Digitising Slides

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

Smoke

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

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?

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

Thesis

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

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?

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...

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..."]