Leben

Well. I had planned to get some coding done today. But then, after a hearty breakfast at half past eight (don't ask), I got stuck on finally figuring out that orange Skype symbol that bothered me already the whole week. And in the end I really wasn't feeling like coding anyways this morning. Instead I was planning ahead for a proper tea time this afternoon. And for this I need short bread. One could buy the Walkers things, which are actually quite nice, but somehow they are really expensive. Fear no more, as with the right substances, it is actually easy to make your own:

620 g flour
290 g sugar
290 g starch
500 g (soft) butter
salt (quantity depending on your taste)

Put everything together and knead it until you have a smooth dough. Spread it on a baking tray with baking paper. Now use a fork to make holes in it and then bake it for 30-40 minutes at something like 150 °C. This yields:

This drives me nuts... since the new laptop, dee, also has an American keyboard layout, as does the machine in the institute, I spent 95% of my computer time using the American layout. While jane (the old laptop) was still in use, it was more like 50/50 and switching between the German and the American layout was more or less easy. Well, not really. But much easier than I get along with the German layout of the keyboard attached to the desktop at the moment. Especially when programming. Hmpf. Maybe I should completely abandon the German layout, it doesn't do much anyways besides giving easier access to the special characters in the seldom events that I have to enter text in something else than Vim (side note: the spell checker complained about 'vim', it wants 'Vim'). sigh But what would a day be without the small, however persistent, annoyances of modern life.

After reading a news article on Golem, my browsing experience changed completely. Not only is it way nicer to use Google with a command line interface (CLI), it is also faster. But the real treat is vimperator, a plugin for Firefox (only 3.0, which is standard for Ubuntu 8.04). Takes a bit to get used to, but now I have a cryptic browser. Excellent.

Seriously, this is not that insane as it seems. Dunno whether I will stick with it, but for a few days I'll see how I get along with a decent interface. One stupid thing though: I am missing the digraph feature, one of the fastest ways to have access to most extra characters. A ð is just a ctrl-k d- away, æ gets conjured up with a quick ctrl-k ae, and so on. Nothing is more annoying than not having the special character you would need on the keyboard and then the darn search engine is not intelligent enough to understand that oe might also match ö (ctrl-k o:). And yes, I know that I can mod the key mapping, but that will always be something else on different machines anyways...

DVDs are basically a great invention. Especially the DVD-Video. They do have their pitas, mostly the brain-dead invention of region codes and the copy protection stuff. And of course this unskipable commercials, trailers and big fat warnings that you must not even think about doing anything with this DVD besides maybe watching it (but please in your own house with closed curtains and preferably no one else there; slightly exaggerate). But generally, it is a great thing: Good quality, easy to use (remember rewinding the tapes?), added bonus features like multiple languages to choose from and so forth.

So for watching a movie on the 'big' home screen it works like a charm, throw the disc into the player, lean back and enjoy. But sometimes I would rather like to watch a movie on the laptop. And then it is really annoying to have the DVD drive spinning all the time. So actually, it would be much nicer to have the movies (not the bonus stuff, if I want that, I go to the TV and the stand-alone player) on the hard-drive instead. Thankfully this is a reasonably easy task, well, not really.

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.

While increasing the caffeine level I was reading in a CERN newsletter lying on the table in the coffee room and found in there an interesting small article about the Singapore Biennale 2006, or, more specifically, an installation named 'Tom Na H-iu' by Mariko Mori (see pictures here, here and a video here). Its shape resembles the ancient Celtic megaliths, or standing stones, but is made of half transparent glass and illuminated from the inside by LEDs. Those are controlled by a <strangelovevoice> computer </strangelovevoice> hooked up to a detector at the Super-Kamiokande. Detected neutrinos – among them are some which belong to distant supernovae – are hence used to create, in a broader sense, new light. The name 'Tom Na H-iu' refers to the place where, according to Celtic lore, souls are waiting to pass into a new life. So, of course this is symbolic (death, rebirth, yaddayadda) but with the direct link to realtime data it actually becomes quite profound. Nice idea, indeed.

The thing is 3 metres tall, would actually fit in my room (height-wise), hmmm...