Today, during breakfast, I watched parliament discussions again. They shouldn't show such things on TV, I always loose my faith into politicians in special and humanity in general.

The discussion today was: Germany's Plan to buld a Tsunami Early Alert System in Indonesia. What they want to do sounds a bit like TollCollect for waves, involving buoys with GPS and stuff. This thing is more than doubtful. We have a lot of experts on earthquakes here in Germany, which are within the top researchers in their field. We also have experts on tectonics, on oceanography etc. We do not have any expert on Tsunamis. Yes, a tsunami is just a wave caused by an earthquake. But it takes much more to understand a tsunami than an expert on earthquakes or an expert on oceanography. You need experts which know all of that and a lot of stuff more. Putting a buoy somewhere which sends an alarm when there is a wave a bit higher than normal or when there is a seaquake is one thing , actually having a trustful alarm system, which does not send too much false alarms and is efficient in real alarms is another thing. So, there is lots of questions to be asked....

What did they ask in parliament? A woman from the greens asked if this system can be enlargened so that all the poor africans on the african westcoast, who were also hit by last years tsunami can be warned. (Well, last year they were warned, because the Tsunami took some hours to reach the african coast...) They were asking lots of stupid things which were not at all related to the real problems. Nobody really asked, can we actually do that or will this be another great disaster in technology development... Do we have the expertise to do that? Nobody asked.

Seems none of them asks the right questions. All have their religions (conservatism, socialism, whateverism...), all have their catch phrases, all have a culprit (the others), all have lost contact to reality. Whenever they want to change something they are working on the symptoms, not the causes. We have to many people without work? Change the statistics and then blame the PEOPLE and the ECONOMY to be lamers... As long as they can rise their salaries and have double incomes, everything is fine.

Two other things, which made me sick: a german health insurer (AOK) is cutting the money for the blinds. Guide dogs are no longer paid, because blinds do not have the right to walk for longer distances. They only have a right to walk short distances and for that a stick is sufficient. And: the german health insurers made high profits last year. Instead of lowering their prices or offering more service, they keep on cutting down their services, but raising their CEOs salaries. Which has been rationalised by "their high responsibility and their high workload, sometimes they have to work up to 60 hours a week..." Well. I will work more than 60 hours this week, I have some responsibility (if I mess up either a new detector worth 1 Million € in Hardware only will be gone, or a working detector worth a couple of million euros will be gone, an accellerator costing hundreds of thousends of euros to run will be in a standstill...), so I am not that far off their responsibilities or workload, I still get twenty to fifty times less than them... And no chance of raise.

The Company and its representatives may from time to time make written or oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the Company's filings with the SEC and in its reports to shareholders. One can identify these forward-looking statements by use of words such as "strategy," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "will," "continues," "estimates," "intends," "projects," "goals," "targets" and other words of similar meaning. One can also identify them by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts.

Disclaimer: We lie to you a lot. But you cannot sue us. HAHA! (found on the Kraft MasterFoods Germany website...)

We definitvely need a russian phrase book in our manuals here at the experiment. Babelfish is really helpful, but how do I pronounce "Victor не здесь, он придет в половину час"...?

We need important phrases like "XY is not here", "The detector is broken, please fix it", "It was not my fault", "No, I did not drink your Vodka"...

This sign is just saying: Move on, there is absolutely nothing to see.

Book binding is a lost art.

What this nice representative of Samsung has in his hands is a mobile phone, just in case you didn't recognise it on first look. The following model will also feature a coffee maker, a swiss army knife like functionality, four wheel drive and maybe you can make a phonecall with it. But marketing is not sure if you really want to make a call at all.

Look at this guy. If he would be Stefan Raab (or insert-your-local-late-night-comedy-talk-show-host-here), he would be cool, hilarious, great. As he is just a obese kid, he is funny, strange, emberassing. Funny enough, most of us are like him. We are far from perfect, we do studid things we think are funny, most of them actually aren't. Shall we laugh about him? Yes. As we should laugh about ourselves...

Just found something wich sums up slashdot comments pretty well: In Soviet Russia, Gentoo trolls you with hot grits down a petrified Natalie Portman's pants being rendered on a Beowulf cluster of Macs.

Some teenagers attacked a 22 year old woman in an S-Bahn Train yesterday. The train was completely filled with people, but the only one helping the young woman was an elderly disabled lady. Hurray for Hamburg's couragious people, always there to defend your dignity.

In case you want to find more women in science, try wikipedia...

As today is world women's day, gajo simpático pays reverence to famous women in science nobody knows:



Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet-Laumont
born in 1706, died in 1749. French mathematician, physicist, author. She wrote an explanatory book on Leibniz' theories and translated Newton's books into french, adding an algebraic commentary.



Laura Bassi
born 1711, died 1778. First female professor in Europe. Teached by her father and her families doctor, she got a PhD in Philosophy in 1731 and a proferssorship in Physics in 1733. She did some notable experiments on the Boyle Mariott Law, wrote several technical papers, 13 on physics, 11 on hydraulics, 1 on mechanics, 1 on chemistry and 2 on mathematical subjects.


Maria Gaetana Agnesi
born 1718, died 1799. Second woman to become Professor (Mathematics) at a european university. She spoke fluently seven languages (probably some more), her book Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventu italiana is the first book discussing both integral and differential calculus.


Dorothea Christiane Erxleben
born 1715, died 1762. Germany's first woman recieving a doctor's degree in medicine. She learned medicine together with her brother, but she was contrary to him not allowed to go to university. Even without a degree she practized, which lead to polemics from her male colleagues. She responded with a treatise called Gründliche Untersuchung der Ursachen, die das weibliche Geschlecht vom Studiren abhalten (Throurough studies about the reasons which prevent the female gender from studying):

Die Verachtung der Gelehrsamkeit zeigt sich besonders darin, dass das weibliche Geschlecht vom Studieren abgehalten wird. Wenn etwas dem größten Teil der Menschheit vorenthalten wird, weil es nicht allen Menschen nötig und nützlich ist, sondern vielen zum Nachteil gereichen könnte, verdient es keine Wertschätzung, da es nicht von allgemeinem Nutzen sein kann. So führt der Ausschluss vieler von der Gelehrsamkeit zu ihrer Verachtung. Dieses Unrecht ist ebensogroß wie dasjenige, das den Frauen widerfährt, die dieses herrlichen und kostbaren Gegenstandes beraubt werden

In 1754 she got her degree in medicine, only after in 1741 Friedrich the great intervened with Halle University.

In collaboration with Especialista em Generalidades, Gajo Simpático proudly presents Cogumelos Aporcalhados (which is portuguese for something like porcified mushrooms). Stay tuned...

Olha, o kunami fresquinho!

Meet Pedro, my godson. Born March, 2nd 2005, son of Nuno and Mariana. He will be the most beautiful, most intelligent and most well behaved kid on this planet... Well, until I have my own kids.

Les bourgeois c'est comme les cochons
Plus ça devient vieux plus ça devient bête...

Introduction to portuguese logic, lesson 1: Next month the fines for traffic abuses will rise. Speeding etc. will be much more expensive. So everybody is driving like hell now, speeding, driving drunk, killing people on the streets to approve of the sales now...

(Not that portuguese driving habits will change afterwards, when speeding gets more expensive. Those who have cars which go above limit can also afford to pay the fines.)

I'm gone. For ten days no Hamburg... Seems like everybody is histeric now I am not there, but their problem...

Hamburg Airport. Half bussiness people, half holiday people. Everything is organised, calm, clean and everybody is running around in moderate pace. In the plane there are four starlets (old ugly women with stupid hats and whith their stupid poodels). Stop in Frankfurt. Business. Only Business. Everything looks like a fair, Managers and their (sometimes good looking) secretaries running around, knowing if they slow down for a second, the economy as we know it will brake down and we will have to live like savages again (or at least they loose their job and have to live like savages again).
Arriving in Oporto. The airport is still being refurbished to look good for the 2004 European Footbal Cup. People are running in slow motion. The coffee is 65 cents and really good...

http://especialista-em-generalidades.blogspot.com/

In my, maybe naïve, point of view, an important sign of democracy is when the leaders of a state can move freely around without being protected against the mob in the streets. A minimum security might be necessary to prevent some madmen doing stupid things.

Now a certain statesman, head of one of the oldest democracies still alive, a bringer of light, a distributor of freedom, the beacon of liberty, is coming to Germany for one day to visit his dearest and oldest friend Gerhard. Trains will stop, streets will be closed for public traffic, dustbins will be removed from the streets, phone networks shut off, factories closed, all to hail the bringer of peace. And we are close to removing the peasants from that area, that nobody could harm this messias of freedom and liberty. Yeehaw. All hail the bush.

A couple of weeks ago I lent my flat in Hamburg to a colleague. He left some food in the fridge, which I have mainly eaten up until now. With this food there was a bar of low fat butter. What is the idea of low fat butter? Butter is sheer fat. It includes still a bit of other stuff like water, that is why you can still clarify it to Ghee, that is also why it turns rancid after some time.

OK, so low fat butter. Take fat out of the butter. Leaves you mainly water. Which you cannot sell in bars (actually, you can sell it in frozen cubes, which had an amazing success in Portugal when they sold Agua de Luso in ice cubes for real high prizes...). So, you need to substitute the fat in the low fat butter with something else. And, as this is supposed to be a healthy product, what comes first in mind? Yes, gelatine. Finely ground animal bones and stuff you cannot even put into sausages. Yummy. And the result: something which looks like butter, tastes like water and if you try to fry something in it (which I unfortunately tried...) you get burned gelatine rests in your pan, which not only smell horribly (and ruin everything you fry in it) but also are really hard to get off the pan afterwards. Great success of food industry.

Today I saw during zapping an advertisement for Spaghetti made out of Tofu. Spaghetti normally are made out of wheat. No need to substitute that by Tofu. It's already vegetarian. So, why?

All this health stuff is turning really crazy now. We do not want to eat fat anymore. Meat is sold completely fat free. But fat is the stuff which has the most taste in it; if you get fat less meat, it tastes like nothing (even tofu sausages have more taste than fat free chicken sausages...). Most vitamins are only soluble in fat. We also eat stuff because it is advertised as healthy. Why do I want to eat Tofu spaghettis? Because Soy is so good for me. As, strangely enough, would be wheat. Or any other grain.

We will be left with design food, which is treated to contain nothing. No fat, no taste, no vitamins, nothing. So that we can then buy functional food. Like the flour I found in the supermarket the other day. Added five types of vitamins. Or pseudo-ecological food with garantueed origin, like flour which was only made out of grains from one farm (which is stated on a sticker on the package!). The supermarkets here in HH are full of that stuff. But, if you just want to buy some apples which were grown in that region (close to Hamburg is one of the best apple growing regions in germany), you can't. Half of the apples which used to grow here are no longer sellable, as they do not comply the european union regulations on apples (too small, too big, too red, too green, too tasty...). You only get New Zealand Granny Smith and stuff like that. Great. I go and get some vitamin pills instead...

Another week gone. This week was something like 50 to 60h work...

We had meetings yesterday and today. I did slides this night until three in the morning for a presentation I had to give at ten. It seems people were ranting that I did not show up for the first talk at nine. Their problem.

Yesterday in a meeting of our big bosses it seems they first talked about one of our collegues having had a heart attack (this guy is something in the early 40s!) because of too much work and stress. Then, a few minutes later, they started discussing that all of us should work much more and much harder to get our detector running. Well, I am one of the people who work least, and I am already at an average of something like 40 to 50 hours a week... Wonder when our bosses have lost contact to reality.

Other news: only one more week and I am gone for a holiday, four more weeks and I am gone for good. Hopefully back to a healthier life actually meeting people in my spare time I have not seen all day all week for more than 50 hours...

Join the Geek Corps

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? (from JWZ's blog)

How do I tell my boss that read out software for a detector is not achieving this goal... ;-)

Gajo Simpatico is blushing. As I sent the mail that we finally managed to get our detector running in the test setup, I receive all the congratulation-mails from the big bosses. Yes, finally I get credits for things other people did :-) (well, I did something too, but not everything)

This is not the goatse man...

I just hate unprofessional wise-asses. I have to admit, I am a wise ass myself, but I do only wise-ass with people who I think can survive me talking gobshite. Just got a mail from somebody who has not even finished school about a website I did for the rowing group of my old school (for the 20th anniversary of rowing meeting in Papenburg...). It seems, he is the webmaster of the site of the rowing group, which has a page flickering of flash, colour schemes that only a blind hippo would like and so on.

Well. I was on the internet before the web was invented. I did gopher, I had my first website in 1994 (I think, when whas the web invented again?). Do not try to out-geek me. I know programming languages this guy has never even heard of... And I am a much more trained wise ass than him... :-)

Rule No. 237 of voluntary work: If somebody is doing things for fun in his spare time, do not critisise him first thing in a mail. Be nice. Then critisise. Makes him a lot less angry.

I just like IT. I tryed to change my password. This is the error I got:

"The entered password violated the common password conventions of DESY.
The server sent the following message:
PasswordConventionException occured: Check Failed for pattern (.*[A-Z].*[a-z].*[0-9].*)|(.*[a-z].*[A-Z].*[0-9].*)|(.*[0-9].*[a-z].*[A-Z].*)|
(.*[0-9].*[A-Z].*[a-z].*)|(.*[A-Z].*[0-9].*[a-z].*)|(.*[a-z].*[0-9].*[A-Z].*)|
(.*[A-Z].*[a-z].*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*)|(.*[a-z].*[A-Z].*
[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*)|(.*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]
\^_\{\}\|~].*[a-z].*[A-Z].*)|(.*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[A-Z]
.*[a-z].*)|(.*[a-z].*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[A-Z].*)|(.*[A-Z]
.*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[a-z].*)|(.*[0-9].*[a-z].*[!#$%&'\(\)
\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*)|(.*[a-z].*[0-9].*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]
\^_\{\}\|~].*)|(.*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[a-z].*[0-9].*)|
(.*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[0-9].*[a-z].*)|(.*[a-z].*[!#$%&'\(\)
\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[0-9].*)|(.*[0-9].*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]
\^_\{\}\|~].*[a-z].*)|(.*[A-Z].*[0-9].*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*)
|(.*[0-9].*[A-Z].*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*)|(.*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-
\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[0-9].*[A-Z].*)|(.*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}
\|~].*[A-Z].*[0-9].*)|(.*[0-9].*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[A-Z].*)
|(.*[A-Z].*[!#$%&'\(\)\*+\-\./;:<=>?@\[\]\^_\{\}\|~].*[0-9].*).
Please try again."

OK, now I know everything...

Dear Hamburg Cyclists,

if you happen to go around the city at night, no lights on your bike, wearing dark clothes, going in non-predictable directions, because you don't bother to signal, overtaking cars, which are giving signals that they want to turn right, on the right side, pass red traffic lights, generally behave like you are the only one on the street, well, if you happen to end up beneath my car and your 5000 Euro mega-stylish mountain bike turned into a wire sculpture, I won't consider this an accident anymore, just natural selection. And I will kick your arse when the paint on my car gets scratched by this unecessary process of evolution.

cheers, gajo-who-is-no-longer-simpatico-with-idiot-cylists.

10% of all Europeans are concieved in an IKEA bed...

After the movie this had to appear some time sooner or later...

Totally vegan and not tested on animals. Eat pussy, not pork.

"Greetings to you and your family in the name of God. In my search for a reliable and God fearing person and having gotten your contact through prayers and painstaking efforts I have decided to seek your help in carrying out my last wishes. My name is DENINS AMAS...."

Why does God give my e-mail address to strange people, and why didn't HE ever sent me a mail?

Answering machines are not really understood by a lot of people. They do not take the burden of answering from you, they just take the bother out of answering when the phone rings. They are turning synchronous communication into asynchronous communication. But, with some people, they seem to turn it into no communication at all. Maybe I am just pissed of with life in general and for that too easily bothered with minor things, but I think it is polite to answer a question, no matter what the answer is or what the question was...

(This is a general thought, triggered maybe, but I am not angry at anybody in particular, just got thinking when waiting...)

[EDIT] I should take more care when to post what. This was not ment to annoy you. Sometimes I get thinking triggered by something, although it has nothing to do with the event, which triggered it. So, when I say on anybodys answering machine: "Call me, if you feel like it", that is not a question where I would expect an answer, if you do not feel like it.

Most of the stuff I get annoyed with, which involves you, the fellow readers of this blog, will not show up here. In the state of mind I am these days, I think I piss you off enough without ranting about you in this blog. And I do not think it is nice to rant about friends in public.

Igthorn also seems to be right. Mariana: a proxima vez que mostro tanto entusiasmo, lembra-me mais sede da Catherine...

Bienvenido al Blogosfera, Igthorn... Afinal, el hombre das zapatillas entra en el mundo virtual :-)

I talked to my Prof. yesterday. I now have a date for re-entry to life and I have a topic for my PhD (which includes all the stuff I have done sofar). And suddenly the winter depression is gone (more or less). It seems to have been pretty bad, I today found two months of letters not opened, including pretty important ones. I managed to talk to people I should have talked a long time ago. And maybe I'll get normal some time soon. At least the hope is arising :-)

As always Mariana is right.

Whoa. Just saw, that I am blogging for a year and a week today. Missed the aniversary... No cake for you then. Thanks to all of you who still read that crap :-)

It seems to work. You may now find photos I have taken on http://www.flickr.com/photos/perreira/.

Thistle in stones

Thistle in stones
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Just trying if flickr.com blog posting works...

It's about time I should come back to Erlangen. Browsing through my last couple of posts today seems my mind has been completely messed up by Hamburg and DESY, I have been completely brain fucked. After two nights of good sleep at a place I think of as home and meeting with most of my friends I am somewhat clearer thinking now. Most of the thoughts I had over the last couple of months (and sometimes shared with you) show signs of madness creeping in. Most thoughts right now seem like complete bullshit.

Might be also something due to blogging. Most of the thoughts I have and had all my life where complete bullshit, they just weren't documented. But I should come back to Erlangen anyway. Well, it's only a bit more than a month I have to spend in Hamburg, so we'll see...

It's always the same questions for somebody socially incompetent and insecure like me... As always, thinking too much leads to too much theories. I should just settle for one someday. So, here's the theories:

1. I behaved like an asshole and should say sorry.
2. She is just generally annoyed by me.
3. She is just generally annoyed.
4. She is much more socially incompetent and insecure than me.
5. She is annoyed because I said too much.
6. She is annoyed because I said too less.
7. It's all in my head.

Most probably true: number 7. Or maybe 1. I just don't know. Anyway, in case you feel like commenting, please do so :-) For the weekend, I will stop thinking now and go and read a book. Much better, as you know what's happening, and if you don't, you can read it again.

It's cold in Geneva.

You must read this...

Studying fees have been declared legal by constitutional court in Germany. Students are now preparing an uprise. The Freiwilliger Zusammenschluss von Studierendinnenschaftinnen (Voluntary Union of Students Unions or something) is preparing barricades, already casting bullets. Some secretly chosen physics students try to steel fission material from their labs, maybe some 80 grams of highly enriched uranium (which didn't find a buyer last week because of him getting arrested) will find a new happy owner now.

Secret Students societies are very secretely planning to overthrow the illuminati world government and try to erect a marxist-leninist-trotskist-liberal-communist-free-love-for-all-and-most-for-me government. Stay tuned for news and join your local students union to become an elite member of the new rulers yourself!

Random Pictures is back...

Arrogance. If you ask what annoys me most these days, it's arrogance. The arrogance of the big city, big houses showing the superiority of their owners, people being more fashionable, more hip than everybody else. The arrogance of people at work, PostDocs being wiseasses, patronizing PhD students. And finally, my own arrogance. Being together with incompetent, wiseassy, arrogant Physicists all day (with a few notable exceptions...) is turning me into one of them. It starts scaring people off whom I do not want to be scared off. I might be in a state where rehabilitation is possible, but it for sure will take time... Be patient with me.

Just got this error message: "Warning: wrong member access operator"

Does this translate as "You wanker!"?

I am sitting six floors below ground, next to me are two crates full of noise making stuff, I am staring at a computer screen all day, I have to do at least five different things at the same time (taking data, analysing data, program, ...), random people keep on popping in and ask questions which need some thinking, my boss is holding a meeting just next to me.

Wouldn't you also like it if your boss asks you why you are not getting anything done...

Well... It finally happened. I am DESYfied. Works doesn't suck that much anymore. I think I have to shoot myself now...

The last week actually was OK-ish. The meeting today was not a complete pain in the arse. I am close to not hating work anymore. Really time to shoot myself. But it also may be knowing that it will only be two more months...

Finally, thanks to insult-o-matic, also my communist friends can understand this blog. The proletariat is enchanted with this great achievement of the peoples front.

I have always thought that I can respect a "no" and live with it. This time, it's getting hard. Really hard. It makes it even worse that I sometimes overinterpret stuff... This "No" has not been outspoken, but it is pretty obvious, although I sometimes want to believe it isn't. I nearly feel sorry for her to have to cope with an idiot like me...

Back from Holidays. From a writers perspective this would have been my day:

After having a frugal breakfast of portuguese sweets (Ovos Moles), I went
to work at the worlds largest working machine, situated in one of Germany's
most vivant cities. Descending in to the pit where the experiment is located I
passed by some of the worlds most brilliant particle physicists, some russians
sitting in a dark lab, working secretly on world domination plans, and a fat
cat. I play an important role in an experiment set out to discover world's
building blocks, what drives them, uncovering the hidden structures of the
universe, mapping out terra incognita in particle physics, removing the white
spots in the image we have of our universe. After work I will have a couple of
drinks with some interesting people, philosophing about humanity and society.


This is what it looks like from a PhD Students perspective:

After finding something edible in the fridge (which had to go anyway,
because soon it will be full of salmonellas) I went to work in a loud, noisy
cave situated in a city I never see at daylight. Descending into this cave,
which has dried air, I pass by some of the weirdest morons on planet earth,
some strange russians cleaning their computer's harddrive with vodka, and a
fat cat. I have to do a lot of stuff like plumbing, kicking electronics and so
on in an experiment which is going to fail, which won't discover anything
interesting, which is so badly organised that you just want to bang your head
on the next wall for some decades. After work I will get drunk with some of my
more normal colleagues, whining about how work sucks and about girls
constantly ignoring us - strangely enough most of us have the same story: boy
fancies girl, girl goes out sometimes with boy, boy wants to be more than
friends, girl says piss off (well, sometimes girl chooses different words,
sometimes girl does not say anything which confuses the hell out of boy...). I
am drifting off...

Actually, if it wouldn't be a blatant lie, I would like to believe the first
way of putting it...

I hate my browser. It just ate my post...

Plan for the next two weeks: take a car, five people, a keg of beer, drive through half of europe to a house in the middle of nowhere. Spend a week there eating, drinking, finding out what else to do. Then buy wine, food and other stuff until the car is nearly breaking down and drive home.

So: as there will be no more posts for at least a week, have a nice new year :-)

Good luck, Morgan!

Cool Micro-Cars from World War II to the seventies...

I just had a meeting with one of my local bosses here, a
"Mitarbeitergespräch". That is where you tell each other what you think about
your work, your performance and these things. Well, he thinks, I should work
more. I do work something like 40 to 50 hours per week now, in dried air,
noisy environment and you know all that because I always rant about it. I get
paid for 19.5 hours per week, I will not get my PhD for what I am doing now...
I'll stop here, I am repeating myself.

My Boss is not a bad person, there's worse on earth. But he has been working
in this big research centre now for a long time, he has basically no friends
outside work, no social contacts other than his collegues. His home is on the
other half of the globe, somewhere in the States. So all he does is working,
because there is nothing else. As do most of the people there. Most of them
are from far away, none of them have any social contacts outside work (they
are physicists, so not of the most fashionable profession). Everything they do
is hang around at work. Most of the time not really productive, but they are
there. And that is what they expect of me.

I do not want to end up like that. I do have friends outside work. I try to
have social contacts which are not collegues. I even would like to get a
girlfriend some day (not speaking of family, this is so far off, that I do not
even think about it). So, maybe I am a bad physicist. But I think this is much
more than weight up by being a human being.

I am close to explode! Just had a five minute phone call from my bosses on my mobile (I was so stupid to hand it to them. Never ever give your private phone number to your boss!). There is now a serious danger that tomorrow I will tell them to fuck off.

Our project is seriously behind schedule, we have to get an important test up and running by end of next week. I (and only I, nobody helping) started preparing that some two months ago, getting a setup which already worked in some other place. Mounted it, plugged it in, didn't work. So I started debugging, got it running quite OK, but there is still some big flaw in it. Got some "Experts" watching over my shoulder, just to get them to the same conclusion as me "We do not know. It should work..." There have been a lot of "it should..." the last few weeks.

At the same time I have to develop the read out software for the test's hardware. I have never done such thing before, I have to learn everything how to do it, including polishing my programming skill, which were slighly above the "Hello, World"-level. Alone this is a full time job. Also taking into account, that I do not know alot about electronics, I have something like two full time jobs plus learning how to do them at the same time. Sitting in a cave, 6 floors below ground, breathing dried air, having really noisy electronics around me, my desk in the office taken over by random people, the other desk which I sometimes used, when mine was occupied by some PostDoc happening to be around, is full of computers which just sit there and rot.

And today this phonecall. I left early, so that I don't go crazy down there. I did not answer the first two calls, I was busy with other things then. I answered the third call some hours later. Big mistake. As I am the personal slave, I have to be at the experimental hall all the time, work round the clock. "There could have been done so much more", they said. Well, there could. If we would have two or three people more, who actually would know what they do. "You could have done that already". Yes, I could. I could also have gone mental and killed everybody. Or ran off to brazil. Or could be abducted by aliens. Just because they like spending their entire life together with other nuts in a cave does not meen I have to. So, tomorrow, I probably will tell them to sod off. I might end up without getting my PhD for that, but I wouldn't have got it for that anyway. Experiment's policy is that you only get you PhD for Analysis. So far for motivation.

You see, I have fun, I am well and I really enjoy my life. On the positive side, two weeks from now I will be 2500km away. I will not be reachable for anyone. And I will spend that time with friends. So, there's hope...

Folding...

Just had some haggis with some friends of mine. Well, two of us had haggis, the other two were to scared by the ingridients to actually try it (or one maybe to english to eat scottish food ;-) ). It turned out to taste quite good, like a mixture between Knipp and Blutwurst (this be german food, you may not know it, so this description might be useless to you...)

One of them was the girl I tried to chat up since 15 years, and to be honest, I think I am quite happy that it didn't work out. Would not have worked, either I would have turned into somebody boring, or we would have split up quite fast. Neither would be an option I would have liked.

Finished watching the first series of Coupling. I really want to see the second now... First time ever I wanted to see how a TV series goes on.

There is plenty of fish left in the toilet of love. How true...

Yesterday I wandered around the city. Shortly before christmas love and understanding spreads through the town, happy people bumb into each other and try to knock you off your feet while getting gifts for their beloved ones. Everybody has a happy "GET OUT OF MY F***ING WAY!"-Smile. Oh, how I love christmas season.

At the christmas market there was a Santa Claus pulled on a roap over the masses, blasting from awful speakers a protest song about peer pressure in reindeer groups against physically challenged reindeers, people having mulled wine with too much rhum, standing inbetween the stands like sardines, the tightness luckily preventing them to fall over from alcohol intoxication, spreading the fun and joy of christmas around. Joy and peace everywhere.

On monday I saw I cool band playing in the streets of Altona. Some policemen where hiding behind a corner. They wanted to listen to the band (which had songs like "Fuck the police..."), but as the band had no permission to play there... One of the policemen complained, that they always stop playing and run away when he comes closer to listen to the music. This is what I like about real democracies: Policemen are people too.

Rule no. one: PhD students have to be around all the time and to be at the disposal of higher ranked members of the group.

Rule no. two: PhD students have no right to use their desk, if a higher ranked PostDoc or something wants to use it, or if storage room is needed to put things on.

Rule no. three: PhD students should not think on their own and have to notify higher ranked members of the group about any small thing they do.

Rule no. four: PhD students are not allowed have a private life.

We had a fun and entertaining meeting yesterday. Well, not really fun, not really entertaining, but you might call it a meeting. Some of my colleagues seem to believe in Voodoo. If you put needles and pins into a PhD-student, it will hurt his boss. At least this was what they tried. There is a group leader which people not really like, one of the PhD student of this group leader did a talk and he was massacred with questions which they thought he would not be able to answer and his boss would have to show his ignorance. It did not work out well...

When our russian collegues did their talks, I nearly fell into a giggle loop when a colleague started to scribble "We must wait! All your tracks are belong to us! Somebody has set us up the bomb!..." on his notepad. It was getting really surreal. But the meeting was short. So not so bad at all.

The day continued with Sushi and Sauna, so overall it was a nice day following a great weekend. Some of my friends from Erlangen had come over to HH, which made me re-discover, that most of the fun hanging around in bars comes from whom you're with. My friends in HH are not as numerous and diverse that I would have as much fun as when I'm in Erlangen...

In the city where my parents live garbage collection has been privatized. The got a new trash can, which is labeled that you could put 50 liters in, but in fact it only is 47 liters (No, I did not measure it myself, but somebody did and complained in the newspapers). The will get completely new high-tech garbage collection trucks which will be manned by one guy only, the cans will be picked up by a robotic arm, weighted automatically (you have to pay by weight now...) and then emptied. So far this sounds slightly reasonable. But: you have to place the can exactly 1.312234 meters off the road side, there must not be any cars parking near the place where you put the can, it has to be oriented in an exact angle of 87.25 degrees with respect to the street and so on and so on. If you do not manage to fullfill all criteria, your garbage stays there and you can try again in two weeks (yes, they only come every second week!).

Another example how technology helps us to get a much more comfortable and easier life. Just put your garbage in your car, drive to some quiet spot and dump it in the woods. Much easier than coping with the garbage collection, also much cheaper...

I went to a pub today here in Hamburg with some friends. The special thing
about this pub is you get a keg of beer at your table. So we had a ten liter
one with five people, accompanied by a lot of fat food. When after a couple of
hours I wanted to pay with my credit card, I had to follow the waitress to the
credit card terminal. This waitress was a good looking blonde, seeming to be a
nice person. Until I tried to pay...

I had to put in the card into a reader. So, there is about fifteen ways to put
it in, I asked the waitress, how to do it. She said "oh, like that", so I put
it like that. "Oh, well, actually, no, the other way", so she tried to get the
card out again. Which didn't work, because some little thing, some hook, was
holding the card back, as the reader was trying to access the little chip on
it. She started complaining that I broke everything sticking it in too far
(mention the innuendo...) I, not knowing anything about credit card readers,
tried to get the card out again by trying the Cancel button, than starting to
push various other buttons. She keeping on complaining, complainig to her
collegues, complaining to her boss, what an Idiot I am, putting it in too
deep, and so on and so on...

After about a few seconds I got the card out again. She grabbed it from me,
"Now I will do it, you drunken old bastard" (actually, she frased it slightly more
polite...). What an arrogant bitch. I got two liters of beer, so I am slightly
drunk for sure. But bitching about because she does not understand how her
stupid card reader works and declaring me a stupid drunk idiot annoys me. I
might sound like boasting about my superiour intelligence, but she was
amazingly dumb and arrogant...

What really wonders me is, this keeps happening a lot the last few years. A
lot of the girls I meet turn out to be arrogant and dumb. And the few of
them who didn't, think I am a really nice guy, but...

I need to get a secret blog. Some of the people I would like to write about are reading it ;-)

Had a couple of beers with some friends. Maybe I shouldn't do the devils advocate, but I just like to take positions in a discussions which not nessesary are my point of view... Sometimes, when I mostly agree with people in a discussion, I take some other point, just to keep the discussion going, I just like to discuss. This is good in discussion with jehova's witnesses, but it might be something not to do with friends.

We're all looking for a woman who can sit in a mini-skirt and talk philosophy, executing both with confidence and style.

(bottom line on slashdot.org ...)

It's saturday night in Erlangen. The place is called "The Fat Lady sings". The lady who sings isn't fat at all though, actually it is a really good looking blonde. The band plays Grateful Death and Crosby, Stills and Nash. The pub is crowded. A nice looking curly blonde sits at the bar, smiles at me, but keeps on talking to an ugly old guy. Sitting there, having a couple of beers with a good friend. Behind me a guy looking like John "Maddog" Hall, around us people who seem to be nice, you can talk to them, when you listen to their conversation you do not want to bang your head on the wall. It's a nice evening, you feel good being in that pub, you feel like home, the owner of the pub recognizes me, chats a few lines. It really is like being home.

A week ago. Some pub in Hamburg. It is brighter, looks a bit more silish. The waiter is nice, but has difficulties speaking my language. People sitting in the pub mind their own businesses, look like you do not want to talk to them. If you listen to their conversations, you wonder how stupid people can be. Just on the next table sits a gay flight attendant with his boyfriend. Amazing how people fit to the stereotype. He is talking about how he really does not like olives. Just if a bad novelist wrote the dialogue. Everybody is closed in, all of them look like they are trying really hard to be cool, to show off. It is like a fashion show, nobody is normal. Everybody has picked a role model and wants to be exactly like it. Like a convention of Barbie dolls, it just seems like plastic, not real...

I do not want to fit in there. I just like being me, not following a trend how to be cool. Hamburg people are really stressed to be like their role models, and they seem really frustrated because they do not really reach their ideal. Maybe they just should try to be normal...

Christmas seems more promising this year...

Ah! a selvajaria desta selvajaria! Merda
Pra toda a vida como a nossa, que não é nada disto!
Eu pràqui engenheiro, práctico à força, sensível a todo,
Pràqui parado, em relação a vós, mesmo quando ando;
Mesmo quando ajo, inerte; mesmo quando me imponho, débil;
Estático, quebrado, dissidente cobarde da vossa Glória,
Da vossa grande dinâmica estridente, quente e sangrenta!

Arre! por não poder agir de acordo com o meu delírio!
Arre! por andar sempre agarrado às saias da civilização!
Por andar com douceur des mœurs às costas, como um fardo de rendas!
Moços de esquina - todos nòs somos - do huminitarismo moderno!
Estupores de tísicos, de neurasténicos, de linfáticos,
Sem coragem para ser gent ecom violência e audácia,
Com a alma como uma galinha presa por uma perna!

excerpto de Álvaro de Campos - Ode marítima

Yesterday I sent a mail to our groups mailing list, stating that after 11 hours sitting in a loud environment and breathing dried air I reached my limit and will go home now (actually, the main message was something else...)

Today I got a response (CCed to the group list) from one of my bosses: when he was doing actual work, 11 hours was his average spent in the same hall, and he could be there much longer. Well. SOD OFF! I am feeling motivated, valued etc now.

Things that make me feel like a valued member of our collaboration: getting forgotten when everybody goes for lunch. Things (like specs) change, but nobody tells me. I have to set something up, but nobody tells me the important pitfall everybody but me knows. Yeeehaaa for my collegues.

Just watching a TV documentary ybout the cosmos (called cosmos or space or someting like that...) Somebody should shoot TV producers...

BE AFRAID! There is meteors hitting earth any time soon now, killing every bit of live on it. Billions of tons of stone will fall down just in your neighbourhood. Then there is supernovas, black holes, dangerous stars nearby. Every 30 million years earth passes a region of higher density of stars in the milky way, risking comets getting kicked direction earth. And: the average lifetime of a species is a couple of million years. We have been around a couple of million years, so we will ALL GONNA DIE SOON! RUN! FEAR! BE AFRAID OF THE DANGEROUS COSMOS...

But thank god, the american army is doing a lot of research how to prevent these terrorist meteors and communist comets hitting civilized world. And Kevin Costner (or whoever that stupid presenter was) warns us about it...

No wonder Science is not really fashionable, if it is presented this way.

Just had a meeting again. This meeting is supposed to be a working meeting, where all problems we had the last week and all stuff which has to be done this week is addressed. Tha last few meetings BigBoss kept on showing up, so now this meeting has become a Explain-BigBoss-your-Hardware-the-umpth-time meeting. I just love it...

I just passed by an advertisment for an exhibition called "100.000 years of sex". Not to be confused with the erotic and fetish fair, which happens to be at the same time in Hamburg. This exhibition is in a well known museum, so it is culture, it is art. No pornography. The difference is that the explicit pictures are no high quality photographs but antique pots. And they show the fornication of young boys which is now only allowed for artistic purposes...

The title made me think a bit. 100.000 years of sex. Just imagine the time before. Homo erectus sitting in his cave, being bored, all day just hunting and being cloned by aliens. One lucky day, some idea strikes him. That thing between his legs, erected all the day (that is why he is called homo erectus), maybe could be of some other use than to hang your fur on or fix the fishing line...

And there is that other being in the cave, which is same species, but somehow wrong... Connecting the dots, he figures out something. And now knowing things, he passes being homo erectus to being homo sapiens, the knowing human. Evolution finally got rid of those stupid aliens cloning humans even more stupid...

Wer also allgemeine Aufklärung verbreitet, verschafft zugleich eben dadurch allgemeine wechselseitige Sicherheit, und allgemeine Aufklärung und Sicherheit machen Fürsten und Staaten entbehrlich. Oder wozu braucht man sie sodann?

Adam Weishaupt

Just returned from Fresher's Weekend (or whatever you want to call it, going with some 20 first year students into a youth hostel and telling them about university...). It seems, there is only a limited amount of different types who study physics or mathematics. You have the sociophobic, wiseassy geek, there is the MacGuyver-Type and there is the Physics-Teacher (everybody had one of them in school, so no need to explain deeper). Mathematicians also fall into these categories, but sometimes they vary a bit more...

After the freshmen left, we went to a bath in Amberg. If there is something like really deep Provvinzz, I think Amberg is very close (although looking like a nice little town). I am still amazed about how dump people can be. And I really start hating german ways of doing things. Take the way germans behave in a Sauna: In the Sauna there is either absolute silence, nobody talks, if somebody has to say something, it is whispered. Or you have some dumbasses boasting around, shouting there stupidities around.

You have the people who run into the sauna, when water is thrown onto the stove, then run out after a few minutes, just to return a few minutes later. In, out, in, out, like they work on a strange Carnot Cycle, transporting heat out of the Sauna into the resting area. Then there is always some walrus, getting into the sauna, climbing with an amazing effort onto the topmost seats, sitting there, after a few seconds making sounds like a steam engine, after a few minutes like a steam engine close to explosion, staying there until close to a heart attack. Jumping out of the Sauna, maybe showering and coming back after a much too short time. For germans, Sauna seems like having to be stress, pain and hush. Annoying people, who can't relax, who cannot have fun.

Some time since the last post... There's been a lot of stress lately, it will keep on some time, so do not expect a lot of posts until February. Short Version of what happened since then:

My bosses in HH finally discovered that it is not a long time until February, when our detector has to be ready. So everybody starts panicking now and wants new timelines and other useless stuff. It is getting more and more like a Dilbert Cartoon....

I should be in HH right now, but this weekend I spend down south together with some friends, just because. I am fed up with HH...

Personal stuff: being stubborn is good for being a physicist. You keep on insisting that your stuff works until it really works. It is not good for getting a relationship. Some time ago, I figured out, that after fifteen years of constantly trying, it is not going to work with a girl I know since school times (Actually, what I really like about her is, she did not say I am a really nice guy blabla, she said: "forget it"; I like people being straightforward). I am now good friends with her, but I still keep on trying. It kind of turned into a hobby. She by now knows how to handle me, so it is fun to be with her...

There is another girl, I tried to chat her up nearly a year ago (this expression just sounds harsh, but I do not know of any english expression more subtle....), I got the usual answer, that I am a really nice guy (well, phrased differently, nore like "Well.... Aehm.... You know...." , but essence the same...). I still keep on trying, convinced that it is worth the pain. Well, seems I am a really strange guy. Sometime I should learn from experience...

Sometimes I think I got it all wrong...

America is going to vote tomorrow (or so). Arte is showing Wag the Dog, Pro7 Fahrenheit 9/11, all other stations have something about the election as well. And me? I am reading a book. About Cartography...

The people in the states can vote without me. They will get the president they deserve (that is why it is a democracy). And the world will go on anyway. Maybe one or too countries will be bombed out of existence if Bush wins, maybe one or too countries will be bombed out of existence if Kerry wins (also Democrats tried to do Damascectomies). Who knows...

I managed to get speech output working for my IRC program! Yoohooo!

Happy Halloween!

Strangely enough alot of reasons why I prefer Erlangen to Hamburg involve headaches the day after...

WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.

Hakim Bey - TAZ

Sounds Interesting: The works of Hakim Bey. He is an american anarchist, sees himself as the last pirate and invented the TAZ, the temporary autonomous zone.

i just like spam. "We sell you a completely worthless degree. MBA, MSc, PhD available. yours kindly, Adam Branch, MBA, MSc, PhD"

Anybody else sees the ridiculousness of this?

The European Constitution is going to be signed today. It then still has to be ratified by the member countries of the european union, but it is already a great step towards a more unified Europe.

The big ceremony is in Rome. Lot of people do speeches, they cite Victor Hugo and Erasmus of Rotterdam, they mention the great achievements of european politics in the last 50 years, they talk about future, war on terrorism, and a lot of other stuff. What they do not talk about is: the constitution is 400 pages thick, it weighs nearly 2kg. Who will read this? And even worse, you just cannot read it. I tried. I gave up on page 4. (And I managed to get to page 15 in Joyce's Finnegans Wake...) It is completely ununderstandable, I tried in german, english, french, portuguese. Not a word. It is all in Law-Speek.

A constitiuon is something so important, that it should be short and readable by everyone. And it should not regulate everything, it is a foundation for laws, not a substitution. But I am just a stupid phyisicist, so I may be wrong. I will just keep on being amused by the TV commentaries like "Oh, now he switched to a language we do not have a translator for..." (like Dutch and Portuguese...)

Mana Mana, didee dididee.

If you use Evolution to read your mail, do not switch on the remote spam tests. They take forever and do not really improve your spam filter results, if you have got a decent filter (like spamassassin with roules du jour...),

Something is seriously wrong. Bayern3 is playing really good music tonight...

Conservative Punk What a strange Idea. And thank god, they own the real TRUTH, they want punk music be freed from those left wing propagandists which prevent the youth of today from thinking and knowing the TRUTH. Yeah, VOTE BUSH because he is PUNK!

engrish.com not only has people with similar problems, it also offers solutions:

Women just can't say no to me. They always answer something like "Well, ehm, you know, ehm, can I call you in twenty years...?"

Stories of a science slave part 15: This saturday I got a call from somebody in our management (or whatever you want to call it). She does not understand some graphs a collegue made and therefore needs urgently his phonenumber. I offered to phone him, because I do not want to give away his number without his prior consent. This started a discussion, that if we wouldn't be so stupid (to make graphs she does not understand?), this all wouldn't be needed and bladiblabdibla. I said goodbye and hung up. I am still completely pissed about that. Not the phonecall itself. But that was the last bit to really annoy me (and a lot of people can tell you that it needs a hell of a lot to annoy me for more than 15 minutes...)

Enough about work, I will talk to my Prof tomorrow what to do...

I went out to buy a new car radio on saturday. My old one still worked, but it started skipping bits from CDs and it started falling apart. And it had too much nobs, which were to easily touched: if you wanted to turn the volume up or down, you could forget that on a slightly bad road... So went out to buy a new one. I wanted one with classic design: two big, heavy nobs which you can only turn with some force and maybe some buttons for station memory. It also should play CDs and have some way of connecting external sources as an iPod. OK. So far, so easy.

In the store, they had a display of different radios. All with price tags I could afford where complete crap: all of them had SuperHyperMega Organic Displays with a gazillion of colours, they had JKHGSD and EBBBC and FFFHGQT and UMMMPF and a lot of other fancy abbreviations. They had customisable screensavers! They had at least 5000 nobs and buttons, joysicks, movable frontplates (and I do not mean removable, I mean you turn it on and then the techno-ballet starts, bits and pieces are moved by motors, sliding in and out, turning around...) And they had an amazingly bad sound.

The ones I liked (with two nobs, one line-text only display in black and white...) started at 700 Euros. And you needed a Mercedes to put them in, everything below that would be just wrong. So I ended up buying a much too expensive Blaupunkt-Radio, which has only a black and white display, you can switch of the annoying flashy animations and it has two AUX-inputs. And it is a solid, robust Blaupunkt with a good tuner...

Another one passed away. Inês disappeared from the blogging world. I will miss your posts about Bogart, about films and about everything. Say hello to the Real Life for me and tell it, I will come around some day, maybe :-)