MacOS X vs me

I just got a brand new Mac Mini, so finally I am going to use MacOS X a bit, at least for multimedia purposes. I kind of like this thing with its remote. However, I was never a fan of quicktime and probably will never be (screws up my DivX videos).

And hey, I am a computer scientist, it took me just an hour to freeze the OS. It was really easy, I mounted a NFS share, umounted it, rebooted. The NFS server was gone, but OS X still tried to connect freezing the whole system (bah, that sucks man!).

Christmas torture

I am not sure how this is in other countries, but there's a very strange (yet unofficial) German tradition to torture people with the very same christmas songs on radio every year.

And this morning it happened to me again, the first time I heard Wham!'s "Last Christmas" on radio and it is rather sure that they will play it again at least any other day.

While this is a pretty good motivation for me to leave bed and switch off the radio, it feels like torture and lets my day start with an very unpleasant event (I indeed dislike - or even hate - this song).

To show an alternative, I want to recommend Aimee Mann's new christmas album "One more drifter in the snow". If you really need some christmas songs to get into the mood.

Conquering capitals

In my personal challenge to see as many capitals as possible, I added another one to my list just yesterday.

Luxembourg is the European capital of culture 2007 and I went to the opening festival this Saturday which turned out to be a lot of fun - some really gorgeous fireworks and very nice live music.

Just do it

No, I am not taking about a famous sports brand.
I am making the case for just doing it instead of racking your brain. OK, I am also not saying you should switch off your brain entirely. But I tend to believe today that when you feel it's now or never, just go for it.

If it fails, fine. (Maybe you gained experience at least). If you succeed, great! Anyway, it is worth trying. So just do it.

How to say Happy Birthday

I was looking for the Russian version of Happy Birthday for a very dear friend and found a website that lists translations of Happy Birthday in a whole lot of languages.
There's another page that tries to give you the pronounciation (if you are German)

Dead Mouse

Ever seen a handicapped computer mouse? Looks like I have one now, works totally fine, but the left mouse button sometimes stops to work. :(
As I am not a hardcore-gamer, this never happened to me before. I think I need to shop for a replacement...

Real big desktop

I finally managed to get the VGA Out of my notebook to work the way I want it. This means, a big desktop spanning my widescreen LCD and the LCD screen of the laptop. Never worked because both have different resolutions.
But today, I managed to install the latest ATi drivers for Linux and somehow managed to succeed! :D

Must be my lucky day today!

Lemmings! on the net

Remember back in the old times, Lemmings! surely was mone of my favorite games. So if you do not feel to fire up an DOS emulator to get back this great game, how about trying out on the web:
Lemmings! just looking like the original, but plays in your browser. Awesome!

DRM arms race

Some time now we see a arms race between DRM software and DRM "remover". Of course, also Apple is in it with iTunes, but hey, getting again around their DRM was very fast.

I like this kind of software, you still have to buy the songs (which is fine with me, prices at least at iTunes seem to be OK), but after that you can get rid of the DRM stuff - and (for me) play it on your MP3 player or even more important in Linux.

In my opinion just downloading songs from illegal sites is bad, but this kind of software just offers you again fair use for both sides.

Plans

It's time to make plans.
My first year as a phd student is over soon, the work is hard but mostly fun and I like what I do. Time to think about how the past year was and what should be in the coming one.

I am also thinking about travel plans. A good friend of mine is currently in Zürich, I really should visit her this year.
And fresh out there, the plan to make a road trip on the US' east coast around New Year together with a really good friend. This would be so fun, highest priority, we will do this, I am sure!

Rainy football

It seems since I am back in Germany, I have to pay back all the nice sunshine days in San Diego. There was hardly a no-rain day for the last couple of weeks.

I am back on the football field, finally. After pausing for more than a year, I have now two opportunities at once to have some fun with sports. However, this is a little ugly at the moment given the weather...

Potcast

Finally, also this happened: I listened to my first podcast (sorry, a German one). I am still not sure why a combination of rss feed and mp3 has such a bloated, fancy sounding name, but anyway.
At least it was easy to use, thanks to Amarok.

Amazon All-in-one

While in Germany amazon.de is at 10 product categories, amazon.com (the US branch) has 34 product categories at this point of time. The latest is its Grocery Department. There seems to be little left they are not selling yet.

Ocean

It's a shame, I am now a month here in San Diego and still I have not found the time yet to swim in the Pacific Ocean. What a shame.

It's Europe!

Well, the football world cup just turned into an European-only tournament. Europe rules!

The land of free behind bars

So finally the US found out that Guantanamo is mostly illegal. Congratulations for this insight! Next time, just ask me and I tell you right away.

Turn the sun on

Weather was pretty chilly here over the past weeks. Luckily, this will change for me really soon, as I have the pleasure to spend two months in San Diego at UCSD for research collaboration until August. Nice desktop switching, isn't it?!

Finally: Spam

It took them 6 long months to finally discover my work email address, but since a few days, I finally see spam in my inbox - though, at most one spam mail a day. Suckers...

Finally spring

Looks like spring is entering the country finally. Good time to get rid of this stupid bus and use my bike again - starting from today!

machine talking

This one saved my day:
There was a message waiting for me at my answering machine and guess what, it was another computer doing a marketing survey. Thus, the survey computer was asking my answering questions and was quite upset not getting a response.

Man, I need to programme a intelligent answering machine that will appropriately answer to such calls. You can choose a mode, maybe the answering machine yelling at the (unwanted marketing) caller or giving random answers.

Black and white

Reducing everything to yes and no, right and wrong, and black and white is not a good strategy when thinking about a person - especially not if it is a woman...

Step by step

A friend visiting yesterday recognized that I managed to sort in my stuff more and more :)
As some friends will come over tonight, I took the chance and pinned another picture to the wall. I get closer in turning the chaos into my room™.

Song for you

It's done! Spending most of my evenings this week, I finished composing my first song yesterday night! It's an awesome feeling and I hope the person I wrote it for will like it.

Maestoso

Looks like another good week (while really different from last one). The soundtrack for this week in my head is written in a Maestoso style at the moment (if you know what I mean).

It can be done and I will do it!

Winter is back

Surpisingly, this week turned out to be just great (almost out of the blue). Progress in almost every area.
And especially today, winter came back. We had almost a snow storm this morning and everything is covered by snow. I hope it stays like this.

Jetlag

Want to know how to get a severe jetlag without travelling? Just ask me...

Smarter than I would think

Normal, daily crisis: You analyze some data and dig out some old script that should do the job (maybe with some minor adjustments). But a problem while capturing the data let the script produce bogus output, you never believe. Instead of seeing the obvious thing (= the trace was messed up), you think about the script and discover some mayor shortcomming which renders all results from the script wrong.

Then you start to think about how to fix the problem and here is the crisis: You have no idea! But after looking over the script again you will realize: Hey, the is no problem with the script, it cannot produce wrong results because the person who wrote it (yourself!) was just smart enough not to make the mistakes you were thinking about.

Sometimes you are smarten than you would expect.