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.

today I had some kind of an argument with Anna, about the disclosure of our address in Amsterdam. It was mainly about me not trying to undisclose personal details on the internet, like when sending mails to ebay-people that contain a link to your website where pictures of family and cat are to be found and also the postal address and phone number and so on…

According to her one has to protect oneself e.g. from the occasional psycho that might be disagreeing with me on my last email and decide to stalk on me (or poison the cat)

According to me, one has to undisclose as much information as possible to the world in order to show that there is nothing to hide. That gives no vulnerability.

I spent a lot of time thinking what it is that makes us require privacy in our lives and why we demand privacy… Is it really neccessary to be anonymously hidden in a big city?
Is my world really too idealistic to be true? Can’t we all just live together without suspecting the weirdest things when looking at each other? Well, always set the case that you get a chance at all to look at the other person, usually there are just too many to look at individuals, or they threathen you if you make eye contact by looking at them.

I guess I am just spoiled from the people from my village, where everyone knows everyone.. yeah, that sounds awful but it’s a good feeling that you can leave your door or window open at night and if you forget the keys inside your car once (or the mobile) it will NOT be stolen 1 hour later..

well, 20 points minus on my “perfect world” scale.. reality sucks :P

I never thought this would be possible but I managed:
In a 12 square-meter room I managed to lose something and not find it back.
Now, nothing special, happens all the time. And if it was a screw or some small item I would definitely agree but what I’m missing is: My pants. Crazy!
I am writing a test at 2 p.m., I don’t want to write it without them :)

Update: found them 2 hours later, now I can leave the house.

When I was at the supermarket today, the woman at the counter handed me flowers. I really didn’t know what she was doing so I gave her a really stupid look and asked “what’s that for?”
She looked at me and said “it’s for valentine’s day” and smiled.
I had completely forgot about valentine’s! – And I’m not used to getting flowers so I stuttered something like “shoudn’t I give you flowers actually? I mean, I never get flowers..”
Judging by the volume of the conversation that erupted afterwards among the other women around the counter, I guess that I must have blushed a lot. ^^

Anna, I love you very much and I hope I don’t have to bring you flowers to make you feel that.
(although, it feels niiiiiiiiiice to receive flowers, I have to admit) :P

Sunday morning, university dormitory of your choice.

MPEG movie, ~1.8MB

I don’t intend to make this place a dump for silly movies but I laughed so much – probably because I can identify myself so well :)
Well, at least with the kitchen :D