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Migrated...

I migrated this blog to new blogger, that's why the link to my friends' blogs are missing. Will be repaired soon.

Hello, Hello, this is Berlin

(you have to crank up the gain to the maximum to hear anything, but it works...)

Snow.

Since last thursday, train station from where I live is less than perfect, at least I can admire the romantic landscape while waiting.

More mindless vandalism

Improvements made to our ticket-machine on the train station. It's amazing how many idiots there are in the upper palatinate.

Result of preposterous vandalism

Destroyed glass-wall of a refuge at my local bus stop.

Ghost train.

Studivz

If you want to register at the Student's Registry (which was sold for €85M to Holtzbrinck recently!) you are presented with this registration form. Up to now I assumed, that someone who graduated from university should be able to distinguish between surname (Nachname) and given name (Vorname) without further help?

integrated circuits and envelopes

We ordered samples from Analog Devices before christmas, today they arrived. We are happy about that, of course, but they arrived with a little exaggerated packaging. The two chips (one SO-8, the other a little bit smaller) came each in a piece of PVC tube (the SO-8) or SMD-reel, packed each in a antistatic bag and put in a seperate padded envelope, about A4-size.

Back in Hamburg

After a lovely breakfast I started doing shift in the bunker.

New love

I really love vmware. Expect more posting next week when I'll be on shift.

Long-term CDR storage

For testing a external USB DVD-burner I needed "something" to test it with. That brought me to 2 packs of CDR-blanks that have been laying around here for ages, I think they have been bought when my trusty old Yamaha CRW4416 x4-Burner I'm using until now was new. That makes them about 5 years old? Well... those CDR blanks were still in their original packaging, with the plastic foil intact. But they looked quite interesting, with a dull finishing and something that reminds me of frosted glass-windows.

Playing with old junk, episode 756412

I found a nice a old HP 82240 thermal printer in the cellar once. You can use it to print stuff from those pretty HP reverse-polish calculators like the HP48. Unfortunately they only speak the proprietary red-eye protocol over infrared so I had to resort to a little bit of hackery using a Atmel Tiny2313 and a IR-diode... And now, it prints! :-) Hooray.

New Toy

The scope is set to 0.2us/DIV x 10 on the horizontal axis. Power consumption is after about 10 minutes of warmup.

Ortsveränderliche Elektrische Betriebsmittel

Here are our tax-euros hard at work. I just had a visit from a guy of the german TÜV here checking the portable electrical equipment. Note the portable. So he put a sticker on every lamp or electrical socket, but NOT on the extension cord that is made non-portable by fastening it with cable-ties to my desk. And he did not even find the old shoddy and most-likely non-TÜV-safe halfway broken extension cord hidden under the other Desk!

Pessimism

tanning salon

State Diagram

I think, I got it...

Entering numbers

We are ordering lot of things (clothes, books, kids' toys) online. Which leaves me with the task of paying the bills found in the parcels. That's not too bad because I can do it onine. The only thing that annoys the hell out of me is transcribing all those numbers (account, bank, customer, invoice) from the paper copy into my web browser.

I don't have anything against typing numbers in general, but why don't they group them e.g. by 4? With hyphens in between? Most likely because the wise programmers of the severly fucked up web-frontend to my bank decided that anything but numbers in most fields is a bad thing. Therefore don't even allow such a readability-increasing method in their various number-eating input-boxes. Oh, and please somebody explain to me why a invoice number has to be 15 digits? Especially when paying a bill from a relatively small german publisher who - for sure - has less than 10¹⁵ customers whom to bill. Suddenly typing in microsofts 8x4 character license keys does not look like a bad amusement at all.

iBook “repair”

The RAM died.