BlaBlubbBlog

Tja, ich bin so herzlich unaktuell, was CGTalk angeht. Die letzte Ausbeute war im Januar und seitdem habe ich nur sehr sporadisch nach Beute gesucht. Aber nun gibt es wieder was! Zwar habe ich bei weitem nicht alles, was zwischen der letzten und dieser Ausbeute erschienen ist, begutachtet, aber immerhin alles im Mai Eingetragene wurde gesichtet. Und es gab durchaus das eine oder andere. Also dann viel Spaß mit Ausbeute 18!

I am a faithful user of the NoScript extension for Firefox. It does make surfing less annoying. Really annoying however is upgrading NoScript. Every once in a while, when I restart the browser, a new version wants to be installed, which is of course fine and I always do it. Once the update is installed and the browser comes up, a new tab is opened with the homepage of NoScript loading there. ARGH! This is really a pain. I thought about blocking the page, but that would be slightly too far-reaching. But one of theses days, when it got too annoying I started reading the FAQ for NoScript. And indeed, there is an item for exactly this annoying redirection with a solution: just set in about:config the key noscript.firstRunRedirection to false. Ah.. peace.

I like drinking tea. A lot. I tend to buy good tea at specific stores and do use two pots (or mugs) to brew it. Only sometimes I revert to the big paper bags to fill in the tea leafs and tea-bags are only used in dire circumstances. My flat-mate is the same, so we do tend to have a good selection of different teas at hand. Our main source for the last months has been the Darjeelings from Teekampagne which has their office a few street from our flat. Added to this are the teas picked up during irregular visits to one of the chain-teastore like Gschwendner.

Preparation is easy: Take a sufficiently large pot, put the right amount of tea in, pour hot water on it, let it steep for x minutes, then pour the tea gently into another pot while sieving for leafs. Enjoy. Now there is of course a lot of magic and voodoo involved in the whole process and there are lots of descriptions and suggestions out there how to produce the best tea. Whatever works best.

Even though I have been quite quiet in this realm in the last two months, a lot of things happened. Not a lot of noteworthy things, mostly work and being busy with my teaching assistant duties. It is part of the requirements of the PhD-programme at the University of Potsdam to do the exercises for a course once. Theoretically this is of course a good thing, practically it is really annoying. Not because of the teaching itself, that is actually fun, no, it is more because of the huge amount of time it costs. It is not only the two hours (that is, 90 minutes in the real world) the class lasts every Monday, it takes at least five hours to grade the exercise sheets and another five to ten hours to prepare an exercise. Luckily the latter is shared between all the people involved in the course on the organisational side.

And since I am anyway busy fulfilling the technical requirements, or at least some, for my PhD this semester, I also chose to do the seminar: Giving a talk of 45 minutes and being there for all the talks the others give. Luckily this is also on Monday, so I am not loosing one day per week. Unfortunately the university is on the other side, the west end, of the city, so a lot of traveling is involved: it does take forty minutes to get to the place where the class is and then the seminar is again at another campus.

via Mela