A fun weekend...

Pictures are online here

Detail

Been to an oldtimer "ralley" (the german is "Sternfahrt", no idea what the english word is...) Got the 4th place out of 12. Not bad for the first try :-) Pictures available soon...

JAWOLL!

Jawoll!! Rettet das deutsche Obst! Nieder mit dem Fallobst!

32 years ago...

Maybe we should try something like that again. At least give the people the same drugs our politicians seem to use...

(For those not following german politics: our minister of the interior is hallucinating about blond and arian people, oh, sorry, german people being also attacked by foreigners, it's not only those niggers in Potsdam, it's also the good people who get bashed. Our minister for building and construction works is going to fight neonazis and giving people work by building nice little houses instead of socially wrecked ghettoes, hurra, garden dwarfs against Neonazis. And some other minister remembers the countless killed Wehrmacht-People on a meeting of Holocaust-Survivors. So much for touch and connection to reality...)

My left ear seems to be gone... I have a cold and can't hear anything on the left side. This really sucks. On the other hand, when I was in Hamburg on Monday, traffic noises were less annoying than usual. And I think I would have even survived a meeting if I would have gone to one, the choices of meetings get multiple each days. Now it's not only the onsite meeting, the technical recoil meeting and all the other regular stuff, it seems that now a silicon noise meeting is emerging, which covers all the silicon discussions done in the onsite meeting and again at the technical recoil meeting. So stuff will be discussed in a small group with most expertise in this noise meeting, in a larger group with less expertise in the technical recoil meeting and in a huge group with no expertise in the onsite. Each time the same questions but in each iteration additional dumb questions. Actually I am happy to have left...

Consistency

Now that I've got a classic car I need to work on the classic look. So I went out to buy two stetsons today... There's nothing like the traditional old shops which despite big mega-multi-plex- super-shopping-centres survive in their small niche, in this case Hut Brömmer in Erlangen.

Fast Reality

Found on the frontpage of Sueddeutsche.de (now sometimes with annoying audio ad). The text says: DAX rose. The graphs definitely shows it...

Du bist Deutschland

Im vergangenen Herbst kam man sich in diesem ansonsten ja so gemütlich wie zuverlässig vor sich hin entropierenden Land so vor, als hätten sich über Nacht das nordkoreanische Propagandaministerium und ein paar amerikanische Spindoktoren zusammengetan und Deutschland in emotionale Geiselhaft genommen.

Monatelang konnte man weder den Briefkasten öffnen noch den Fernseher einschalten, ohne dass einem eingehämmert wurde, man sei Deutschland, Goethe und ein Baum in einer Person.

Gefunden auf Sueddeutsche.de

And in other news: Welcome Phil.

Style

Ah, those glorious days when girls' hats did not only looked stylish but also provided nourishment.

(Picture of Carmen Miranda, shamelessly ripped off a page I can't remember...)

Been there, done that

Is your life empty and unfulfilling? Looking for a way to tamp down those ever-present feelings of existential despair? You might try emptying out your toolbox, and spending the afternoon cleaning and rearranging the contents. If you can follow that up with a Sunday afternoon spent fiddling with the workings of an old car, followed by shoving around heavy things in a friend's garage, why you're getting darn close to nirvana, my friend. That's exactly how I spent my weekend, and lemme tell you, it was a profoundly satisfying, dare I say, even a spiritual experience.

found here via BoingBoing

Meetings

Seems to have been the right time to have left. Now the mandatory meetings take at least 10 hours per week for students in HH. On average on these meetings there are about 20 people, all payed according to BAT2a, which gives you roughly 15.000 Euros as a sheer working cost for these meetings. I might have miscalculated, but still the monitary cost is impressive but much lower than the emotional costs...

Local Blogs

Thanks to the feedmap thingy I found 20 blogs from Erlangen and surroundings. All of them are from dotnet-fetishists or knowledge-management-people. Seems my blog is the less geekiest of these 20... OMG, I need more techno-babble.

Back Home...

I'm back in Erlangen.

And found an interesting article on liberal communism. (via 3QD)

Just one more day...

These people here don't have a life. They have meetings instead; even if everybody goes out to get hopelessly drunk, it's called the offsite-meeting. They don't have the time to send around a mail (which would take something like 5 minutes and inform about 50 people when sent to one of our many mailing lists), they have a meeting with three people for about an hour, to which agglomerate some other five who don't have any idea what the meeting is about nor any clue about the things discussed, but are happy to utter their completely nonsensical statements nonetheless.

If you show stuff on a meeting about which you do not had the time to reflect or which you don't understand, you get shouted at for doing so. If you want to discuss it with the two other people who have any idea at all what the stuff is about, at least ten other people completely unrelated, uninformed and dumb show up and you get shouted at for having a secret meeting and not let all have a share of the enjoyment of a meeting. Not mentioning that now you can forget the result of the meeting.

And while I am ranting about: today I cleared my desk and tried to leave everything in a reasonable state. I talked to my would-like-to-be-boss about who takes care of my on-call-expert-phone, as I will leave within days. He started to whine that I can't leave, it's all against his wishes and he could call my boss and "do all kind of cheesy things". This is the second time he threatend me in a week, showing his complete inability to be in any kind of position where he has to deal with people... The only good five minutes today were when a colleague basically told him "You have no life at all, and that little you have is really miserable, ain't that funny...". Naughty bastard, hope he does that again :-)

Religious Concerts...

I am just coming home from a concert of the First Second And Third Reformed United Baptist Church of Hamburg Choir and Brass Band, listening to chorals and sprituals the honorable Reverend and Godfather of Soul would be proud of. For some reason only at the time of leaving the fun part comes to light and you meet the interesting guys and beautiful girls...

And, 1 hour and around 40 minutes too late, my part to the world day of poetry, Joachim Ringelnatz:


Abschiedsworte an Pellka

Jetzt schlägt deine schlimmste Stunde,
Du Ungleichrunde
Du Ausgekochte, du Zeitgeschälte,
Du Vielgequälte,
Du Gipfel meines Entzückens.
Jetzt kommt der Moment des Zerdrückens
Mit der Gabel! -- Sei stark!
Ich will auch Butter und Salz und Quark
Oder Kümmel, auch Leberwurst in dich stampfen
Mußt nicht gleich so ängstlich dampfen.
Ich möchte dich doch noch einmal erfreun.
Soll ich Schnittlauch über dich streun?

Oder ist die nach Hering zumut?
Du bist ein so rührend junges Blut. -
Deshalb schmeckst du besonders gut.
Wenn das auch egoistisch klingt,
So tröste dich damit, du wundervolle
Pellka, daß du eine Edelknolle
Warst, und daß dich ein Kenner verschlingt.


and another one:


Logik

Die Nacht war kalt und sternenklar,
Da trieb im Meer bei Norderney
Ein Suahelischnurrbarthaar. -
Die nächste Schiffsuhr wies auf drei.

Mir scheint da mancherlei nicht klar,
Man fragt doch, wenn man Logik hat,
Was sucht ein Suahelihaar
Denn nachts um drei am Kattegatt?

Only Monday and already completely pissed off

Today I mentioned again that this will be my last week in Hamburg (yes, I did say that already quite often, but this time I'm serious). Which made my local would-like-to-be-boss say something that I can't, as the detector is not yet in a stable state. Well, it never will be... And he said something in the line of if I leave I never will get my PhD. (Yes, he said that, not for the first time! I have until now ignored it. Next time I will answer to it...) I am pissed off. Luckily he has not anything to do with my PhD.

I am not really sure how to react. I would like to tell him to go and f*ck himself (and I am quite sure, that if he wants to fight, it's him going to loose).

I was supposed to stay in Hamburg till August 2004. I am still here, one and a half year after that date. I have worked quite often up to 80 hours a week. I have my desk in a smelly dark container. I work with people I can't stand. (Some of my collegues I actually like, but unfortunately that's only a few). I get phonecalls in the middle of the night by incompetent shift crews. I have been in a state of being utterly pissed off for the last two years, I had not much of a private life. What do these fucking idiots want more?

This is my last week here. I want to keep at least a little self respect. I should have left two years ago...

Questions

I just had a look at the proposed questionary people have to fill out if they want to get german citizenship. Besides being completely ridiculous, western-german centric, too hard for 90% of the germans, there was one question I found really hard to answer, and most probably I would fail on that question:

Name three reasons why you want to become a german citizen.

Weekend

Playtime
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Time to play...

Health

Although I am a non-smoker: there is an interesting article on Süddeutsche on the stupidness of outlawing smoking. Nice to read, it not only applies to smoking but to other things considered not healthy as well...

Snippet, badly translated by myself:

Einen Schritt weiter kommt man beim Nachdenken über die Formel der Gesundheit, die von der Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO), vage genug, aufgestellt worden ist. Da wird dekretiert, Gesundheit sei der „Zustand vollständigen körperlichen, geistigen und sozialen Wohlbefindens“. Diese Definition umfasst mehr als die Gesundheitsvorstellung jedes Hausarztes. Wie könnte er auch, neben dem körperlichen, das geistige und soziale Wohlbefinden bestimmen? Das tut jeder für sich selbst. Und in dieser allgemeinen Bestimmung steckt ein Restchen anarchischer (und das heißt, genau übersetzt, herrschaftsfreier) Selbstbestimmung ohne soziale Kontrolle. Über den Zustand seines geistigen und sozialen Wohlbefindens entscheidet – wie lange noch? – jeder Mensch selbst.



You will get a step further when you think about the formula describing heath which has been formulated vaguely enough by the world health organisation. It decretes health as being the "state of complete well being, physical, spritual[1] and social." This definition implies much more as the definition of health your doctor has. How could your doctor aside of your physical wellbeing say something about your spritual or social well being? That everybody has to do for himself. And in this general designation of health there is a little remain of an anarchist (and that literally means without authority) self definition without social control. On the state of his spritual and social wellbeing decides - who knows for how long - every person himself.


[1] geistig can mean spritual, mental, intellectual. Not really sure which too choose, as all apply...

Tags: Health | Smoking | Sueddeutsche

Herr Paulsen

Tuna marinated
Originally uploaded by I&eye.

Herr Paulsen hat nicht nur ein lustiges Blog sondern auch nette Fotos...