Natural Born Presenters

Natural Born Presenters.


Dynamic, by mistake.


Oooom me.


Some guy.


Every day, after conference, we try to get home. However, the U.S. American public transport system is ridiculously lousy. Crappy. Ridiculous.

IROS 2007, San Diego - Downtown

This place is totally crazy for Halloween these days.



However, it is tilted towards religion as well. In fact, my impression is this country is trying hard to fill some void, fill some lack of ideals by putting religion in its place. To have at least something to cling to, since there is nothing else - no common history, no cultural heritage, no social ideal.



Church service and church look different here.



So do cars.



Architecture, especially functional one, is interesting at times. Most times, it is just plain functional, however. This whole country seems to be a collection of cardboard houses and concrete containers, with a few glass towers sprinkled in for good measure.





You couldn't complain about sunset, however.



Since there is no other bond between people here, it seems the armed forces are a unifying force - which means there are many displays of military power around.



Sunrise is not bad either, especially when you're jetlagged enough to actually witness it.





Hotel.



Eh... oom.



One of the most stunning things so far is the ubiquitous, absolutely thick and gorgeous lawn. It's not lawn in the sense of grass, but more in the sense of carpet. Everywhere, even next to major streets. Obviously it really is some kind of carpeting. Look at the incredibly straight border.



San Diego Metropolitan Trolley Service.



Travelling party.

IROS 2007, San Diego

After an totally, exhilaratingly, excessively long day - no sleep, driving to Frankfurt, flight to San Diego via Philadelphia, with only intermittent ambushes at sleep, PJS finally arrived in San Diego, CA/USA, in the company of both Jan and Techno, for this year's IROS conference.


Jan and Techno. The crème of UBT's robotics researchers.


Our plane, and... uh... tons of cargo.


Terminal.


Philadelphia Airport.


Stunning, every time.


Days Inn Sea World, in a jetlagged night.

Iceberg

Today was an extremely bad day. The incident below was just the visible, physical tip of the iceberg.



And two of my car sharers. But they're not to be blamed.

Mind-boggling Synergy

The other day, I found a mind-bogglingly cool tool. Synergy/QuickSynergy shares control of multiple computers with just one keyboard and mouse via TCP/IP. No matter Unix, Windows, or Mac OS X... one mouse to rule them all. Now one sweep with one mouse can cross screens from my Linux desktop over to my MacBook and then on to a second screen attached to it.

Extremely cool when that sweep transfers control between Linux, Mac OS X, a Windows running in a virtual machine on the MacBook, and another Windows Terminal Server remote session, seamlessly attaching the wireless keyboard to each one in turn, and synchronizing the copy&paste buffers along the way.

CURAC 2007, Karlsruhe (II)

An old-fashioned S-Bahn.


The German surgical robotics créme seems to be dwindling.


Laptop und Lederhos'n.


The Karlsruhe Pyramid at the Marktplatz. There's free WiFi waiting to be stolen, too.


Wat es en diskotek in Swedisk?
Drønetøne. Jo jo... drønetøne.

More Despair

When looking only at pictures like these, one might actually get the impression it's going down the drain. Or at least went circling it.

However, today I was told by this very guy that our computed normals are great. So it can't be that bad.

Despair maybe depends on how you look at it.

CURAC 2007, Karlsruhe

The current conference trip led me to Karlsruhe. Since my sis is studying there, I am making my university very un-poor by not spending buckloads of money on hotel living. Samely, I didn't go there by Smørebrød, saving the university buckloads on that again. However, there are no bonuses (I looked it up, that's really the correct plural in English) for awesome employees like me.


Prof. Wörn giving the opening keynote talk.


The créme of (mostly Germany's) surgical navigation and robotics research community.


Despair.


Industrial funding.


Urban landscapes.


A funky chick, a so-called Winterbrüter. Pretty stupid idea, IMHO.

Foes, Friends, Woes, Bends

What man needs enemies when he has colleagues (doing things) like this?



[...]

My Dad called something like two minutes after I uploaded the picture above. Therefore I feel obliged to post one showing a more realistic view of the size of the, eh, scar. In fact, it's barely visible:



And indeed, nothing is so bad it cannot get any worse: