Refurbishing the university

What do you use to renovate the university? Well, Uniflott of course.

Das Keyboard

Last week, I ordered Das Keyboard from Get Digital. Today the order arrived. Typing feels very nice on that keyboard, although the constant clicking will drive my colleague in the same office nuts! ;-)

My tax euros at work.

The german government tried to persuade its citizens to file their tax declaration electonically by providing a free (as in beer) windows application. It's called Elster, which is german for Magpie, a bird that at least in german folklore, is said to be quite thievish. Now, I installed that application to finally file my 2005 tax returns. And I'm prepared for the worst, because the german government is known for it's phenomenal failure in all its software projects. And my confidence in their incompetence was not disappointed, the dialog box above tells you that they were not able to make the program work without administrative rights. That's especially funny because -at least as a merchant who also can use that program- you are required by law to abide to basic security practices on your computers.

porn carnival

greatoffer

Again, trainstation at night.

After watching this space for a while you will inevitable come to the conclusion that I really like taking photos at our trainstation. Please let me affirm this suspicion with this post.

Playing with the layout.

 I'm trying to put my non-existing CSS skills to use... I hope you like the baby-blue background.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

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.