Category Archives: personal

things that matter to me personally

Siepke and Servers

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God, I am so happy this cat is back.. I don’t know what I would have done without him.

feet

Anna is writing another summary of her thesis for the press and I am typing my thermodynamics-lecture into the laptop. I decided to do this from now on to memorize the lessons better.

My friday night I spent in the biology-department setting up a new webserver because I accidentially deleted the whole /dev directory by issuing rm -d -r /dev/ instead of ./dev (note the small but fatal dot!)
At 0:00 I arrived in Maastricht, Anna being very mad at me having spent the evening without me once more.

Lesson of the day:
“Never touch a running system!”
Or as the IT-department says:
“Never touch a running system on Friday after 14:00!”

through the night…

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When I’m on the road, I’m indestructible. No one can stop me…

Whoa, riding on a motorbike through the night with headlights fully up is the closest thing possible to flying.. I think wherever I arrive I carry a cloud of pheromones and adrenaline around me ;)

I have no idea why I didn’t use the bike the last months, especially in summer. Well, actually I know, I was too busy with work, exams, Anna’s thesis and thousands of things that only happen when you are already involved with 2 others.

Anyway, life is good, I am busy, have a cool job, enough motivation for the term that has just started and the only thing that is disturbing me is that Anna is away monday till friday. But I’m getting used to that slowly, it makes weekends more enjoyable.

situation: all good! :)

autumn surprises

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Autumn, the time of falling leaves and wonderful colours. Time to take long and exhaustive walks through the forest and enjoy the relaxing effects of the indian summer on the mind. (after all we had a lot of stress the last weeks)

While at it, pick up some of the wonderfully coloured leaves and flowers that grow now, they definitely make a nice decoration in your window at this time of the year.

Just never, ever collect any of these things:
rohrkolben
Even if they look beautiful between autum-flowers, after 2 days at the window (especially if you are away for these days) they explode into a huge mass of seeds that you’d never expect to hide in these 20cm long things… and they cover your house, your PCs fans, your shoes, everythigng in the house is covered in a layer of this foam-like seeds. And your cat then drags them all over the appartment.

my vaccum can’t handle the amounts that these things have produced, I will have to buy extra bags now.
And also ignore tips from gardeners/relatives to spray them with hairspray to prevent from opening, it DOES NOT WORK! ;)

the show must go on…

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okay, the new term has begun, I have a new job, business as usual.

It’s really interesting that I now sit at work and I percieve it as “relaxing” to be working… compared to the last weeks this little working and studying is a piece of cake. And at least, now my days have structure and order again ;)

back to work, there is a new laptop to work for :)

The current candidate is the VAIO TX1
TX1

well, it’s not as sexy as the “835g light, 1cm thick, completely fanless” x505
x505

but almost 8 hours of battery life are also tempting.. . I have to choose between sexiness and functionality. For me, this is extremely difficult.

Talking about reason, IBM/Lenovo has very nice notebooks for students aswell with great battery runtimes. But they don’t really look nice.. in fact, they look incredibly ugly compared to a VAIO and 2 kg are not really “portable”.. and they are not even cheap ;)

x41

Update: SONY is thrown off the throne, Sharp has released the Actius MM20 – running on a Transmeta Efficeon (Transmeta, you know, the company of Linus Torvalds that nobody precisely knows what they are doing…)

actius mm20

It looks quite nice, weighs less than 1kg and costs much less, aaaand:
It goes at 1500 Dollars, that’s 2500 less than the Sony x505 which costs almost 4000.
I guess that’s the end of my days with sony.

Links:
PDF Datasheet
US Homepage

I just hope they’ll also release it in europe… can’t wait to get my fingers on it! :)
And as the processor is made by Transmeta, there shouldn’t be a problem with running linux on it ;)

(not so) happy end…

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well, as if to prevent us from ever being able to enjoy a weekend we just got a call that Anna’s dog, Miro, has been shot in Dogville (Bg)…

miro
3.05.1999 – 8.10.2005

somehow, I think this is not normal anymore.

We urgently need vacation!

Still lost…

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I offered a reward of EUR 100,- today, the local radio stations and newspapers are informed and I will print 100 more posters and hang them on every fucking corner of this city. I want Siepke back, and if it is the last thing I do in this city.

I can’t sleep unless I know for sure that he is either dead or back.

lost…

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Siepke jumped out of the window yesterday… ever lost your cat? what a dull, empty and helpless feeling..

I put 100+ “Wanted” posters with his face all over the city,
siepke lost
posted to all local newsgroups, informed the asylum and informed all neighbours (they actually did not really want to know that but that’s another story).
Too bad we did not make him a chip implant or a tatoo…
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The Thesis

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It’s done…

on Thursday last week, 350 copies of the Thesis of Anna have arrived here in Maastricht for distribution.
several years of work for Anna and lots of stress for me finally paid off as we hold fresh copies of “The Very Lo-Density Lipoprotein-Triaglycerol Pathway and the Metabolic Heterogeneity in Familial Combined Hyperlipidemia” in our hands.

Today we went to deliver them to the participating people, professors, colleagues of Anna, to the University and the libraries of the country.
On November 3rd, Anna will have to defend it and then she’ll be a pround Ph.D. in Medicine. Actually I think I am more proud than her, sometimes but anyway ;)

A lot of work comes to an end and finally we will be able to do other things in the weekend than proofreading and fighting with Microsoft Word.
If anyone ever asks me how to write a scientific paper I will have only one advice: Don’t ever think about using Word for it!
It might look nice but it’s inconsistent as hell and these auto-format/ auto-correct/ auto-sex-me-up-functions drive you crazy if you try to do a decent layout of a paper or a thesis.

For reasons of completeness, here the link to the thesis:
cover_tiny

to dutch or not to dutch…

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I’ve gotten myself 2 new jobs while I was busy with chemistry in Aachen. I will be working at the University’s helpdesk and I will do the customer service for UniDSL, a freelance DSL project for students. Both are jobs to dream of, free distribution of time, shifts, workload, just perfect and they even harmonize with each other.

Problem: I have to cancel my work at Mercedes, where I spent the last 3 years working and hating the job. Now that it finally happened and I can get myself a better job (where I actually CAN help people and don’t have to use phrases someone else wrote) I am afraid. Afraid of what? Since 6 months I stress Anna that I want another job. Since one year I am bored by working for the arrogant Mercedes-customers.. and yet, it feels like I am betraying them, Am I already that deep inside? Am I that attached to them? Or am I just getting old and afraid of the changes?
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