Schlossfreiheit

Tuesday, there was a little arts exhibition and a party announced to take place in a very unsual location: the catacombs of an old monument of the Kaiser which has been distroyed in World War 2, I think the statue of which had been removed by the GDR, thanks Bea for pointing this out (see third comment). The great thing: It’s in the very in centre of Berlin, and you would never ever get to see those spooky arches underground, right next to one of the smaller arms of the Elbe Spree (the river that flows through Berlin), and the old Palast der Republik.

So the entrence itself was pretty dodgy, just one small little manhole, and a 5 meters ladder… Down you came straight into the old catacombs, where some artists put up a variety of light– and sound installations.

Unfortunately, the party was canceled on the night itself when suddenly some police men showed up and bascially forbade the whole thing for a number of reasons. It was great to have a look around anyways, and I also got to take some nice night shots

I became a professional fisherman, but discovered that I couldn’t live on my net income.

Herbie Hancock

I would never have thought it, but being at the right time in the right city, I had the opportunity last Friday to see Herbie Hancock live and direct here in Berlin.

Although the tickets were fairly pricy (the cheapest started at 38 EUR), in my book, it was worth every cent. Even if this guy is 66 years old, you couldn’t tell neither by his looks, the energy he radiated, the humour he showed nor the music itself. (By the way, that’s him on the center of the stage with the guitar like keyboard I forgot the name of).

In a single word: it was as massive. No comparison in quality to anything I’ve ever heard, when it comes to a jazz combo. Of course, this was also due to the other musicians he played with: Vinnie Coleiuta (a particularily famous drummer), Nathan East (an impressive bassist and singer) and Lionel Loueke (I didn’t know him, but geez, he was a genious too).

Among the pieces they played were classics like Cantaloupe Island, Watermelon Man or Chameleon as well as more recent songs.

Being good at being stupid doesn’t count.

11.11. 11:11

Not sure if you guys know, but the 11th of November at 11:11am is a very special day / moment. In a few cities / regions in Germany — such as Köln (a.k.a. Cologne), Mainz, Düsseldorf, etc. — it’s the start of the Karneval Saison, the „Fifth Season“ for the people living in those parts of the country..

Being from Berlin (where people typically have a rather antagonistic opinion on all that buisiness) I do not know all that much about this stuff, but make sure you read the Wikipedia article on it ;-)

Why am I mentioning that? Well, purely by coincidence I happened to visit a good friend of mine that particular week end, and when I tried to get some classical breakfast ingredients like Brötchen (a.k.a. bread buns / bread rolls depending on where you from) or Croissants it was simply not possible to reach the bakery because of all the people on the street already getting wasted at 9am. Well, this continued for the entire day, and it actually looked like fun (I didn’t have any costumes or the like on me, so I couldn’t really join in), and I’ve decided that at some stage, I wanna go with it, full time :-)

It just needs a bit of preparation to look as funny as all the other people… On the photo that was one of the many little bands that played some random semi-rythmic noise to celebrate their drunkeness :-)

Eat yoghurt and get cultured!

3x 30 !

Friday last week I went to a big party, the birthday party of one of my brothers (Jan) and two good old friends of his (Michael and Matthias), who all just turned 30

It was a great party in many terms. Nice (finger) food ;-) Nice ladies, loads and loads of dancing (I was all sore the next day, and that rarely happens), so thanks for organising it, guys! Also, this was a great opportunity to only see a lot of people from old times (you always know your brothers’ friends fairly well too, and I haven’t seen most of them for a good decade!) and my family again.

As a surprise (even I didn’t know of it!) my dad drove all the way up from Stuttgart (on the other end of Germany) and my other Brother (Daniel) was there too. I eventually managed to convince my brothers into a little photo with the three of us together, which I like a lot (and it’s the first of its kind in a about a decade too!).

Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9!

New job

Since Wednesday this week, I’ve officially started working here at the Technische Universität (TU) Berlin, in the „Institut für Energie– und Automatisierungstechnik“ or more precisely in the „Fachgebiet Regelungssysteme“ that is Prof. Jörg Raisch’s group.

Right now I’m still in the process of filling my empty office (pictures soon…), getting to know people, and generally just getting set up. As well as reading. And heaps of it…

In a way it’s weird, I’ve really finished my uni degree now… I’ve graduated, I’ve got some title to officially put in front of my name (that’s „Dipl.–Ing.“). Kind of exciting. Also, my name is already featured on the name table just next to the elevator (see last line in the picture).

Guess that makes it official…

Once I worked in the woods as a lumberjack, but I just couldn’t hack it, so they gave me the axe.

Macarena

Once I came back from Trento, it was time for some serious relaxing and — of course — partying too ;-)

I spent most of the time in Magdeburg, the place where I studied for three and a half years. It felt great to have nothing to do other than worryign about what cool meal to fix in the evening.

The photo here was taken at Uwe’s birthday party, a friend of mine from Uni. I think it was Julia (that lovely lady at the back of the photo) who suddenly decided it was time for some Macarena dancing… Somebody took a short video from that, you can watch it here.

Oh boy, those days were days of fun… now it’s back to work, as you’ll soon read about…

I just got back from a pleasure trip. I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

Trento

After settling a few days in Magdeburg, I started preparing a poster for the CMSB06 Conference in Trento, Italy (that is the International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology 2006), my very first conference I would attend.

The conference (on the 18th and 19th of October) was awesome, lovely people there, quite a few interesting discussions, and the numerous talks, especially the invited speakers, were also great. Unfortunately they run a bit late with some of the presentations which ate up most of the time for the poster session. After that we went to the “social dinner”, which resulted in a culinary firework of 5 kick–ass gourmet courses and copious amounts of local wine and spirits…

After the conference, I had an extra day to explore the beautiful city, day and night… All in all, it was a great trip. A big thank you again to Ollie from the Hamilton Institute for sponsoring the trip.

Law of Probability Dispersal: Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

Podpourri #26

Und schon wieder ist ein gutes Stück Zeit vergangen. Aber Podpourri gibt’s natürlich immer noch :-)

In der heutigen Folge gibt’s erneut ein bissl content, jaja! Ich habe Steffi zum Thema Jakobsweg ausgefragt, den sie diesen Sommer ein gutes Stück weit entlanggelaufen ist.

Der Jakobsweg ist ein alter Pilgerpfad im Norden Spaniens, der von den Pyrenäen bis fast an die Atlantikküste im Westen Spaniens führt. 500km in 20 Tagen zu Fuß finde ich eine beachtliche Leistung, aber es geht hauptsächlich um die Eindrücke und Erlebnisse (aber auch ein paar Tipps und Tricks) in dieser hoffentlich interessanten Episode.

EDIT: Seffi hat inzwischen eine sehr informative Seite über den Jakobsweg (mit viel Hilfe von mir ;-)) erstellt.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Defense presentation

Being back in Germany, I think now my friends in Australia (or Ireland, or elsewhere) are more interested in reading this blog… Hence, I’ll be writing it in English from now on (or at least for a good while).

Anyway, sorry it took me so long to get back into writing. I’ve been hanging out, relaxing and just felt like doing nothing I didn’t have to for a while. But I’ll let you know what I’ve been up to (roughly).

My first important thing back here was to give the presentation that goes with my Diploma Thesis (remember, that “Algorithm Development and Testing for Four Legged League Robot Soccer Passing”). I prepared it in the last two weeks over in Australia, practiced it twice over there and had the real run through here.

Fortunately everything went really well, my MacBook Pro didn’t randomly shut down (actually, it hasn’t been doing that for a good while now — must have been one of these firmware updates…) and I managed to answer the numerous questions people poked at me.

Speaking of the people, thanks for showing up! The seminar room was pretty much filled, I was seriously surprised! Well, may be they just came for the 60 odd muffins I fixed :-)

For those of you interested, I did a video recording of the presentation. It is fully iPod compatible and can be downloaded here. More infos on the talk here.

Is a light year one in which you gain 50% less fat?

Please wait…

Meine lieben Blogleser — ich habe Euch nicht vergessen. Da ich im Moment aber so eine Art Urlaub mache, wird es noch ein paar Tage dauern, bis hier wieder neuer Inhalt erscheint.

Ich werde mich dann aber bemühen, alles brav nachzuholen…

Bis dahin — danke für Eure Gedult !

Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t.