Leben

So, my first posting on this blog was exactly (to the minute, I used the timed publication for this post) one year ago. Wooohooo! And even though I agree that it is a bit cheesy: Happy Birthday, BlaBlubbBlog! I am somewhat surprised that I managed to more or less regularly post over the course of the year.

A few statistics: 115 articles (7 by Oleg, 108 by me) make 0.32 articles per day (that is 2.21 articles per week or 9.78 articles per month), 43 comments make 0.37 comments per article, 305800 written characters make 2659.13 character per article. The update to s9y 1.1 did something nasty to the visit counter, so I don't have any number on this, but this is anyway mostly search bots (Hi there!).

So, with a big Thanks to Mela for hosting the site (yes, I will buy the Geek Kochbuch! ^_^), Oleg for contributing a couple of articles+comments and everyone for reading and sometimes commenting, I'll venture in the next year. May there be a second birthday!

One good thing, maybe the only good thing, about flying is the option to go to duty-frees. Or at least close approximations thereof in terms of bottle sizes. Normally a bottle of whisky bought in a shop contains 700ml of the juice. The bottles in the duty-frees contain 1000ml. Clear advantage. So I paid 36,99£ for 1000ml of the Caol Ila (18yrs), which is roughly 56€ according to xe.com. The 0.7l bottle costs 53€ at Scoma, that equals 75€ per liter litre^a. I actually just checked that for the purpose of the posting and am now surprised that I saved that much, cool, wasn't expecting that. But okay, that propitiates me even more than just having a nice whisky with the hassle of flying: arguing for an exit seat – more space for the legs, or I should say, barely enough space compared to not enough space – security checks every two metres, popping ears... And of course the whisky helps relaxing after a long day of programming. Lets see if the bottle will last till the end of my stay.

^a: British spelling, since I am in the UK...

It is already 10 days ago that I arrived in Edinburgh. And that also means that only 39 days are left for carrying out my project. Ah, well, yeah, why am I actually here? Well, there is a very interesting programme called HPC-Europa where one can propose a project that requires High-Performance-Computing. This project will be done at an institution – in collaboration with a group or a person there – which is located near one of the six European supercomputing centers. Actually you can only apply to those centers which are not situated in the country your are working in. So you have to travel.

Which is fine of course. Given that your project is deemed worthy, you can then work up to thirteen weeks at the host institution and you have access to the most potent computers in Europe. All paid, of course. This is a pretty neat thing and so I did apply for a seven week stay in Edinburgh, working directly at the EPCC on some aspects of parallelizing AMIGA.

You might have noticed, that the Blog tag line is chosen randomly. And the more regular visitors (there are some, I hope) might also have seen that since two days there is new one. Namely: "If it doesn't work, hit it. If it's in your way, knock it down.", which is a cite from one of the best Star Trek Voyager episodes, 'Faces', in which the resident Klingon-Human, B'Elanna Torres, is split up into a Klingon and a Human — so there are two B'Elannas in the episode, which is probably why it is one of the best^a.

There was apparently this storm the other day. It was even left at our discretion if want to leave the office early in the afternoon, because of the storm warnings. Well, since I only have 20 minutes of walking, or 3 minutes bus and 6 minutes walking, I stayed longer in the office, getting some work done. Okay, it was raining and for a few moments even pouring down. But nothing really bad. So after this few moments of heavy rain I decided to go home at a ten to eight.

It had stopped raining and the sky was even partially clear. The bus didn't come though. But who cares, a bit more walking, can't be bad. The roads were slightly flooded, but well, the sidewalk is higher, so no problem. During the night the wind freshed up a bit, it was very soothing to sleep with the gentle swishing outside. Well, no frightening heavy evil storm then in Babelsberg.

But coming to the office next day, the building seemed to look different. It actually took me a few seconds to notice why:

Last week an interesting challenge surfaced. We were looking for a nice motto for the christening plate of a RPG spaceship. Oleg found a good quote, which is perfectly fitting for that purpose: "...doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read." This is a shortened version of "True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it."

After having seen Casino Royale, we decided to walk from the Potsdamer Platz to the main station to catch the S-Bahn there. It is not that far and some fresh air was good after sitting in the cinema for over three hours. Anyhow, approaching the main station we noticed the visual effects:

There are also some stars on the other side, but they were not functioning. Will they have eggs for easter?