I just cought myself thinking “well, actually it IS cold and I could turn the heating on a bit more.. but on the other hand: The cpu dissipates heat through the keyboard where my fingers are, the power converter and the harddrive produce heat where my wrists rest… it really could be worse.” ;)

Passively cooled laptops do have a lot of advantages. Especially in winter! :P

I am still studying for my exams, so far I have done four and two more are to come. This time I really fell into the rhythm, it seems. I get up at seven, start studying or working at eight and try to read as much as possible to pass the exams. I hope I can carry this motivation into the next semester and do a bit more before the exams next time, preventing another study-marathon next time.

On the other side, this permanent stress makes me unbalanced and even more chaotic as I phase out more and more “not so relevant” things to concentrate better on studying. This involves not paying bills, not talking to Anna, not keeping appointments (which in turn creates yet more bills – Anna was quite mad at me after paying 20 Euro for not appearing at the dentist and 36 Euro for not paying the tax for my motorcycle again)

At least I am making progress and I finally believe in what I am doing.

As Andrew Tanenbaum told us at the IEEE Conference of Pervasive Computing, it is possible to use RFID-chips to infect the underlying databases…

Read the full article on the website of the University of Amsterdam:

[…]the prankster decides to unwittingly enlist his cat in the fun. The cat has a subdermal pet ID tag, which the attacker rewrites with a virus using commercially available equipment. He then goes to a veterinarian (or the ASPCA), claims it is stray cat and asks for a cat scan. Bingo! The database is infected.[…]

Here is the full paper.

If I imagine Siepke infected with a computer virus, this cat gets only more precious ;)

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Frank Herbert, DUNE 1965

I am so busy with Biochemistry that I can’t even think of some words for here.. I miss the days when I was writing for hours!

They really seem to show off once more before the Hubble space telescope will be decomissioned in 2011. This picture can be found on Hubblesite.org, being the most detailled view of a galaxy ever.. and it’s beautiful, even ;)
Makes a beautiful wallpaper.. *hint* *hint*

To get an idea how detailled the picture is: The original image is 15852 x 12392 pixels resolution, sporting 500MB of data. It features ~1 billion stars. The whole galaxy is expected to contain ~1 trillion stars. The light on the photo has been emitted 25 million years ago. Such things remind me of how small we (our planet) are and how precious our little life is.. not more than 100 years, most of the time ending even earlier.