Nerd Tip of the Day

Mensa TV

A TV team interviewing students in the university's canteen.

two ways to generate polarised light

Name at least two ways of generating polarized light: Laser, Solarium

Deep Shit

I live on a small hill, and aparently on the wrong side of it. So we have a sewage pump in a septic tank below the street to move the soiled water upwards. The pump is connected to a control cabinet with a flashlight on top that is supposed to light up if there are any problems. And it flashes a lot. Figure 1 depicts three gentlemen contemplating the problem of the pump seen near the hole in the ground. That's the septic tank, by the way. Also visible: The door of the control cabinet.

9.63 km/h

3.84km in 23:55. Those are 9.63 km/h! Eat this, Martin! W00t!

Printing Graphics

I wasted some time getting graphics output work reliably on the HP 82240 I wrote about last november. So far the printouts are just beautiful.

Should one? *lol*

Computer Junk

Cleaning out a old server room where people have accumulated various kinds of (mostly broken, but always completely outdated) computer junk.

Nice things in Hamburg

There have been nice moments in Hamburg, too.

End of Run

It's only few minutes to go, then my last shift for the collaboration will be over. I have done these chores for few years now and sitting here never was pleasant. It's a mind numbingly boring work and often I was quite angry about how stupid things were done. But on the other hand, the environment at a big facility like ours here is actually quite fascinating. I always admired the mixture between a industrial plant and a hobbyists lab, combining professionally built high-power machinery with duct-tape and a web of uninsulated cables dangling from racks with measurement electronics. If you walk around, late in the evening, you can see huge halls with impressive construction with single scientists working on their own duct-tape-held experiment, immersed in their research. And sometimes I contemplate that this deeply focused work is what I could have done, and might even have enjoyed had I decided to move here some time ago, and not only do shifts few times a year. But now I realized that I might have built what I critizied when on shift: A faulty device, built under time-pressure by a layman, that no one but him could ever operate. It's probably for the best that it will be shut down in few months, so that everyone can built a new gadget, at a new facility somewhere else.