Ups, Downs, and Something Else

Life does have its up sides sometimes.



Down sides, too.



Sometimes it just looks dumb.



Das letzte hier wiederum glaubt zuhause sicher wieder kein Schwein.

Casual Friday

What an eventful but casual Friday.

Started with the most beautiful (read: sunny) morning this year, I had breakfast right across from the sight you see below, we had the longest table soccer deathmatch ever (read: so far), got told by even two girls that my eyes are "beautiful, soo blue" (although because of mere business), and managed to reserve a table for us guys at the world-famous (in BT) Mondial for Sunday, Chinese New Year.

Oh sure, and our boss is out of office now.

And sun is shining.

And birds tweeptweep.

Top 10 (2nd runner-ups, ever)

Of course, selecting a set of "Top 10" pictures wasn't easy.
While cutting down from 240 to 80 was still easy, the last 10 (or the last few 10s) were more based on the story to go with it during presentation. Therefore, there is this second set of "almost-Top 10" pictures which got sidetracked only in the very last iteration.

However, my dear blog readers, you won't be left out of the loop, and what was ours during the initial presentation at Techno's, is yours to behold now.



My then-gf, Hi-Khan, and me in Hamburg, Germany. Younger, too.


The first summer in Bayreuth, there was an antique car exhibition in the pedestrian zone.


My dad and me, and several passersby, competely absorbed by everything else, in Bamberg, Germany.


Me.


A model of mine, in a sketch I like very much.


A morning impression, looking out over the moat around the Forbidden City, aka Palace Museum, in Beijing, China.


A group of officers parading in Beijing, China.


Dad and son, alone on a lake near Whistler, Canada.


Two other people, alone on Emerald Lake, Canada.


A huge fish, probably completely unaware of being watched, in the Biodôme, Montreal, Canada.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Complexity, Analysis, and Ability

I spent the weekend in my parents' place back in I/O. For many years, they had a big old Sony TV which in its own day used to be a hot thing, but over time degraded in quality and ended up as a squeaky old box full of electronics beyond its best-before date. Recently, it got replaced by a new hot thing, a badass big flatscreen. So much for context.

Deplorably lacking a decent DVI or VGA socket, it still features a plethora of other input options, almost all of which immediately got hooked up with their counterpart output connectors from VCR, DVD, cable, and a satellite receiver, which in turn ended up connected to a hifi system as well.

Apart from bogging down the available cupboard space with remotes, this whole installation also captivated our attention due to some nasty analogue-style image disturbances and a humming background sound. Of course, PJS immediately and without any second thoughts by the S-family got recruited as chief bug-hunter in command. It turned out to be a whole-Saturday activity of attaching, detaching, and swapping of coax, SCART, and cinch cables, receivers, and input sockets, and ended with the nailing down of a very stupid issue, a crappily manufactured BNC connector.

The interesting thing, however, was a comment by CS. I'm still not completely sure about its truthfulness, but still it stunned me. What she did was to praise my ability to systematically go after the bug, instead of faltering in the face of overwhelming apparative complexity and aimlessly poking around in search of some elusive problem.

Could it be we (Computing Scientists) really learned something useful? Are we more able to analyse a complex component-based system even without prior experience? Now, that's what constitutes this weekend's central question.

Top 10 (ever)

Recently, we've held a "Top 10 Pictures" presentation over at Techno's, with a bunch of colleagues showing off a selection of their best (ever) photographies.
Since "best" is a non-operational qualifier (or at least is difficult to operationalize), everybody applied his own criterion for selection. Here's what made it past my own personal filter.

Enjoy.



A panda in the Schönbrunn zoo in Vienna, still sleepy but happily chewing away at a bunch of bamboo just an arm length away, seen through only a glass pane.


Sunset view of Vancouver Bay, behind the Anthropological museum.


A child feeding a flurry flock of birds in Hamburg near the Binnenalster. This was a carefree time before avian flu.


Another kid, half a world away, dreamily gazing from the top of the Great Wall at Huairong.


Time and haste on a Hongkong pedestrian overpass.


Time and haste again, looking down at the crowd from the second deck of a Hongkong bus.


An old man dutifully guarding an entrance to a mosque side room in Kairouan, Tunisia, sitting in the shade.


The Niagara Falls with a Maid of the Mist barge in the center.


My family, having crêpes at the Christmas market in Karlsruhe, Germany.


Stefan and me, without braking the summer toboggan near Waischenfeld, Germany.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

TALES OF DISGUST

Today's TALE OF DISGUST is centered on the feeling...
how the heck do colleagues believe the general outside world will ever accept them as normal human beings when they keep using
OFFICE SCISSORS TO CLIP THEIR FINGERNAILS???