I hate programming languages which do not give an error when you do $foo = $bar when $bar does not exists, but is called $baz...

You can do lots of cool things in PHP, but most of the time you shouldn't.

Night Shift again

On night shift again. Five more days to go, it's boring...

YES, I do believe!

I, also, was touched by His Noodly Appendage.

Finding my place in the world...

Originally I started my browser to post something melancholic about the lack of visions and the search for Ideas. Then I got distracted by Google Maps... (Thanks Markus...)

So. Here I work when in Hamburg. This is my flat in Hamburg. The blueish white blurry spots in the upper right is where I work in Erlangen.
The place Pedro lives (and a lot of my friends as well).
A place which does not exaclty look like San Francisco. One of the sites Lord Byron declared to be the most romantic place on earth.
Little green dots where I want to spend my holiday on.

And I now stop, else I spend the whole night looking at satellite images...

Ich möchte Weintrinker sein...

Ich möchte Weintrinker sein,
Mit Kumpanen abends vor der Sonne sitzen
Und von Dingen Reden, die wir gleich verstehn,
Harmlos und ganz einfach meinen Tag ausschwitzen
Und nach Mädchen gucken, die vorübergehn.

Ich möchte Weintrinker sein,
Und nicht immer diese hellen Schnäpse saufen,
Nicht von Dingen reden, die nur mich angehn,
Mir nicht für zwei Gläser Bier Verständnis kaufen,
Nicht mit jenen streiten, die am Tresen stehn.

Ich möchte Weintrinker sein,
Bei 'nem herben roten oder leichten weißen
Um 'ne Runde spielen, nach der keiner fragt,
Ein paar Witze über den Verlierer reißen,
Der ganz einfach nur darüber lacht.

Ich möchte Weintrinker sein,
Nicht um ein paar Zehntel Skat mit Hirschbock spielen,
Wo man gierig Geld in seine Taschen wischt,
Nicht dem Nachbarn heimlich in die Karten schielen,
Ihn nicht schlagen, wenn er sich zwei Asse mischt.

Ich möchte Weintrinker sein,
Mit Kumpanen lachend ein paar Lieder singen,
Die sich um Trinken, Mädchen und um Liebe drehn,
Nebenbei ein bisschen reden von den Dingen,
Die am Tag in einer kleinen Stadt geschehn.

Ich möchte Weintrinker sein,
Nicht ab Mitternacht Frau Wirtins Verse grölen,
Kein Soldatenlied und nicht den Tag des Herrn,
Nicht vom Mittelabschnitt irgendwas erzählen
und auch nichts von Hungerpest in Hongkong hörn.

Ich möchte Weintrinker sein,
Auf dem Nachhauseweg wie Kinder darauf achten,
Dass man beim Bürgersteig nicht auf die Ritzen tritt,
Und im Bett dran denken, wie die Mädchen lachten
Und im Schlaf noch lachen über meinen Schritt.
Ich möchte Weintrinker sein.


Franz-Josef Degenhardt

Hiking in the Alps

Been hiking in the Alps this weekend. Today finally my legs are not hurting anymore...

Template problems in IE

Try using a browser instead.

New Template...

Changed the template for the blog, couldn't see the old one anymore. It was a bit too dark anyway. Feel free to comment, especially if you find any bugs or can't read something...

Smashing windows

I just love windows...

I tried to work a bit again on the department's website, checking how it looks in internet explorer. Everything is validated, it looks nice on Linux, it looks nice on a Mac. In windows, it looks crap. Placings are wrong, transparency in the pictures etc does not work and so on and so on. Trying to look at some other website my computer claims that my Network Card has restricted connectivity (badly translated to "Konnektivität") and cannot access the internet. It did show the MSN page though. So, after installing a "Small home and company network", changing the default "Show all my data to everybody" to "Piss off", rebooting, etc, I was able to look at other websites. Just to figure out that the one I was looking for to copy some stuff uses some non-standard-dirty-tricks which make all validation go boink. Internet explorer just ignores any standards and forces you to do shitty pages. Unfortunately it's 95% Market share.

Went home then. Tried to boot windows at my home PC. The TFT complained signal out of range, and went dark. After some meddling around I could boot into the failsafe mode. Where you cannot change the screen settings. Nice. So I looked at the graphics-card-manufacturers website. There it said: if your TFT does not display anything go to System->Settings and click... Makes you wonder if somebody actually read that stuff after they wrote it.

Then I tried to delete the driver. Which worked. For a couple of seconds. Then the "New Hardware found" thing popped up and gone was my monitor. Fucking automatisms... Messed around with the registry, tried reinstalling the video driver while in failsafe mode, nothing. Gave up.

AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!

Paper is some amazing material...

If you want to do it yourself, get the layout here. It took about 4 hours of cutting and about half an hour of folding the thing up.

Maybe I am not the right person to complain about it, as I am also quite convinced about my opinions, wrong as they may be. But some of my collegues annoy me by being right, no matter what's the subject and how off they are (or by completely missing my point)...

At least I do not answer the question "Why should it?" with "Because I say it does!". Usually I try to make up an explanation or at least try to confuse people with weird stories...

Doing my tax declaration is as fun as last year. I have some stocks, so I got from my bank lots of paperwork, including also 5 pages of "Fill in this value in this field in the tax-form". I have to copy that stuff into my tax declaration. Why don't they just send it directly (preferrably electronically) to the Tax office? You don't have more privacy the way they do it now, as the tax office can check with the bank (without noticing anybody, without needing a permission from anybody) about all your data the bank has (even shoe size...). The data for taxes already subtractad from my salary are also sent electronically to the tax office by my employer. I still have to fill all that stuff into that stupid form.

I do my tax declaration electronically, using software provided by the tax office. The data are sent electronically to the tax office. Then I have to print the stuff out and mail it to the tax office. Digital signature still years away.

The Tax program also provides helpful tips: for the field labeled Summe der für 2004 festzusetzenden (anteiligen) Gewerbesteuer-Messbeträge i.S.d. §35 EStG der Betriebe lt. Zeilen 3 bis 8 u. 26 (ohne Gewerbesteuer-Messbeträge, die auf nach §5a ermittelte Gewinne oder Gewinne i.S.d. §18 Abs 4 UmwStG entfallen) - Berechnung auf einem Gesonderten Blatt - (Don't ask for a translation, I have not yet found out what that means, and I always thought I can speak german...), OK, so for that field it provides the help: "Fill in if you can apply for stuff from §35 EStG!" Thanks. Helped immensely.

Lower Deck Hawaiian Lounge!

Humanity keeps on being interesting. There is people closing in to their 30-ies being as naïve as a 14 year old, there is people in their early twenties being as old as close to their 40-ies. And sometimes the latter behave like the further and vice versa. But, in general, it's amazing how simple they are...

Most of my wrong understanding of people seems to be overestimating them...

A wonderful Photo-Essay about farmers in Kazakhstan on whose lands the debris of Russian rockets is falling down...

In other news: my blog is getting close to 5000 visits. Thanks to all :-) Send me a screenshot of the counter if you are number 5000 and win a free guest post (or a beer, whatever you prefer).

As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
Keep you doped wit religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero just follow me
If you want to be a hero well just follow me


Working Class Hero --- John Lennon

Nasty little buggers...

l'éléphant barrit

l'éléphant barrit
Originally uploaded by eleric.

I think I want to live in france...

This is one of the classical situations where you can only loose...

You're walking home from the bar, having had some beer, so you are already walking more relaxed than you should. At the far end of the street you see the siluette of a really hot girl, walking towards you. She get's closer, a really hot blonde, wow, is she hot. You start to realize it feels a bit windy down there. Damn, the zipper is open. You are confused. What do I do, do I close it, showing her that it was open? Do I hope she does not realize it and just walk past her? Whoaaaa. HELP! OK, just pretend everything is fine, hope that she does not see that you are wearing the most ugly shorts beneath, smile, do not be emberassed, behave normal. Damned. She has a big grin on her face. She saw it. Even after you tried to pull your shirt over it. Sinking into the ground. AAARGHHHHH. YOU LOOSE.

The dangers of blogging...

Ouch. (found on surfmania)

Yesterday was the meeting of our bosses with the project reviewers. Seems that the reviewers were stating that it is a really interesting project, in a good state and making progress fast. For sure they confused something or were at a different meeting.

In other news: Congrats Scousers!

I would like to say: I do not know what I did wrong the last eight years... But unfortunately I kow. Tonight I danced away with a hot hungarian engineer and with a hot sports student, tomorrow I hopefully will meet a hot biologist. Something is different this Bergkirchweih. Maybe I'm turning human...

Found on the Website of O Publico

It's mine. Hands, lots of hands, are trying to get the first Stein of beer distributed at the opening of the Bergkirchweih in Erlangen (Germany). Inhabitants and tourists celebrate the 250th anniversary of tihs traditional festival.

(Very loose translation by me...)

[Edit] Sorry for the spelling errors...

I just like bars where they play songs like Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin
(More info about the album here, more about the bar on Cogumelos Aporcalhados).

Dear people who are not yet born,

if you read this post somewhere in the google archive after google has taken over the world organisation, or if you read this in a handritten note somebody made just shortly before the internet broke down: please ask your friendly neighbourhood mad scientist to borrow you his/her time machine and set the coordinates to here...

Very Bad Idea (TM)...

Famnous last words: "Du kommst doch noch mit ins HaWo, oder?" "Hmmmmm. Warum nicht".

Brazil is also an option...

Congrats, Pool. As a wise man keeps saying: the horizon is red.

What a crap day. I am seriously considering going into a monastery for the next couple of months...

Not only I fucked up the data taking, the students lab experiment I had to tutor died today, I have a huge pile of work which never will get done,...

So, maybe becoming a monk is an option.

Just discovered that by making a little mistake in a script I fucked up a week of datataking. Seems I am really good in working in a chaotic environment... I should not show up the next couple of weeks up in HH, as I will for sure be killed by some people, multiple times.

Just talked to one of our coordinators (we have a big bunch of them, actually we have more coordinators than people who actually do work...). So, the last two weeks we recabled the whole detector, changing the paths where the cables are running. We shorted some of the cables, glued front plates to some of our electronic boards, took data, analised the data, discussed how to procedd, tried to figure out how to beat the noise down, programmed a bit (This might not sound like a lot of work, but it keeps you busy for some time...). That only being the stuff relevant to the detector. I also had stuff to do for general university business, like attending faculty board, writing the minutes for that, meetings with various people, tutoring, etc.

Comment from our coordinator: "So nothing was done the last two weeks." Well, not really. We just hung around and did nothing...

There are people who work more, and yes, I could have done a bit more, as there was still a significant amount of time I spent for hanging around with friends and doing stuff I did not really need to do. But you might get my point...

Foto: Ding Xiaochun/AP/Xinhua, via Publico

There are some problems if you get old...

I just chatted quite a long time with a really nice girl, she's something like nineteen or twenty. As I am getting quite old now, I also start being hard of hearing. So I turned always my ear towards her. Which looked a bit like I was staring at her breasts (they were something to stare at though...). Not quite the best impression to make...

[Edit] Well, maybe it's not because of old age. Maybe it has something to do with aclohol. Which is a shaky theory, because I only had too much beer and cocktails, not much too much beer and cocktails. And some of the beer would not really qualify as beer. I also remember most of the evening...

Time Management for Anarchists: The Movie. If you want to do a revolution, organise yourself. Organisam-se! Organisam-se!

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams

found on publico

Back in Erlangen after a bit more than a week of fun in the pit in Hamburg. Being in at the experiment makes me definitively more aggressive, wise-assy, annoyed and dump. Hope to recover soon, I'll be here in Erlangen for a whole month.

Today was faculty board. I not only was volunteered for writing the notes, I also volunteered voluntarily (all on my own) for making a redesigning proposal of the departments website. I always thought of it as not usable, ugly and generally bad. Then I saw this.

Physicists invented the web. And as usual the got interested by someting else and left the first attempts of making websites untouched. It seems that all physics departments in Germany have webpages which suck.

Now take a look at this.... No comments on why we are considered mediocre.

Either I need to get new friends or I need to get new stories. I think I have told all my friends the same stories at least fifteen times (including the all time favourites "Back then, when I was in portugal" and "How I was kept at the Romanian Border")...

Yesterday 70 years ago Emmy Noether died. And nobody knows it. Too busy with the Einstein-Year. Sad...

Just another reason to live in Italy. Although I would not have thought of italians to win by that...

The last couple of weeks in Hamburg haven't been too bad. I did work a lot, but I also started to get along much better with my fellow collegues and sometimes got convinced, that they know what they are doing. Having returned to Erlangen and just getting digest of what they do via mail, I am back thinking that they have absolutely no clue about what they are doing.

Either I got used to that back in HH, they did not behave that stupid when I have been around, or I also got stupid while being there. I think the latter. Working in a big research center makes you dumb, you do not think really about what you are doing, everything is only taken so far, that it just nearly works, nobody really understands his stuff. Mediocrity is the goal...

LA SEÑORA ORIANA.
A DULCINEA DEL TOBOSO.

Soneto

¡Oh, quien tuviera, hermosa Dulcinea,
Por más comodidad y más reposo,
A Miraflores puesto en el Toboso,
Y trocara su Londres con tu aldea!

¡Oh, quien de tus deseos y librea
Alma y cuerpo adornara, y del famoso
Caballero, que hiciste venturoso,
Mirara alguna desigual pelea!

¡Oh, quién tan castamente se escapara
Del señor Amadis, como tú hiciste
Del comedido hidalgo Don Quijote!

Que así envidiada fuera, y no envidiara,
Y fuera alegre el tiempo que fue triste,
Y gozara los gustos sin escote.


-- Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha

Sometimes I have the feeling, some of my friends take me much too serious. Sorry, I'm as an idiot as anybody else.

Sure you can sing and whistle communist anthems about abolishing private property. But first you have to pay the copyright fee...

Been back in Erlangen since about a week. Something is missing, the thrill is gone. I started cycling again, I started riding, I've met a lot of good friends, I've met new people, life is much better than in Hamburg. But something is missing for it to be as much fun as in the good old days. When I meet new people, most of them are students and I feel like the nice and funny old granddad, but not like one of them (not mentioning the odds of meeting a potential girlfriend). When I meet some of my friends they turn out to be old as well or less interesting than I remembered.

The city is full of ignorant idiotic kids, the university is full of them as well. Erlangen has now a lot of arrogant elitist clubs, lots of self-focussed suits running around. But on the other hand, all the good pubs still exist, you still meet the same nice people there and it is nice there. There are still some islands, some retreats of the people and things I like.

Maybe it is time to move on, to leave all that behind, to just stay with the memories and not mix it with the time now. Finish my PhD and go somewhere. I start to like Kryptikmo's idea to go and shake hands with a gorilla...

Smoothly slides open to reveal the cunningly hidden camera.
Unique red glow display screen exudes mystery and excitement.
Complete your look with the stylish protective carrying bags and straps.
Stand out like a flame in the darkness with the unique rotator (no number keys, only select, send, end, and 2 soft keys).

Did you guess? It's a phone.

THE WORLD IS GOING TO END. At least if you believe the IFO Index. There is a nice view from over the ocean on the IFO index on slate.

There is an interesting article on slate if peer review works. Read it here...

They found it. It took them at least 4 hours to find that and correct it (a collegue of mine found it around 15:00, I checked around 19:00 it was still the wrong version...). And still this graphic is crap. You do not get any more information from the graphic than you would have got from the table. You have always to go back and forth between table and graphic to figure out which coulor is which party. Can you tell if the light green section is bigger than the pink one? If yes, by how much? You cannot think about the data from the graph alone, you need a table beside it. If you have a table, you don't need the graph, as it does not enlighten you in any way. It is just a blob of colour on the page. And if you need a blob of coulor, than just put up an ad, at least you get money for it.

A table would have presented the same information in an as easy way, you can easily tell that 49.6% is something like a bit less than half of the whole (which, by the way, you cannot tell from the graph). OK, this argument is a bit flawed, as it took Spiegel more than 4 hours to find the error...

Chartjunk.

Found this on Spiegel Online. So 49.6% is more than half. Nice Plot. Go and shoot yourself.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." (Abraham Lincoln, 1809-65)

Grad school is the snooze button on the clock-radio of life. --- John Rogers

Being a scientist means living on the borderline between your competence and your incompetence. If you always feel competent, you aren't doing your job. --- Carlos Bustamante (Molecular Biologist, UC-Berkeley)

Hey, I'm getting famous, somebody from nokia has visited my blog. Lucky me that I have not posted anything bad about my mobile :-) (Which happens to crash everytime I use bluetooth and which has basically no Linux support. But it still is the best mobile around...)

Funny to see the old posts and how some things have changed. Or have they?

Although it looked like it's never going to happen and although my bosses are still not really aware of it, I am back in Erlangen... Let's see how long I can stay without the detector blowing up or the project getting at a standstill because nobody is around who has a clue (right now I have a competent substitute, but he will be in Hamburg for only a few days. The next possible substitute is not yet aware of having the responsibility about the whole detector. I have warned him that everything will be on him and he should shout NO as soon as possible, but he thought that was a joke...)

Bloody blogger ate my post! So try again...

I just love intellectual TV. Just watching Arte, showing something about a couple of tree-hugging goths making porn movies to safe the rainforest. Who work together with a couple of plastic-fetishist pine-apple-provo-pogo activists. As a statement against conservatism.

I went for diner with a good friend of mine, a nice girl, who leads a completely boring normal life. She works in a hospital, her boyfriend in a bank, they go together on package-holidays, they are just normal. (Don't get me wrong, I really like her a lot, I think she is intelligent, good looking, all that. There was a time I would have liked to share a larger part of my life with her...) What a contrast...

To be honest: I think the eco-goths and the plastic-fetishists are nuts. I wouldn't be able to be in the same room with them for more than a couple of minutes without feeling the urge to kick somebody...

They're showing the airport movies again on TV! Oh, what great movies they made back then. And using innovative cutting techniques as well!

Why don't they make an airport movie now? Back then, the first was made when the Boeing 707 was new, then for each new aircraft there was a new movie showing the safety of them, until Airport 80 - The Concorde. They should make an Airport 2005 - The A380 now.

Cast: the usual airport cast, if no longer alive, take somebody else. But lot's of stewardesses in miniskirts, please.
Story: doesn't matter, as long as it involves a whole load of pregnant, deaf-mute, 9-year old girls with heart diseases, who have to visit their old sick parents in soviet russia. And stewardesses in miniskirts. And you need Lee Majors abseiling from a Jet-Helicopter. You need the old guy with the cigar ranting about his time back then in the airforce, when people got sucked out of airplane windows every five minutes. Everything needs to happen during a snow storm. Did I already mention stewardesses in miniskirts? Some of them might have random affairs with other members of the flight crew. As long as they have miniskirts...

The transparency feature of the newer x-windows is just amazing...

Just installed three nifty applications I think I will love a lot: F-Spot, an image organiser which helped me already discover that I have something like 8000 photographies on my computer; Tomboy, a note keeping program with wiki like functionality and finally, beagle, which seems to be a really powerful search tool...

The rest: I have spent the week programing hardware with commands like vme_A24D32_write(crate, address, buffer); more than 1500 lines of it. It is as fun as it sounds...

HELP! I am trapped in a Dilbert Cartoon...

OK, so we have a online library. That is nice. We have actually two of them, one is the online-online library, one is the offline-online library. There is a third one from the CERNLIBS. We not only use the same name for the library but also the library calls are the same, just that they do completely different things. These libs are spread around the system, nobody knows which is where. And we are using automount, so that you only see half of the directories. And all software is written by madmen. I think I just go and shoot myself.

img_3999
Originally uploaded by perreira.

I put some more photos on flickr, enjoy :-)

Today I installed Ubuntu Linux on my mother's laptop and on my brother's PC. This distribution really rocks! It is based on debian, but contrary to debian it does not suck... It comes with kernel 2.6.10, Gnome 2.10, Openoffice 1.2 and lots of other nifty software. What makes it really good is, there is no choice. Linuxes traditionally are proud of their choice. With XYZ Linux you can choose between 5 gazillion editors! So what. I need exactly one. And I need one I can use. I do not want editors where there is absolutely no sign what to do, you have to read don't know how many pages of the manual to find out, that to just leave the editor you have to type ESC : w q ENTER. I don't bother if it's KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker or whatever, I just want something I can use without reading the manual...

Ubuntu helps with that. During installation it asked only a few easy questions, like which language I want, which Timezone I live in, whicht partition to use. 25 Minutes later I had a system which just worked (TM). Graphical interface, simple easy desktop, Office Suite, Mail, Browser, everything I need. If I want more, there is an easy to use package manager, I could even install CERN-lib (which is physics-analysis-software for hardcore particle physicists) by just two mouse clicks (one to select the package, on on Apply). It has all the nifty features of Gnome 2.10, like automounting of CDs and USB Sticks etc. (now I do not have to issue cryptic commands, I just insert the CD and can read it). It detected the soundcard and just worked. It started the graphical user interface without painful configurations (even on Windows I had to manually install a driver I had to download from the internet on a very hidden place and it really sucked...) The wireless card of my mother's laptop, which was a real pain in Debian and Windows, just worked. The Nvidia Graphics card of my brothers PC, just worked. Installing the printer, two mouse clicks...

And I don't even have to bother for a root account. You never set the password for it, you cannot access the root account... Everything is done via sudo. The accounts you create can be "Administrators" and end up as sudoers. Which I like, because it's simple and understandable.

It just works, that's what software should be. Even my brother thought it was simple to install, and he is allergic to anything non-windows. Linux for humans. If you want to give it a go there is a Live CD you can test it without installing it on your hard disk.

It's 1111111111. unix time, I am busy taking data and making chef-plots for todays meeting (7 hours until my talk...). For Windows and Mac Users (Mac OS 9 and older), that's 1:58:31 UTC (2:58:31 MET).

It's 1111111111. unix time, I am busy taking data and making chef-plots for todays meeting (7 hours until my talk...). For Windows and Mac Users (Mac OS 9 and older), that's 1:58:31 UTC (2:58:31 MET).

Hurray for my bosses. I came to Hamburg in April last year, with the statement, that I will leave in August. I am still in Hamburg. I told my bosses here, that I will leave end of this month for about half a year. Today I got a phonecall from our spokesperson, if I can change these plans to stay more time, as I am the last one having any clue about the project, new people not being available... Well, I won't. End of discussion. The manpower problem is not my problem, I do not care anymore. If nobody is around, then I cannot do anything. This problem has been known since a long time, I have advised for half a year that I am no longer available after March, so if nothing is done, not my buisiness... (Do I need to mention that I am pissed off by that?)

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.