and get drunk on my own.

Style not speed. Elegance not exertion.

2009-03-08T22:56:00.001+01:00

Something we should achieve. Curtesy of the tweed cycling club...

A huge part...

2009-01-15T19:51:00.002+01:00

The largest part of the web users in germany won't be affected by the child-pornography-blockers wich will be installed. So the official statement, why we should have it, even if it is a step into the direction of censorship, providing at least the possibility to block other websites.

The largest part of people will not be affected by the online searches the police is allowed to perform now on any computer without notification. So the official statement, why we should have it even if it is a step into the direction of a surveillance state.

The largest part of people will not be affected by raster-searches,...

It's only about Schadbären and Potential Evildoers. The rhetorics used for things like that is a very interesting thing, as is the logic and the numbers.

Blocking child-porn is a very good thing, people producing shit like this should be tarred and featherd, hung and quartered. But the reaction to this (and most other threads on having a civilised society) is mostly ridiculous and can be mis-used for a lot of things. I don't think it will be misused, I am just annoyed that politicians think we are dumb and throw their stupid rhethorics at us which just turns out to be hot air in the best case or completely wrong and misleading bullsh*t in the worst.

Random illumination of the week

2009-01-14T22:26:00.002+01:00

Successes are done by the team, Failures are done by the individual.

Some things are the same in University and Industry...

Shiny

2008-12-08T23:38:00.002+01:00

Christmas present has already arrived :-)

For Henning

2008-11-20T20:09:00.001+01:00

Monty Python have their own youtube channel!

Yay for thinking!

2008-11-19T00:29:00.003+01:00

Over on planet.ubuntu.com and other open source blog things, there have been a couple of posts to "What is the first thing you do after installing Linux". Amazingly all of them were "install all the proprietary stuff". Everybody installs google earth, skype, w32codes etc.

So, why keep up the "We do not like proprietary stuff"-attitude and make it hard to install this? Why not just accept that even if it is an evil non-open-source licence, the programs are working much better than any of the free stuff?

I'm just one step closer to getting a Mac...

History

2008-11-10T22:42:00.004+01:00

Although we are busy remembering the start of systematic slayering of jews and political opponents in the Reichsprogromnacht at November 9, 1938; and remembering the fall of the Wall in November 9, 1989, there is also pretty important dates we should not forget:

November 9, 1918: Kurt Eisner declares the free state of bavaria, marking the end of monarchy. Bavaria was one of the first states in Germany to actually revolt against monarchy. Kurt Eisner was shot shortly afterwards by right wing Count Arco. Subequently the Communist took over (Eisner was socialist) to form the Soviet Republic of Bavaria.

The conservative uproar following the revolution in bavaria lead to...

November 9, 1923: Hitler tries to putsch him self into power for the first time (the infamous beer hall putsch). He gets a couple of years in prison for it, during this time he writes "Mein Kampf".

Inbetween, November 9, 1918: the armistice of Compiègne starts the end of WWI. After the marine revolted, german military finally accepted the loss of the war. Wilhelm II resigns. Inn Berlin, Philipp Scheidemann declares the german Republic and Karl Liebknecht the Soviet Republic of Germany.

Funny enough, although a lot of important events happened on November, 9, which are all somehow connected and only together lead to some understanding of german history, we only talk about two of them. The Armistice is remembered anywhere outside germany (as is May 8, 1945) - germans do not generally know this date. For the generation of my parents it seems that history only covers everything till 1871 and then starts again at 1950, for my generation it seems that history mainly consists of 1933-1945 (with some hints of middle ages and 1950-1989).

I don't care anymore

2008-11-07T00:21:00.002+01:00

As most of the stuff I did voluntarily is ignored, I think I just don't care anymore. Maybe I'll care about my friends, but generally I won't do anything for others anymore. Nobody cares about the stuff I did, so I won't care about anybody myself. I will try to have fun, but if the world goes down, I won't do anything about it. No more nice guy.

(This is nothing job related. This is a late effect of university.)

Capitalism

2008-09-27T01:45:00.003+02:00

Listening to the news these days is quite funny. It seems that everybody is completely surprised that capitalism in the end works like it is supposed to. If you take high risks, you get sometimes high gains and sometimes -surprise, surprise- high losses. If you have people trying to make a lot of money, sometimes they also will loose a lot of money.

Now some cry for the state to drop in who were hardcore laissez-faire capitalists before (with the notable exception of a very few who keep on and keep the concept, knowing that sometimes you loose).

If you want a free market (which I believe is quite a good thing if you do it right[1]), you'll have to live with a free market.

[1] I wont elaborate more on this, because this will take forever. Basically: there are monopolies which should belong to the state like water, electricity etc, and there are areas where there should be a free market, free meaning that the small farmer in africa can also sell his stuff as the farmer around the corner. On a large scale the big economic powers should not interfere... This is by far not the complete story, a complete coverage of my political and economical views would span about 50 long posts.

The end is nigh! (again)

2008-09-07T23:34:00.003+02:00

On wednesday LHC is going to be turned on and we all will end up in a big black hole. It was nice knowing you/it was a pity not knowing you, we had all good fun/we would have had good fun.

Besides that: anybody for scrabble later?.

I hate computers

2008-09-06T00:07:00.002+02:00

Today I fought some hours with Ubuntu to get my network working again. It started with the idea to have the NAS no longer attached by WLAN (SLOOOOOOOOOOW) but via a cable (FAST). I clicked on "Network Configuration" in the menu which made all my networking disappear and broke everything. Then I started to configure stuff by hand, which worked for the WLAN card but not for the classical LAN card. For some reason after each reboot it went from ethx to ethx+1, making it to eth181 before I found the problem.

Not necessary to mention that I went half mad during the search for the problem...

In the end it turned out that some completely brainless moron decided it would be a nice idea to have a random MAC address assigned to the LAN card at each reboot (from the BIOS). For privacy enhancement and you cannot switch it off... So the magical automatic hardware stuff of Linux thought "Oh, a new card" and gave it a new number. FUNNY. VERY FUNNY.

Instead of developing computers which go faster and faster (and can drive you mad much faster than anything before), why not just develop something which works? Call me wimpy, but I don't want to spend nights in front of my computer just to get a stupid network card working, this is supposed to be the 21st century...

Monday at the pub

2008-08-25T23:21:00.002+02:00

Three lesbian sports teachers discussing their relationship troubles and telling that they just can't break up, despite trying for months. A group of male goths with fingernails painted black trying to look like a depressed Antonio Banderas. A table with two Brits on the way to getting drunk. The table next to us an elder couple of rock'n'rollers.

What did I learn this night: one woman in a relationship seems to be trouble enough, some kind of self esteem is nice, never get too drunk in public and rock'n'roll never dies. Sometimes I am happy to be pretty normal.

Age of the Dilletante

2008-07-09T23:26:00.003+02:00

Sometimes on the intarweb you find the idea that our time is the age of the amateur, like the amateur scientist of the 16th to 19th century; at that time noblemen with to much money and to much time lingered into science and did a lot of important discoveries, today people with to much time can have access to the latest discoveries, to a lot of knowledge, can work on new technologies and do a lot of armchair science. An amazing amount of technological ideas is generated by this new class of idling intellectuals, bored technicians, hobby artists and armchair scientists. Technology and science have been democratized, everybody has access to anything and can become anything they want. Without to much effort I could become an underwater archaeologist, a backyard rocketist or a closet electronicist (I made that word up...).

This is one side of the story. My feeling is that there is another side... Life, work, science, technology have become so complex that nobody can be a specialist anymore. Everybody is an amateur, even the people who are doing stuff professionally. Be it at university or in industry, it looks like nobody has a real clue about what they are doing, everybody is a dilletante. This might be a sign of a lot of change happening, this might be a sign of life growing to complex for anybody to grasp. Nobody has a plan, nobody really knows what is going on. The people who are good on their job have an idea on how stuff works, a vague feeling what happens under certain circumstances. The bad ones just don't have a clue. But nobody is able to tell exactly what will happen.

The age where you had masters of a craft who really knew their tasks, who knew what will happen, has long gone by. Work, Life, Technology and Society have grown so complex that people have yet to keep up with it. The big bosses do not really know how to run a company, the politicians do not really know how to run the country, the technicians do not really know how their stuff works,... Nobody can be certain about anything anymore, everybody is just improvising.

This is the 21st century. Everybody is equally lost...

Neighbors

2008-06-22T00:26:00.003+02:00

You might know me as quite peaceful, but my neighbors start to seriously piss me off. Yesterday the neighbor from above started to practice tap dancing at two in the morning (today I had to get up at 4AM...). Tonight the neighbors from below started practicing drum playing at twenty past midnight. They didn't even have the guts to open the door when I rang.

This is extremely bad education. Some times I did make noise, some times a party went a bit long. But at least I apologized with my neighbors and answered their calls. I don't know if I should drop them a note in the mailbox or if I should ring there tomorrow at 6 when I have to get up just to annoy them.

Dienstreise

2008-06-21T13:04:00.002+02:00

Tomorrow I will start my first business trip (traveling Economy class...), for a week I will go to Chicago (more precise Chicago's suburbia). Pictures will appear in the usual places, stories maybe here if something interesting happens.

Football

2008-06-19T23:33:00.003+02:00

It was a nice game, we won. Can everybody please calm down now and go to bed?

These car corsoes are getting really annoying nowadays. I think, fuel is by far not expensive enough, nor are cars. About half of Erlangen is driving around in new and expensive cars now, honking like mad, driving like they never went to driving school and "celebrating" the great and historic victory over the dangerous portuguese, who, if they would have won, would have eaten our children. Or something like that. For a football game this is a bit too much...

Why can't we have fun just walking, jumping around and getting drunk?

(And to be honest, most of the guys and girls in the cars do not really look like they have fun, most of them are aggressively annoyed)

Chemistry

2008-06-04T10:19:00.001+02:00

TV

2008-05-18T23:02:00.003+02:00

Tonight on TV: a documentation on management training with Llamas (probably including Ralf the Wonder-Llama), where a lot of managers brabble about win-win situations and other blabla while pushing around Llamas or being pushed around by Llamas.

And on Arte a documentation on Hemingway where somebody got crazy about seeing the actual toilet Hemingway used in Cuba.

For some reason getting crazy about Hemingway's toilet seemed much more normal and intelligent than the managers with the Llamas.

In other news: theres a rumor that the Erlangen Siemens people got a mail that they should't talk about the company on the local beer festival and always refer to the PR office. I think this is completely ridiculous and does exactly the opposite it was supposed to.

Blues Vader

2008-05-15T00:20:00.001+02:00

2008-04-26T02:37:00.001+02:00

I completely forgot what I wanted to post. Bloody Alzheimer...

Besides that: 34 years ago there was the portuguese revolution. People were ready to die for their ideas. Nowadays we just grumple a bit and accept whatever our glorious leaders think of...

About a month ago our government wanted to introduce a law that fuel should contain at least 10% of bio-fuel. Then they discovered that about 10% of all cars cannot live with that type of fuel... This week they started a campaign to ban bio-fuel because it uses up crops which also could provide food. Hurray for a good foresight. Hurray for a consistent planning. Hurray for our intelligent leaders. (Just one example of many) Can somebody tell me how they actually made it to the top, please?

Timetravel

2008-04-12T23:53:00.001+02:00

Today I travelled back to the Paris of 1900 to get my picture taken by Nadar.
And I want a steam driven Robot.

Interesting People

2008-03-29T23:22:00.003+01:00

Sometimes you meet interesting people in the least probable places. Today I went to a saddler in Nürnberg to get his opinion on restoring the outer hull of the body of my DKW. He basically said I could spend a fortune if I want to and that he cannot tell how much it will be... But that's not the part of the story to tell.

On the way home I wanted to see how fast the DKW actually can go. On the way to Nürnberg I checked with a GPS that if the speedometer is at 80, I am actually going 65. On the way back I got the speedometer to touch 100 km/h, so probably I was going something like 80km/h. And then suddenly the motor stopped. Just stopped, did not move a bit. Starting the warning lights I pulled right to the side and started to look at the motor. A small motorcycle stopped just in front of me, a huge pile of luggage hiding the driver. The driver dismounted, took of his helmet and a guy with a beard like Santa Clause appeared. He was a homeless born in Thüringen, about 65, and basically told me the story of his life. He used to drive a DKW lorry back in GDR times, he collected motorcycles, he knows an awful lot about history, he had a living and was well integrated into a social network. And then the GDR ended and became part of the Germany of today... For some reason he lost his job, he lost all of his belongings and he ended up for some months in jail.

Talking to him I understood for the first time why people want back the GDR or even the third Reich. People who were not persecuted nor were part of the system, just ordinary people, actually nobodies. At these times it was ordinary people againts THEM, against the state, against the rich, against the establishment. There were networks, people helped each other to get along. As you couldn't get stuff via the official ways, they developed networks how to pass by offical channels. You couldn't get Diesel engines for your tractor in the GDR, so somebody who had still some pre-war Maybach engine hidden in a barn helped you out. Everybody was in the same deep shit as anybody else, people stuck together.

For some reason this ain't no more today. Everybody is now working against everybody. All these social networks collapsed. As you need to be successful and rich, you cannot afford to help other people. You can only be successful, if other people are unsuccessful. This guy is one of the many people who just lost. Not by their own fault, mostly. He had bad luck, he didn't fit into the system, he got divorced and at is odds with his family, he made some wrong choices. He just fell through the system and now he is living on the streets, no chance to get back into the system, no chance to get a job, no chance to get a retirement pension. He will go on on the street, until he sometime disappears with nobody remembering him.

It made me think. If you talk to people, a lot of them complain that nobody helps, that nobody says thank you if he recieved help from you, that there is no solidarity, no cameradie between people. Which is funny, as everybody gave up on solidarity there cannot be any solidarity. Why not just start to be nice to other people, why not continue to be solidary to your neighbours, to people who are in the same situation, to random people...

As for the motor: it seems that if the spark plugs get to hot they stop working. So after talking to the homeless guy for about an hour, the car started like a charm and I could drive home.

History repeating

2008-03-18T18:10:00.003+01:00

If this is the matrix, where can I report bugs please?

Disorientation

2008-03-17T23:25:00.003+01:00

After about three months outside university I feel like I habe been living in the often mentioned ivory tower. A small microcosmos of a very peculiar species of people, all of them pretty much the same, all of them remote from reality, a very protected environment with a very small diversity.

As all of them, I still have no clue who I actually am, what I actually want, what is my goal in live, if there actually is one. Still I have not found my place in the world, nor the path I want to follow. Probably there is no path, but I also don't know that. A lot of people I meet seem interesting, some of the people I know seem boring at times. I think I am completely lost[1]...

A vague feeling also suggests that most of my friends who are not yet married and settled down - and even a couple of those who are do - don't have any clue what live is going to be. On the other hand, I also can't stand people who know by the age of 18 where they are by the age of 80.

I do have an interesting and well paid job, I do have great friends, who I really admire, I do have fascinating hobbies, I have seen quite an interesting part of the world, and basically I should be happy. But somehow something is missing... Probably this is normal. I should get used to it.

[1] I also know that I am completely drunk right now...

How to wise ass when far from the intartubes...

2008-03-04T21:48:00.003+01:00

This is the future, so even though I am still missing a jet pack, I can now carry a complete encyclopædia in my pocket. As I am not that into ringtones, the 2GB memory of my phone are not doing a lot (despite having a topological map of Erlangen and surroundings on it) - so to also help the nowadays much often experienced lack of Wikipedia-Access (how often have you sat in a bar with a bunch of wise-asses who cannot listen to a story without correcting the facts), I installed an offline copy of the german Wikipedia on my phone.

But besides that, a wise man once said: "Never let facts spoil a good story".

Kiki and Bubu and The Shift

2008-02-16T17:40:00.001+01:00

via boing boing...

Frauen

2008-02-09T00:08:00.000+01:00

Frauen sind oftmals überrascht, dass man das Lenkrad voll einschlagen kann.

Ich glaube ja, dass seit dem der siebte Sinn nicht mehr gesendet wird, die Deutschen langsam aber sicher verlernen, Auto zu fahren. Blinken und denken beim Fahren sind irgendwie out...

(Thx Frunk für den Link)

Qualification

2008-02-04T18:12:00.000+01:00

You Need a Better Degree, and we can Help!
Obtain degrees from prestigious non ac Universities based on you life experience.

That's right, you can become a Doctor and receive all the benefits and admiration that comes with it!

Strangely enough this spam flood started as soon as I finished my PhD exam... Maybe I should also get a title from a prestigious not-accredited university, as my german Dr. won't be of any use except to annoy medical.Dr.'s :-)

Beat Club

2008-01-29T20:18:00.000+01:00

Just watching the Beat Club Night, recorded from TV sometime last year. The 60ies definetely had the best drugs... And back then you could be the dream of all young male TV viewers with a name like Uschi Nerke (the picture above shamelessly stolen from her homepage).

The co-hosts were Dave Lee Travis, at first working for a pirate radio station (Radio Caroline) and later the BBC; and Dave Dee of "Dave Dee, Dosy, Beaky, Mick & Titch"-fame. They had damn' good music back then.

More Music

2008-01-26T23:03:00.000+01:00

Soundtrack Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot

Brilliant soundtrack of one of the best german movies ever (if you haven't seen it, go and buy the DVD). Great songs, rock, blues, score music at it's best. And it includes parts of the dialogue like the famous "Dät'n Sie eventuell mit mir vögeln" - "WAS?" - "Also net..."

The Puppini Sisters - The Rise & Fall of Ruby Woo

Not as good as the first album, but still quite nice. Features "Walk like an Egyptian" in Swing Style... Generally nice, but badly produced, sound compressing at work.

Gare du Nord - Sex'n'Jazz

Very good Jazz/Blues/AcidJazz album of a french/belgian combo, very smooth and sexy. Shows that "Die Angefahrenen Schulkinder" were wrong (not yet proven, only a vague feeling...) For some reason the album appears twice at amazon, once for a normal price and once for f*cking expensive, without any obvious difference but a sticker on the cheaper one that it is Volume 1 of a series...

Herr Doktor

2008-01-26T03:07:00.000+01:00

You may now call me Herr Doktor and I officially don't have to object anymore. Everything went well in my final exam and the only thing missing is now the printed version of my thesis, which I have to hand in in eight copies soon...

Besides this I went to a quite nice party in a students residence tonight where I again discovered that I am too old and too intellectual to actually chat up girls. They were actually quite nice and I would have appreciated any success, but most of them were still kids (besides being 25+). Very strange, indeed.... Maybe I should get more drunk at parties.

Gazing at the moon...

2008-01-13T22:33:00.000+01:00

Starting last week I am working at Siemens Healthcare now. I will be doing software and hardware quality tests for angiography x-ray machines and especially the ECG trigger module. And I still have to learn all the stuff for my final exam, which might happen friday in a week (no date fixed yed...).

The picture I took today from my window with the small teleskope I bought beginning of december when I started to learn stellar evolution and re-discovered that astronomy can be fun.

The Future

2008-01-04T11:53:00.001+01:00

As petrol prices rise and rise and might reach 200$ per barrel at the end of the century (please panic now, this is a radically new insight our national economics institute gained, independently from those nutcases who already said so in the 60ies...) some of our brilliant politicians start to think (time to run for cover) and want to change the energy mix (what a word) to use more nuclear power. I am all for it, let's build the Ford Nucleon! If we get cars with fins like in those of the 60ies, I am happy to sit 1m away from a reactor. Well, actually not, but I want fins! And chrome.

There will be elections soon, so the politicians here start to brabble even more nonsense than usual. I am always amazed how stupid they can be and get away with it, even get elected. Seems to be actually necessary, the higher they are the dumber stuff they brabble.

Holiday Project

2007-12-22T14:20:00.000+01:00

I just got this antique phone (probably built 1927) off ebay. It's interior is really torn, the outside definetely needs some paint-job and some serious polishing on the metal parts.

My plan is to marry this phone with a cheapo USB headset and then use it for skype :-) More pictures and a description what I did soon here :-)

100

2007-12-15T21:39:00.001+01:00

Parabens, Oscar!

Footnotes in history

2007-12-14T22:30:00.000+01:00

So, the big success in Bali is a footnote with a reference (including a PAGE NUMBER!) to a formerly agreed document, which states that a lowering of about 25-40% in CO2 emissions might eventually prevent the planet going boink (of course we know, it is, just like evolution or the bible, just a theory).

We are all safe now. Birds sing, peace on earth will begin soon, and wolve and deer live nicely together. And if not, we just buy a new deer.

Lights out...

2007-12-08T13:59:00.000+01:00

Tonight we are supposed to turn our lights off between 20:00 and 20:15 to save the planet. This is advocated by Bild (a newspaper who is a strong opponent of high fuel prices and speed limits), Pro7/Sat1-Media (a TV group who will continue to transmit crappy programs and ads in this time and whose extremely bad reality shows are responsible for about 50% of TV caused energy consumption) as well as Google (an Internet company, whose founder is marrying on a tropical island, which has been enlarged by artificial sandbanks, who has his friends flown in by private jets and celebrates in air conditioned tents...).

The electricity companies are already stating that we will all die, because the huge changes when everybody switches lights on and off will kill the power grid.

Can we please return to planet earth sometime and start behaving like grown ups? I think, I'm going to be sick somewhere...

Time to say goodbye

2007-11-27T20:25:00.000+01:00

I just seperated from all the interesting life-forms I have been sharing a fridge with. Unfortunateyl they started to take too much space, so I finally divorced from the herb-butter I shared my life with for about two years, the Terrine-au-lapin with which I shared fond memories of a holiday in france four years ago, the trusty swedish fish cream who accompanied me for so many months...

Now I am ready to move on and develop fresh emotional bonds with new interesting food items which develop fresh and interesting personalities in the next years.

2007-11-22T20:08:00.000+01:00

Beim sinnlosen herumgoogeln gefunden: Die Kochschlampe hat ein paar nette Rezepte und lustige Kommentare. Mal schauen, ob sie in der Blogroll bleibt...

2007-11-21T15:45:00.001+01:00

The problem being an atheist you cannot blame a deity for things...

Even though I handed in my thesis and started looking for a job, does not mean I believe anything will change, it just will be better paid which makes it easier to have short term fun. On the long run, it still does not make sense.

Having to learn for exams does not really put me into the best of moods. I have to fill my brain with stuff completely unrelated with my thesis, which I will immedeately forget after the exam. So completely useless... As you cannot fail the exam, I should have the cojones to just go there, tell the profs how useless it all is and that I preferr to spend my time drunk somewhere warm. But as usual, I don't have the cojones to do it and will play safe. And be frustrated.

This is post number 666 btw...

What happened so far...

2007-11-19T16:55:00.000+01:00

This morning I had a job interview at Siemens, which I think went quite positive. This afternoon I handed in my thesis to my advisor and the second revisor. Tonight I'll probably will get drunk. So far a successful day...

The colourful world of ebay

2007-11-12T13:59:00.000+01:00

You just can't make this stuff up...

11.11.

2007-11-11T15:36:00.000+01:00

“At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month, one minute of silence will be observed to mark the signing of the Armistice and to remember all those who fell in the cause of their nations.”

At 11:11, 11.11. in germany carnival starts. But I think it's unrelated...

A post two days late...

2007-11-11T12:35:00.000+01:00

The 9th of November is sometimes referred to as Schicksalstag (day of fate) in german history. A lot of stuff happened at a 9th of november...:

1848 - During the german revolution the democrat Robert Blum is executed in Vienna by monarchists. He soon becomes the most famous martyr of the 48 revolution, and soon is forgotten (I never heard of him before...)

1918 - Kaiser Wilhelm resigns. Philipp Scheideman proclaimed the republic at 14:00, two hours later the Soviet Republic of Germany was declared by Karl Liebknecht...

1923 - The Hitler-Ludendorf-Putsch (also known as Beer-Hall-Putsch). It failed, Hitler was sentenced to only 5 years of Festungshaft (the more comfortable jail) because of his patriotic motives. Hitler only served 8 months of the 5 years...

1938 - Kristallnacht, the first large Progrom against jewish people in germany and austria.

1989 - Fall of the Berlin Wall.

And we do celebrate the Inventor's day... It is the assumed birthday of Hedy Lamarr, who as most sources say was born (as Hedwig Kiessler) on November the 9th 1913, 1914 or 1915. Or maybe at the 9. September, as in the birth certificate it first was written IX and later corrected to XI.

Hedy Lamarr was claimed to be the world's most beautiful woman by her Holywood Producers. Groucho Marx once said after leaving one of her films "I hate it if the male lead has bigger boobies than the female...". Together with George Antheil, composer of a Ballet pour instruments mecaniques et percussion
(for 16 mechanical pianos, percussion, sirenes and a plane propeller, according to the FAZ the loudest concert in the history of mankind...) and a self claimed experts on adenoids, who wanted to enlare Lamarr's breasts with lotions invented by himself, (to remind you of the beginning of this phrase: it started "Together with George Antheil") she invented the frequency hopping method of spread sprectrum techniques and had a patent for it. Unfortunately it wouldn't have worked... There is a nice article on FAZ.net, which deconstructs some of the otherwise nice story :-)

As last words of this post, a quote from Miss Lamarr:

Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

LED

2007-11-09T23:35:00.000+01:00

A prototype for a LED tail-light for a DKW 1000S (and probably also my DKW F8...). This 1W LED is really bright...

Remember, remember the Fifth of November

2007-11-05T22:51:00.000+01:00

A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!

Happy Guy Fawkes Night everybody :-)

Me versus Leonardo

2007-10-29T23:58:00.000+01:00

Wired has an article called "Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin", in which they claim that vinyl discs are and will always be better than CDs. Although I am a great fan of vinyl discs, I sometimes wonder who ever writes such articles. It basically says that a good recording well mixed on vinyl sounds better than a crappy record badly mixed on a CD. Doh...

A fresco done by me looks better than a sketch done by Leonardo drunken, blindfolded and all gagged up while beaten with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Well, maybe it doesn't. But you get the idea...

Braune Häschen

2007-10-28T09:23:00.000+01:00

The NDR send a drag queen to a party convention of the NPD, the extreme-right party (just to avoid the word neo-nazis). They are completely lost and have no clue whatsoever how to answer the very simple question "Why should I vote for you". Only one manages to give an answer "I just don't know..."

Three generations

2007-10-24T19:16:00.000+02:00

Micha: Der hatte auch welche :-)

Family

2007-10-24T00:43:00.000+02:00

I am scanning old negatives from my grand parents I found in a cigar box at my parents. It's quite interesting to see those old pictures, taken some 70 years ago, still usable, still full of details. Of these days, all the digital pictures we take will be lost. Our children and grand children will not have the fun of digging through old cigar boxes full of strange old glass negatives and films...

Also interesting: not only do I look like a nearly exact clone of my father, also I do look like a nearly exact clone of my grand-father (I'll post a picture soon for you to compare). And all three of us have (or had) the same unreadable handwriting (similar not only in readability but we could all fake each others signatures without effort), which in the case of my grand-father is even worse, because he wrote the completely undecipherable Sütterlin.

Ich habe fertig.

2007-10-04T18:48:00.000+02:00

At least partially. Today I finished the first draft of my thesis. I think I still have to include some corrections, but that should be a matter of days. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter, right now I should hear the sounds if it were a train...

Pinkle

2007-10-01T00:24:00.000+02:00

You might have heard about blackle, which was created because somebody calculated that using a black background for google would save the planet or at least some energy (which is a at least doubious assumption).

Now there is also greenle and my new favourite search engine: pinkle. Probably more energy could be saved if you switch your computer off instead of creating stupid websites...

The strange notion of getting old but not growing up

2007-09-28T02:35:00.000+02:00

Today I just wanted to drop by at a birthday party of two friends, just say hello, have fun and not stay exceptionally long. I was the last to leave. Twice.

Around midnight everybody left, just me and another guest stayed. Then some guests arrived late and left again after some time. Leaving me and the other guest as the last ones to stay for the second time...

Pretty weird if your the last to leave for the second time...

Fußballgucken

2007-09-26T16:05:00.001+02:00

Nachdem ich gerade einen Fernseh-Empfänger da hatte und die Kollegen informieren konnte... Die Chat-Mitschrift

(15:44:35) gajosimpático: schuss richtung tor, aber deutsche abwehr kein problem damit
(15:44:40) gajosimpático: schon wieder
(15:45:33) gajosimpático: jetzt gehts noch mal richtung norwegisches tor
(15:45:49) gajosimpático: wieder bei den norwegern
(15:46:03) gajosimpático: torabstoss de
(15:46:31) gajosimpático: norwegen hat den ball
(15:46:39) gajosimpático: aber mehr auch nicht
(15:46:42) gajosimpático: einwurf no
(15:47:02) gajosimpático: schuss aufs tor, deutsche torfrau hält
(15:47:13) gajosimpático: sehr niedliche norwegerin
(15:47:32) gajosimpático: drei minuten verlängerung
(15:47:42) gajosimpático: einwurf de
(15:48:16) gajosimpático: reporter faselt über teamgeist
(15:48:51) gajosimpático: schuss aufs tor, torfrau von NO hält
(15:49:02) gajosimpático: wieder richtung NO-tor
(15:50:01) gajosimpático: ausausausdasspielistaus
(15:50:31) gajosimpático: lauter hopsende frauen
(15:51:51) gajosimpático: sauberes eigentor, die norwegerin hatte echt keine chance
(15:51:57) gajosimpático: war spiel mit bande quasi
(15:52:06) gajosimpático: die anderen beiden tore waren auch sehr schön

Service

2007-09-26T12:03:00.000+02:00

As you might have read in the last post, I lost the password for a website. So I tried to contact the hoster... They have a feedback-form which you can fill out for questions related to your contract and technical problems and they have an expensive phone hotline.

I filled out the form. I did fill out my contract number, my client number, my e-mail-adress, my name, the domain-name, my shoe size, everything they asked for. Today I got a response.

We are sorry to inform you that we don't answer not authenticated mails, please use our expensive hotline

WTF!?!?! Why do they have the form in the first place? To make sure their clients get seriously angry before calling them? If I hadn't found out how to quit the contract by Fax and already did so yesterday, I would have done it today.

Security by obscurity

2007-09-25T00:15:00.000+02:00

Today I got a mail from a specialist on computer security. His name appears on a web page I did for my school some years ago, he asked for his name to be removed, as his private background should not be on the web. I already forgot that the page existed and of course I have no clue what the password was... So, I mailed him that I will remove the page as soon as I find the password. Hurray for showing competence :-)

Old Skool Communication

2007-09-21T13:18:00.000+02:00

I just returned from an expedition. I tried to send a letter (for those born after 1980: letters are a paper based form of communication, like printing out your e-mail, giving it to somebody and hoping it will arrive somewhen within a week). The problem: the post office has moved about three times since I last wrote a letter...

So I went to the all new and shiny shopping center (which will be feature of another rant soon), which is where the post office used to be. And, behold, I found a post office. Or at least something similar. Just at the back of a post bank, hidden behind the mobile phone shop hidden behind the bank, there was something like a post office counter. After having fought through the bank salespeople ("No, I do not have any money"), through the mobile phone salespeople ("No, I don't want a mobile phone, I have one already, that's why I don't have any money and passed through the first line") I managed to squeeze in. Tried to find an enevelope, but for some reason they are only sold in family packs (100 envelopes for the prize of 110). Well, also facing the enormous queue at the stamp sales counter, I just gave up the hope of interaction with a semi-human post sales-drone, and just went to the stamp machine.

Now faced with the problem, if I want to send a Maxi-Letter, an oversized letter, a XXL-letter, a huge letter or a Happy-Weekend-Letter (wait, the last one doesn't exist, happy weekend is railway...). None of the options had any explanation, nowhere any information about sizes could be found. Just these fancy names. I just bought a random stamp, went home, found an old envelope and threw the letter in something yellow I believe to be a letterbox... I hope it will arrive.

I start to like e-mail.

PhD

2007-09-19T18:35:00.000+02:00

An amazing amount of people doing a PhD comes out of it with stress related problems, either psychological or physical. Some develop stomach ulcers, some turn into near-alcoholics, some are depressed. If you are lucky, you just survive your PhD with a major frustration. Not sure if this is supposed to be like that or if it is worth it...

Logic

2007-09-17T19:59:00.000+02:00

In spain's schools religion is now substituted by a course about citizenship and how the state works. It is thought to explain people's rights, democracy and how the law works. Some of the books also explain that homosexual marriage is allowed in spain. Which made the catholics go berzerk...

Now the catholic parents organisation tries to fight this course. In an arte interview their speaker explained that it is the parents right to teach their believes to their kids, be it atheist, be it catholic. The state should not try to teach children anything about religion. This is why the state should teach catholic religion instead of democracy. Around this point he completely lost me in his argumentation...

It's improving!

2007-09-14T23:57:00.000+02:00

»Há dez anos havia o dobro do dinheiro, mais professores e menos alunos, o mesmo resultado, o mesmo insucesso escolar, o mesmo abandono escolar«

De Rerum Natura cites the portuguese prime minister: »Ten years ago we had twice the money, more teachers and less students, but the same failures in school, the same amount of students dropping out«

This is an improvement. Crappy as ten years ago, but now much cheaper. This seems to be a very common way of thinking these days...

Fashiosm

2007-09-14T23:41:00.000+02:00

Eva Herrman (a german TV presenter) saying that back in the good ole Nazi Times, Mothers were much more appreceated, families were still great and so on.

Cardinal Meissner going on that Culture which does not praise god is to be considered abnormal (»entartet«).

And you could go out on the streets back then without being molested, and they built great Autobahnen, and everybody had work, ...

Seems that the collective memory forgets pretty fast.

Gimmie 5!

2007-09-14T11:38:00.000+02:00

We have both, geeks and nerds.

2007-09-09T20:35:00.000+02:00

[Note: the string of thought of this post is neither finished nor homogeneous]

Of some people you meet at university you hope that they get lost on a lonely island far far away. (Occasionally you also meet people you'd like to get lost on an island with, but this happens very rarely. One of the latter triggered this post...)

University seems to be a cradle where people can survive who, in other surroundings, would get declared mad and handed over into medical care. Science is a collection of weird people, some of them harmless, some not. Most of them don't realize how weird they are and that they sometimes annoy people or scare people (sometimes I fit into this category as well). And it will get worse, as we want more and more "elite" students. It is only possible to reach the high demands to enter these closed circles of higher education if you sacrifice your life. Pupils need to do only science in school, then as students only do science, as PhD only science, as Postdoc, as Prof, only science.

The only social contact they get will be with other nerds, exactly like them. Althugh this might be an interesting psychological experiment, this will create some seriously disturbed people, especially in physics, where (at least here in germany) 90% of the students are male.

This is the part which scares me most in the race for the best students and the "elite of tomorrow": the creation of Frankenstein's Monsters en masse.

Cricket

2007-09-08T18:27:00.000+02:00

England 188-3 (36.2 overs) won over India 187 (47.3 overs) by seven wickets. What I really like about cricket is the descriptions and names:

Sourav Ganguly, who was peppered with plenty of short stuff, was hit on the helmet before being snapped up at second slip and Gautam Gambhir was well caught by Wright between square-leg and mid-wicket.

I have no clue [1] what this means, but it sounds like an interesting match. The full article is here

[1] Actually, a small clue, thanks to Phil teaching us a bit about it.

Strange

2007-09-07T20:12:00.000+02:00

It's friday evening and I am programming like mad... It seems that finally motivation has caught in to get my thesis off the desk as fast as possible.

Food

2007-09-06T20:19:00.001+02:00

Finally Bacalhau again! To all of my friends over here in Erlangen: start finding excuses, sometime next week I might invite you to a bacalhau...

Gumboots

2007-09-04T22:03:00.000+02:00

[...]
It was in the early morning hours
When I fell into a phone call
Believing I had supernatural powers
I slammed into a brick wall
I said hey, is this my problem?
Is this my fault?
If that's the way it's going to be
I'm calling the whole thing to a halt

You don't feel you could love me
But I feel you could
You don't feel you could love me
But I feel you could
[...]

Just finished watching Graceland, still one of the best concert videos ever.

The End is nigh!

2007-09-03T14:27:00.000+02:00

I am running out of "Blabla"-Parts to write for my thesis. I already wrote "The Experiment", "The Theory" and "A general Description of Stuff". Now just two chapters are left: "Stuff I actually did" and "Conclusions and Outlook". Those will be the hard part...

Sommerloch

2007-08-30T20:08:00.000+02:00

Today at the physics institute, around 5pm: we were having coffee and chatting, the medicine physics people were playing cards, the work shop people were already at home. Only the astro-particle people where working and appearing generally over-motivated. They scare me...

Circles

2007-08-28T23:09:00.000+02:00

A possible solution to my current bad mood would be finishing my thesis and getting a girlfriend. Which won't happen soon because of my bad mood not providing sufficient motivation do finish the first and get anywhere close to the second. Catch 22...

Hiking

2007-08-27T23:30:00.001+02:00

Größere Kartenansicht

I have been hiking again this weekend. I started to do the Xacobeo, St. James Way. There is a way which passes close to Erlangen, which I eventually want to do from here to Santiago. I started in Kronach, which is the northern most point of the bishopry Bamberg (which this year celebrates 1000 years of existence). I managed to do 28km, which I think is not bad for a start. Most of it was asfalt, so now my ankles hurt like hell... Next time I'll take a bike with me.

2007-08-26T06:25:00.001+02:00

Just to scare you (and myself): sunday, 6:25am and I am having breakfast :-)

Gajo Simpático listens to music

2007-08-24T23:10:00.000+02:00

A couple of Albums I bought recently:

dunkelbunt - Morgenlandfahrt

"A mix of Dub, Reggae, Bossa, Jazz, Electronics, Trip Hop and Break Beats woven with a Balkan Twist" says the liner note. It'S an intercultural mixture, created by an Hamburgian in Vienna, covering everything from Hamburg to the Balkan. Unza Unza Music, electronics meet Reggae. A very relaxed and cool Balkan influenced album. See for a taste the video to "The Chocolate Butterfly"

Oi Va Voi - Laughter through tears and Oi Va Voi

Klezmer crossover with the singer KT Tunstall. Very cool Klezmer and Balkan Beats inspired albums with a great singer. Very creative mixing, a modern dancable Klezmer meets Balkan Sound.

Balkan Beat Box

A nice compilation of Unza Unza Music, but to be honest, not up to par with DJ Shantels Bukovina Club.

Pink Martini - Sympathique, Hey Eugene and Hang on Little Tomato

A very nice Jazz combo, with brilliant songs. The sound of an upper class cocktail party from the 50ies. I especially like the song "Sympathique" on the album of the same name, a brilliant Chanson based on a poem, first you think it's about the normal work frustration, then you understand the tragic love story behind it...

The Puppini Sisters - Betcha Bottom Dollar

A sound from the 40ies, swingy and jazzy. Three sisters bringing back the jive of ye goode olde times... With brilliant cover versions like Wuthering Heights and I will survive as well as the standards like Bei mir bist du schön (בייַ מיר ביסט דו שיין) and Mr. Sandman. A very nice Swing album.

Hurray for Lawyers

2007-08-24T11:44:00.000+02:00

So, I am not allowed to write "GEZ Brief". I need to write "Informationsschreiben der GEZ und/oder Schreiben, mit dessen Hilfe der gesetzliche Auskunftsanspruch des § 4 Abs. 5 RGebStV geltend gemacht wird". I am all in favour to only allow completely correct law-speak whenever anything is published. No longer these spongy formulations, if GEZ-Brief actually means the "Informationsschreiben der GEZ und/oder Schreiben, mit dessen Hilfe der gesetzliche Auskunftsanspruch des § 4 Abs. 5 RGebStV geltend gemacht wird" or actually only means a love letter or anything else in letter form send by an "Beauftragtendienst der öffentlich rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten oder Rundfunkgebührenbeauftrag".#

BTW: that's the same guys who annoy the hell out of you with letters and threats if you don't confess that you have a TV. I am paying my TV fees, but nonetheless they sent my parents (sic!) about 20 letters that I have to pay my TV fees for the TV I have at my parents home for sure (I don't). They only stopped after we threatend to call a lawyer. Public Broadcasting Service Mafia, of the worst kind...

[Edit] Nice article from jetzt.de

Sympathy

2007-08-24T09:22:00.000+02:00

Nice e-cards to show your friends your sympathy :-)

Writing...

2007-08-22T17:51:00.000+02:00

Writing theses sucks. You stop having social contacts because you are always busy with writing. In the short times where you wait for your software to run you mailbomb friends and the time you are neither working or writing you annoy your surroundings by being generally weird. Not a good time to meet people...

Culture Shock

2007-08-18T14:33:00.000+02:00

Back from the holidays. A nice week of hiking through the alps. Now I am in a state of cultural shock, there is much to much people outside, it's to noisy, to hectic, to confuse. Adding to it this morning at 5 a couple of drunken russians started to sing russian folk songs very loudly below my window. Thank god I don't own any weapons. (I should have thrusted one of my hiking socks at them though. Even if that would oppose the Geneva conventions.)

Procras^H^H^H Gaining Experience in GIS and Mapping

2007-08-08T02:42:00.001+02:00

I bought a new mobile phone. My old Siemens SK65 started to annoy me by being generally shaky and having a flickering display (as you might have noticed I am not that into Flickring anymore...)

So I got a Nokia, it has WLAN, can do VOIP, has lots of other stuff with fancy abbreviations. And it can talk to a GPS via bluetooth. So I bought a bluetooth GPS mouse. I tried the Nokia Sports Tracker which is quite cool but cannot do a lot. It can do tracking though.

I then found AFTrack, which can do everything, from tracking to moving map. If you use a bitmap map, you need to calibrate it, which really sucks doing with the mobile's keypad and it is really slow. So I tried to find a better way...

AFTrack can read OziExplorer map files. OziExplorer can read GeoTIFF with a plugin (via Import Map->Import single DRG Map). So taking a scanned map, reading it in GRASS, marking coordinates in GRASS, saving as GeoTIFF, transfering to my Laptop (Windows...) to read it in OziExplorer and save as map-file. Then editing the map file by hand to convert from UTM to Latitude/Longitude using a web-based converter. Then saving it on the microSD card of my mobile, importing it in AFTrack and voilá, now I know where I am and find my way around Erlangen. Not that I didn't before...

(If you ask now why I needed GRASS, and did not use OziExplorer from start: I hoped not to have to use OziExlorer. And knowing a bit what a GIS does is also fine. And it can do a lot of warping around the map to get rid of distortions...)

Next Step: get the maps of the Virgen-Valley onto my mobile, so that I can get lost in the alps next week.

Competent Publishers

2007-08-03T23:00:00.000+02:00

In Ferbruary I went to a conference in Vienna, where I presented a poster. The proceedings I wrote got accepted and will be published in NIM A, a high reputation journal published by Elsevier. Today I got a mail where I had to sign a copyright transferal. The copyright on the article, all included figures etc. has to be given to Elsevier. They can now do whatever they please with it. This is just the normal procedure how science publishing works: scientists (and people like me) write articles, where they do not get any money. The articles are then peer reviewed by other scientist, who also don't get any money. Then the article gets published, the original writer looses all copyright and the publisher sells the journal for some thousand Euro per edition. So far I did not really worry more than normal...

They did however address me as Dr., which is still wrong (and will be for some time...). So I sent them a mail:

Dear Sirs,

my contact details are not completely correct, I am not yet a Dr.
Can you please remove the title?

Tonight I got an aswer:

Dear Dr....

Should I trust publishers who cannot read mails?

2007-08-02T16:18:00.000+02:00

No Comment.

Slight Redesign

2007-08-02T13:49:00.000+02:00

As you may have noticed I changed the colours and the fonts of this blog. For best viewing experience you should have one of the fonts "Day Roman" or "Linux Libertine" installed (both free).

I also added a link to a portuguese science blog, which looks nice: De Rerum Natura

Digitising Slides

2007-07-31T23:56:00.000+02:00

I am trying to digitise slides with this setup. For Sample images and more info follow the link at the picture above...

Smoke

2007-07-31T01:19:00.000+02:00

Taking pictures of smoke is harder than I thought. You need to be faster than 1/60s, you need to focus fast and you need good smoke. And a CF card that works would also be nice... I lost about 50 pictures due to a crappy card.

Discalculy

2007-07-30T00:22:00.000+02:00

Just saw an ad on TV:

Phone Flatrate: 0,--
DSL Flatrate: 0,--
No Base Fee: 0,--
Various other stuff: 0.--
-----------------------------
Sum: 29,-- Euro

Is it just me or do you also find this summation strange?

2007-07-28T14:45:00.000+02:00

Two of my Hamburg pictures on flickr made it to a tourist guide on the web: one, two

Thesis

2007-07-25T19:58:00.000+02:00

It seems that everything I was directly involved failed. While writing up it seems that all data that I took was useless, all tests I conducted showed that the detector is not understood and that the tests were useless. At least it will improve my english when I try to make it sound that everthing was great.

Else: this weekend my car wouldn't start (empty battery), my mobile broke (wrong pin entered three times while it was supposed to sit in my pocket being switched off), I met a lot of advanced-level-geeks and had a lot of good wheat beer. The beer was definitely the high point the last couple of days...

Weekend

2007-07-16T23:08:00.000+02:00

A loaded weekend: saturday samba festival in coburg, sunday up at 4am to follow friends in a balloon to pick them up after landing, then back again to the samba festival. I took something about 700 photos this weekend. Now I have to wade through them all to pick the good ones and delete the bad ones...

But for some strange reason I am close to motivated to work. I should do weekends like this more often.

WTF?

2007-07-10T00:10:00.000+02:00

Instead of ranting about our minister of interior going completely nuts (wanting targetet killings etc.) I'll blog about a city in Oregon who discovered that their traffic pilars look like penises:

I think they are right in banning these things. There is an awful lot of stuff which looks like penises and should be banned. Examples? Here they come:

Need to say more?

Moving slowly to the 21st century...

2007-07-06T16:36:00.000+02:00

Today a lot of laws got passed by the Bundestag. Inbetween them is §202 E-StGB, which makes software illegal which has the purpose of attacking other computers. This includes nmap, ping and other usefull network tools, because they can be used to figure out weak points in your IT. It also includes all the tools any decent IT security person would use to check the systems he is responsible for.

Also passed got the second bucket of the Urheberrechtsnovelle, basically the copy-right law. From now on you can only access electronic publications from your university's library on special computers. The electronic subito is no longer allowed. To access research result's which were funded by tax money, published with tax money paid to the publisher, peer reviewed by tax money paid scientists (who don't get anything for this review), you now need to spend even more tax money to access. Elsevier and others will get rich, science will go boink.

Hurray to our well informed and competent politicians. [Note to those who can't understand German: it's politicians saying: "Internet, yeah, I think I have heard of it..."]

Computer

2007-06-28T01:07:00.000+02:00

The next time some hardware fails I'll get a Mac. I just bought a new motherboard for my old PC and it took only some 5 hours to get things working again. Now I still don't have graphics via the DVI port, only some not very sharp output on the analogue port. But at least it works and I hope it won't crash that often as the old one did. As for the barebone which I had and where the porwer supply died: you cannot get that power supply anymore. This barebone is less than two years old... Hurray for short product cycles.

[Edit] Finally got the DVI working. It seems that envy is pretty useful if you have an nVidia or ATI card and want to use it with Linux. Also the nVidea settings program is quite OK (you have to run it as root though and the user interface is not really intuitive). So I have now a working graphics output on my DVI port, with 3d acceleration (including wobbly windows and desktops on a cube)

How to print an a5 booklet

2007-06-25T19:46:00.000+02:00

You've got a file full of a5 pages and want to print it on an a4 printer so that you can fold it and it will be a booklet:


psbook -s<number_of_pages> file.ps file_sorted.ps

Number of pages is here the number of pages in a stack (normally the number of pages of the document plus a bit that it is dividable by 4). If you are binding a real book, it is the number of pages which will be folded and sewn together.


 psnup -2 -pa4 -Pa5 file_sorted.ps printme.ps

-p is the page size of the output file, -P the page size of the input file.

Print with flipping on the short edge. This is tricky on the command line, but if you print from a viewer this should be easy...

Think. flickr, think!

2007-06-15T19:27:00.001+02:00

Think. flickr, think!
Originally uploaded by perreira

As flickr seems to go the same way compuserve did go back in the early nineties (from a successfull community to a huge coorporate hell which ignores it's users and only focuses on shareholder value, from being great to being bancrupt because they overlooked what it really was they had...) I am now trying some alternatives. There is a good overview of alternatives (in german only though). I signed up at zooomr and 23hq, experiences will be posted here...

[EDIT] This is how flickr treats it's customers... (For those of you who do not speak german: this guy sent a mail saying that he is leaving. He got a response which basically tells him "We don't need you, just f*ck off")

[EDIT2] I also signed up at ipernity which looks quite nice

Politics

2007-06-14T00:54:00.000+02:00

According to the political compass questionnaire I am belonging to the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism. I am more left and liberitarian than Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama (Economic Left/Right: -5.50; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.82).