Não esta a mim de votar, mas...

Burn!

Yes. Just burn those witches. And their family. And their village. They all are sinners and must go to hell. BURN! BURN!

(For those not reading portuguese: the link is about a bishop stating that not only the women considering abortion should be penalised, also their husbands and doctors.) Middle ages are still alive in Europe.

A disgrace to all craftsmen

Today I wanted to get the battery in my watch changed. It is a swatch, so nothing fancy. It eats standard batteries. So I went to a, well, not a clockmaker, not even a shop who sells watches, more like a shop who tries to sell watches but failing.

The sales drone there was the most incompetent sales drone I ever met. He stared at the swatch as he had never seen one before and then said they don't have that type of battery (which might be true) and he didn't want to change the battery because he didn't know how to do it. Well, changing the battery of a swatch is an artform which only the best craftsmen ever manage. You take a 10cent coin, put it in the slit of the battery compartment and then turn the battery holder about 10 degrees counterclockwise. Then it falls out, you change the battery, put it back and turn the thing in the other direction. That's hard to do. I know. But sometimes people master this craft...

Worse yet, in the house that shop is in Emmy Noether was born, one of the greates mathematicians. What a step down.

Then I went to another watch-shop, a very good looking and nice girl changed the battery in about a minute, chatted a bit with me, set the watch correct and was generally nice. Much better...

Invasion of the Brain eaters

Sometimes modern world just pisses me off. I tried to contact ebay that their e-mail server apperantly has a clock going wrong. All mails I get from them are in no way in a correct time-zone or time. (Well, maybe ebay has their servers sitting in a time bubble which is 5 hours into the future, but I think they only have this at google.)

I got an answer by one of the customer satisfaction bots, made of pre-fabricated sentences. It seems they have a very small pile of these sentences, as they were exactly the same as in a mail I got from them on a different problem. Instead of: "well, we have looked at the mail header, you are right/wrong", they sent me some customer satisfaction brabble, at least addressing me five times by name to get that personal touch. Is it only me or does nobody see that this is not taking me serious? Why do they have sales bots? Just put the emacs psychatrist there, that would at least be some 20 minutes of fun for everybody...

In the fear of not being friendly and unsatisfactory to their clients, they hide behind their shield of pre-fabricated sales-blubber. I very much prefer the way they treat me at local workshops. They grunt at you, they are not really friendly, but they take you serious and take care of your problems. They won't bullshit you with these false friendliness of shareholdervalueoriented companies.

Ah, and ebay wanted me to fill out a survey on how to improve their customer service. Luckily it's all multiple choice questions, where neither the question nor the answers fit to anything I would tell them. And when I tried to fill in the free-form text area, it just stopped working. Yehaa.

25.000 Views

Stylish in Barcelona
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Not on this photo. This photo had only something like 30. But my flickr-stream hit the 25.000 views mark yesterday :-)

Sometimes...

you just should go home. I tried to help cleaning up after this years winter party, being quite intoxicated (still being intoxicated while posting this, so sorry for the spelling).

While I tried to lower one of the speakers from its stand, I moved a cable, which resulted in a lamp tipping over, falling down, hitting the bar, catapulting one of the candles on the bar into the air, which spilled liquid wax all over a friend of mine. While this might look like a comedy, all his outer clothing was full of wax and most probably can only be used in hard weather conditions as a wax jacket again, he also got some of the wax in his face which is as far from funny as you can get. Thank got he did not have any major injuries (at least none were discoverd up to now)... Hope he is alright...

So: Lesson for today: when drunk - leave.

Scientific Progress goes Boink

Well, another week nearly over. Nothing done for science, done a little for the car, done something for the party tomorrow, done some politics (well, sitting in a meeting), done nothing in special...

Just another week.

Todessturm tobt über Deutschland

Fest wie unsere Eichen halten alle Zeit wir stand,
wenn Stürme brausen übers Deutsche Vaterland.
Wir sind die Niedersachsen, sturmfest und erdverwachsen.

Wer es auch noch hören will: mp3s gibts hier, nehmt die Variante von Herbie G.

State of mind

It seems that I am entering the writing up phase of my thesis. My flat gets cleaner everyday, without me remembering of cleaning it up on purpose. The same already happened during my diploma thesis. You just start cleaning, to not need to write...

Engine Block

Engine Block
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Successful week: I managed to seperate the engine head off the motor block of my DKW, cleaned out all the rust and dirt. It looks like it needs a bit of honing and some cleaning, but else it looks usable again.

I also managed to make two plots for my thesis and to copy a couple of pages into my thesis taken from an old report.

Cap d' Any

Sagrada Familia
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Back from Barcelona. And not very motivated to go to work again...

Sharpness

Sharpness
Originally uploaded by perreira.

I am close to turning vegetarian as it is so much fun to cut vegetables with this...

Incompetnce

I had to to an exercise sheet for the first year students. As most of the exercises I found in books were either shite or wrong (or both), I tried to do some of my own. I dug out the paper of Henry Cavendish, were he determined the density of the earth with his famous torsion balance. I calculated everything with his measurements. It took about two days until I had understood what he did and ended up at a Gravitational Constant which made sense.

I made an exercise out of it. I had to simplify it a bit, because the students did not yet know the torsion pendulum. While simplifying it, I introduced a couple of errors, which went unnoticed but made the complete calculation bollocks.

I had another exercise on an hammer bouncing off the floor where I mixed up elastic and in-elastic bounces.

When doing the example solution to the problems, the one which all other tutors would read and use to correct the exercises, I made about every possible error and mis-calculated about every quantity at least twice. So it took me about 8 or 9 iterations (all sent around to all tutors) to have a solution sheet, which was nearly right (I didn't find the errors myself, btw.). I think I should quit doing my PhD, hand back my diploma and do a ritual suicide. That would be the correct outcome of this. As I have met people who are even more incompetent and got away with it, I will wait a bit, maybe I can get away with it too...

The Helsinki Complaints Choir.

They are right!

Being a mediocre physicist sucks. You're nerdy enough that girls won't talk to you but still not nerdy enough to not bother...

Gone Beta

So, I am Beta now as well. Which means I can do colourful texts. Yehaa. Web 2.0. Much more enterprisy!

Pickert per Inhabitants

The highest density of Pickerts per inhabitants is found in the Ohrekreis. The lowest in Dresden. Interesting statistics you can get on the intarweb...

Question

Can I kill cyclists who go around in dark clothes without any lights in the dark just so or does it need to look like an accident?

Typography

Lisbon seen by Typographers

In related news: I have been doing a web-page on Typography, LaTeX, Presentations and related stuff. If you miss something which should go on this page, please drop me a mail.

Blogging

Finally, after only about a year, I managed to put some updates to Cogumelos Aporcalhados