Optics

I have been to an optician, because I get headaches after a couple of hours working in front of a computer. Saturday I went to one of those big chain opticians, it turned out that they don't measure your eyes on a saturday. I had to wait some 10 minutes to get attended (although being nearly the only customer there) and then they didn't seem to be very competent. They did arrange the frame of my old glasses though.

Today I went to a local optician, only in Erlangen, and this since a long time. The shop was full of customers but I was attended as soon as I entered it. The senior boss took the measurements, then four people helped my chosing the frame. I was impressed by the friendliness and competence...

And finally the arranged my old frame again, seeing that it wasn't done properly, and suddenly the world got three dimensional again and the headaches got better... So far for the big chains.

In a week I will have my new glasses and hopefully see much better (and look better ;-) )

Thank god it's friday

It's weekend! This week I actually did something for my thesis, I did some physics stuff...

It seems that I need a new bed or at least a new cushion, I didn't sleep very well the last weeks, waking up everything hurts and I am as stiff as a ironing board. My feet are bad again, so no sports, maybe some cycling on sunday, depending how drunk I get tomorrow and how bad my feet are on sunday.

Anyway, nothing changed, everything is as good or bad as usual.

Avast!

Maybe a good alternative: now there is a german PIRATE party. HARRR! And hope you all enjoyed the international talke like a pirate day, ye landlubbing beauties and jimlads.

Wer ko' der ko'

I just did race a highly pimped Mercedes convertible, tuned by AMG or something, blasting RAP music out of it's speakers, roaring exhaust and everything. I won. The driver got seriously pissed when I overtook him three times at a traffic light. On my bike :-) Wer ko' der ko'

Motivation

Everytime I manage to get a faint bit of motivation, just so slight that I would actually start doing something useful, I get a call, a mail or an IM which makes it go away instantly. Today I was asked if the rumors that I will be in HH for the next three weeks are true. I have not heard about it. I hate it when I am being managed and nobody even bothers to tell me...

Somebody should tell some people that it is all nice if they make plans for others. But they shouldn't be surprised if they hear a fuck off as an answer if they don't ask, don't tell...

Workflow

This is the bash script I use to convert my photos from RAW. It works most of the time well, only a few pictures need hand-treatment...

#!/bin/bash
set -e
ext=.CRW

for i in *$ext; do
# Get basename of file for easier treatment
bn=`basename $i $ext` ;
#
# Convert from RAW
#

# The following line converts directly to jpg without any treatment
# dcraw -a -c $i | ppmtojpeg > ${bn}.jpg;

# This should do some basic image treatment:
# dcraw -a -4 $i ;
# convert -normalize -gamma 1.8 ${bn}.ppm ${bn}_dcraw4_normalized.jpg ;
# rm $bn.ppm;

# Including an ICC profile, this gives the best results for my screen
dcraw -4 -c -w -m $bn.CRW | pnmnorm -bpercent 0 -wpercent 0.1 -brightmax | pnmtotiff -truecolor >temp.tif;
tifficc -w -i /PATH/TO/eos10d-linear-8apr2004.icc temp.tif ${bn}.tif;
convert $bn.tif ${bn}.jpg ;
rm $bn.tif ;
rm temp.tif;
#
# Copy and set EXIF stuff
#
exiftool -TagsFromFile $i $bn.jpg;
exiftool -Author="My Name" -OwnerName="My Name" -UserComment="(c) My Name" $bn.jpg;
rm $bn.jpg_original;
#
# rotate according to EXIF (only needed if dcraw only is used)
#
# exiftran -i -a ${bn}_dcraw_only.jpg;
done


Home Again

So, I returned safely from 4 weeks of dives, hiking attempts, helping the revolution and tanning on the beach of luxury hotels (without actually staying at them, but at better places instead...). Now I face the threat of converting about 1000 Photos from RAW to something readable, of selecting a couple of them for the web, some more of them to show to friends and to actually get some friends to see them... (I might use bribery for the last task, some food and wine always helps to get people interested in slide shows ;-))

[Starting Computer and Photo babble now, non-geeks please skip the following]
To convert the RAW files to JPGs, I am experimenting with various methods, all involving dcraw. I am still a bit undecided which gives the best results, but the third method looks nice on my screen most of the time, although sometimes a bit on the blue side... I have put some sample images below, all taken at Lusco Fusco in Erlangen at 2nd of Septembre.

Method 1
dcraw -a -c foo.CRW | ppmtojpeg > foo.jpg

Method 2
Inspired by this webpage:
dcraw -a -4 foo.CRW ;
convert -normalize -gamma 1.8 foo.ppm foo.jpg ;


Method 3
Using an ICC color profile for an EOS 10D camera, which uses a similar sensor as my EOS 300D and as found here:
dcraw -4 -c -w -m foo.CRW | pnmnorm -bpercent 0 -wpercent 0.1 -brightmax | pnmtotiff -truecolor >temp.tif;
tifficc -w -i eos10d-linear-8apr2004.icc temp.tif foo.tif;
convert foo.tif foo.jpg ;

Examples
dcraw only.
dcraw to 16bit pnm, normalizing, converting to JPG
dcraw to 16bit tif, applying ICC profile and converting to JPG

dcraw only
dcraw and normalize
dcraw and ICC profile

dcraw only
dcraw and normalize
dcraw and ICC profile

It never rains in southern california

It might not rain in southern california, but it always rains a lot when I go the the Peneda-Geres National Park... Which on one hand was bad, because I could not go hinking, on the other hand th ehiking path I wanted to do the first day would have led me directly into a forest fire, so although I did get wet to the bones, at least I did not get burned.

I went for a car trip instead, which was really nice, although I will never go again to a megalithic site close to the road again. Close is relative and might be long enought to get you really wet in the rain and if you have seen one megalithic thing, you have seen all. It's just at the name suggests some big stones...

Shown on the picture above are espigueiros, little stables to dry corn in them despite the usual quite wet weather there.

Changes

Some things never change, some do. I still get handshakes from the waiters at the cafe I spent half o my stay in portugal. On the other hand, having a coffee and a cognac there now costs a fortune compared to the good ol' days. But for compensating it was full of nice girls (unfortunately half of them french). One of them looked like the twin sister of a girl I know from Erlangen...

Tomorrow I will go up north, to the Serra do Geres, trying to find a camping site in the part which is not burning. If you don't hear anything from me in the next five weeks, I got a stroke while trying to do some walkabouts in open sun with something like 32°C...

El umbelico del Mondo

Today I drove from Lisbon to Coimbra via Almourol (a very interesting castle of the Knights of the Temple), Abrantes (a village in Ribatejo which looks like any other village), Vila de Rei and Lousã. I stopped at the geodesical centre of Portugal, which you can see above. The big pilar is the first geodesic mark, marking the first starting point of mapping portugal. It was discovered heroically in 18something. Thank god it was on a hill, else the triangulation would have been tiresome....

The little pilar in front is the geodesic mark TF4, which marks todays starting point of triangulation. At this place next to Vila de Rei there is the most wimpy museum I ever visited (it's for free, else I would be annoyed...). The only things on exhibition are a theodolite, a leveler and a computer with a GPS from Leica. Together with 4 posters on Geodesy, this is the whole museum... If it wouldn't be for the cafeteria, this would loose any reason for existence.

I'm Leaving on a Jet plane

Plane
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Don't know when I will be back again...

Actually I do, 4th of september. But I'll be gone nonetheless for the next four weeks. I won't respond to mails, if not considered important (important in this case means either from good looking girls or telling that the detector has blown up (in the second case the answer will be "Yooohoooo"...))

I may post some stuff here and put photos on flickr... But I am on holiday, so I will keep my contact to the internet to a minimum.

Photo stuff

Schloss
Originally uploaded by perreira.

I just bought a new lense: the Sigma 10-20 DC EX. Finally a decent wide angle... Although it looks like it is not very sharp at the edges, but this might also be an effect of wrong focussing...

And I started to geotag my pictures on flickr, so you can see where I have been when I took them. (You might want to check out flyr or Yuan.cc to look for geotagged photos and the flickr geotagging group for what's this all about)

A Fun day out

Cockpit
Originally uploaded by perreira.

You never cease to be a six year old. Today I flew a plane (actually I did a left and a right turn in a motor glider, but I did do it all my own...), I drove a fire brigade van (Ford Taunus from 1964) and I drove a Mercedes from 1963. The dreams of a six year old come true...

Fuck the establishment

I just gave up watching a discussion on TV between the heads of some of the bavarian universities, which are now organised in Universität Bayern e.V. (Warning: extremely ugly homepage). On the board also is his Magnifizenz, the rektor of my universtity. What a huge amount of bullshit they talked. Some stuff made sense, but most was just buzzwords (in english, which is a traditional indicator: if somebody talking german uses english words instead of available german words, it's generally because he is talking bullshit).

So, it's all about synergy, we have checks and balances, extensive and intensive research universities... These guys didn't even get it that they were talking nonsense.

This is why I want to leave university as soon as possible. The universities are now in the hands of the establishment. Nobody is creative anymore, it's all preserving the status quo, no innovation, nobody has the guts to think a bit aside of the mainstream. There is no Avantgarde. (Unfortunately the Avantgarde is dead, you won't find it in university, but also not outside university...) Even the students turned into the establishment. All of them just want to finish their studies fast and then become succesful consultants and managers. None of them is any creative...

We are now in a process of restructuring the faculties. Instead of lots of small faculties we want five big ones. All the people planning this are only trying to keep the already existing structures, but get more power to their own positions. We will have a faculty, beneath that departments, then institutes then chairs, then groups and subgroups. It's very vertical, if you want to put it into buisiness speek. None of the people involved shows any balls to do something radical. Why have so much organisation? We don't need a vertical structure that big... University should be fast, creative, research and teaching oriented. It just turns into a playground for would-be politicians...

I siwtched the channel after 30mins and am now watching the Montreux Jazz Festival... At least some creative people on TV.

Happy Little Trees

The Picasso of Puffy Clouds (via Positive Ape Index)

It's all a big hoax

The hole intarweb thing is a complete hoax. It just does not work, but you won't notice, because we have flashy animations and it's THE INTARWEB and it's hip.

I tried to book a plane ticket via one of the big portals. Searching for flights I found a nice connection, it said e-ticket available, mark it and proceed. Enter a lot of info, click around a lot, sorry, your flight is not available anymore, try a new search. Did that. Repeat ad infinitum. After trying four times I just gave up...

So I went to a travel agency, had a nice chat with the guy there and 15 minutes later I got a ticket for exactly the same flight, but this time 50 Euros cheaper than if I would have bought it via intarweb.

Unrelated I got a mail, saying basically, payment details enclosed (subject line: "VB: Attached Image"). It had a PDF attached with an account number and all the international bank crap you need to send money around in europe (a scanned letter (of course printed out by computer first), so it's a big huge image (340kB!!!!!). Normally I would have thought, well, spam, delete it. The PDF made me worried. So I answered the mail, and, yes, it was payment details for a parking ticket I got nearly half a year back in sweden, where I send a complaint letter, that even if I would like to pay, I just can't, because there is nothing on the ticket stating how. (The story: I parked on something I thought being the vistors parking lot of a students residence. It actually was, but you needed a small paper sticking in your car, which you could get somewhere. The people I vistited in the residence did not know that, nobody told them and the sign was written in swedish, which I don't speak and which was also not understood by the people I vistited, although they speak sewdish quite well... So I got a ticket for 40 Euros, without any information how to pay it if you don't live in sweden.)

So, this mail had two dumbnesses canceling each other out: first make a huge attachment for a line of text, which you could have just put into the mail body and second write a mail which looks 120% like spam.

Maybe I just get disconnected and rely on usable technology like pen and paper, talking to people in person or maybe postal service. All the intarweb just does not work and only frustrates me...

Thank god...

... I am not responsible for the christian education of my godson. Thank god he is educated only by civilised people... (although he has a lot of contact to physicists, which makes the statement civilised somewhat vague)

The place to go

The place to go
Originally uploaded by perreira.

If you find out what's interesting about this place, please leave a note on the flickr page... (Micha, Markus, Phil: you are not allowed to guess in this competition ;-) )

Spam Spam lovely Spam

This has some surrealistic poetic note... (found in a v1agra spam)

Jan Zoscha wer beaufsichtigen William Aluminiumverbundfolie das, an Aluminiumverbundfolie Dickschnabelnonne duften wer Daumenlutschen William zum Fernstudium das gefangen fritten Aluminiumverbundfolie gut Daumenlutschen. wer, alles fritten befriedigt nicht wann auf entgleiste William wo bedingt entlassend rein Büroservice er/sie ist/war geschlichen aufgeklappt was Anwendungstechniker.
Charles Vetter ihm Er traut sich was William er/sie ist/war geschlichen wer, rein Blumenkohl Ami was raus die William wann Agrarwissenschaft er Frühsport die Erzielen alles erleben. wer, er eins Aufdrängen wer ich Anisotropie William wo Einspruch erheben gegen gleich Aufzug auf dem letzten Loch pfeifen Co.Compagnie wer geschnuppert.

At least they pretend to be sorry

I used to get terrorised by calls from SKL, a public lottery. About twice a week they tried to sell me stuff, although I already complained that I don't want to be called, although phone advertisment is illegal in germany and although I had put my name and number in their not-to-call-list. I complained again and today I got the following reply:

wie in unserem o.g. Email angekündigt, haben wir bei der Staatlichen Lotterieeinnahme Gregor eine Stellungnahme zu Ihren Ausführungen angefordert. Diese hat daraufhin bei den angegliederten CallCenter eine Stellungnahme aufgefordert. Daraus geht folgender Sachverhalt hervor:

Sie wurden vom CallCenter GCS Leipzig angerufen. Dabei unterlief dem CallCenter-Agenten ein Zahlendreher, so dass er statt der Nummernendung 662 die Ziffern 226 wählte. Das Gespräch dauerte ca. 40 Sek. und endete mit dem Hinweis, dass der gesuchte Teilnehmer verstorben sei.

Sowohl das CallCenter GCS als auch die Staatliche Lotterieeinnahme Gregor bedauern diesen Irrtum sehr und möchten sich sich auf diesem Weg bei Ihnen entschuldigen.

Wir hoffen, wir konnten Ihr Anliegen zu Ihrer Zufriedenheit klären und stehen Ihnen selbstverständlich auch weiterhin gerne zur Verfügung.


OK, so a stupid call center guy mistyped my number while dialing. I imagine the poor chaps in Leipzig, sitting at old bakelite phones with dialing-wheels, or even a plug-board... I also don't really recall to being dead or talking about dead people while I had them on the line, they also did adress me by my name (and I don't think there is somebody in Erlangen with my last name, having a 662 instead of 226 at the end of his number).

Either I accept that they think I am stupid, or I just complain uselessly. I think I'll do the latter...