Thanksgiving Lab Turkey

What happened around the Thanksgiving turkey that Ioana and Brian invited us for.



As usual, click through for full picture glory.

Week before Thanksgiving

Impressions from the week before Thanksgiving when Matthias came to Baltimore for the project integration testing.



As usual, click through for the slideshow.

Crawling Around with Baltimore Street Rats

Baltimore and rats: They are smart enough (in a non-individual, Darwinian way) to ambush a garbage truck.

And of course there was this giant rat from China news.

Trouvaillen

Tonight, a sudden flash of useless linguistic insight hit me.

The terms "syndrome" (a group of symptoms that consistently occur together), "concurrency" (esp. programs running in parallel), "Mitläufer" (sb. acting without having formed an own opinion), and "also-rans" (a loser in a race) syntactically all have the same components in their own languages - however, obviously their actual semantic meaning is completely unrelated in each!

Fascinating how the same expression evokes different meanings and feelings in different languages.

Then again, "współbieżny" actually means the same as "concurrent". And for some unrelated ridiculousness, check "współdzielić". (And it's almost unbelievable all those terms in the table there not only mean, but actually evoke all their different semantics!)

Culturalities (Siemens and Pizza)

Yesterday, my little boss arranged a visit at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, where I had to give a talk. Luckily, the talk was about something that nobody really knew what it should be (meaning I could choose what to talk about). Sadly, I am still new in my field. Luckily, it went somewhat alright.



I learned that the NIH recently changed its scoring table for grant applications. Where they had a 1-to-5 scale before, in 2009 nothing less than a 1-to-9 scale is good enough. However, the first five categories are labeled "exceptional", "outstanding", "excellent", "very good", and "good". It could be a sign of an imbalance. Projects rated less than "outstanding" face a small chance of getting funded.

Today, I committed a cultural mistake. Ordering a chicken-and-green-pepper-pizza-with-soda-combo-number-three-for-here-thank-you, there was enough cash in my wallet (not BE "purse") to cover the check (not "bill") to cover it. Mistake part one was to pay cash in the first place. Mistake part two was to wait for six cents change. I realized this after the cashier closed the counter without returning my change, but it was too late to back out without embarrassment. So I tried to look around in a noncommittal way without moving an inch. Finally he got the hint, reopened the counter and handed over my six cents. Score for the German.

Half-life

It just occurred to me that by now I have spent more than half my life so far with programming (in the loosest sense of the word, probably more like "thinking in algorithms").

If all goes well, the next half will be spent with programming, too.

If this doesn't change the neural connections, then I don't know what could.

(... I still remember very clearly how arrays confused me back in highschool times... using DIM in QBasic in MS-DOS 5.0 - how could many values be stored under the same name? I chose to ignore pointers back then.

It was awesome that some fellow highschool students were actually able to use TurboPascal's "GUI" units.

Later came the magic of callback functions (with pointers!) in C, when programming the Schroeder 2 in XForms (which still look as fugly as they did back a decade(!) ago) kept us awake.

OOP in Java (brand-new back then, a year or two later; I actually ordered a CD-ROM with something like an "IBM WebSphere Java Developer Kit" through mail) was a relief.

Also, I remember vividly how at the turn of the millenium I learned C++ from what is probably the least appropriate tool - Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language.

All of this happened before the Internet happened in the way I use it for programming today, which means all of this was harder (which means one actually looked up the parameters for printf() in a book).

Still, I grew up in the era after GOTO.)

Autumn ("Fall")

Autumn (also known as "fall" here) in Mt. Washington and Baltimore County.



As usual, click through for the images. (Tekkno, view them in fullscreen. You'll like what you'll see.)

Zeig Mir Den Weg Nach Unten

Wie kommt es, dass Knorkator so lange unbemerkt auf meiner Festplatte vor sich hingegraben hat?



dann kommt Licht /
und ein Känguruh /
und ich weiss ich bin /
zu weit

...unbezahlbar :-)