Aug252007

My new Apartment!

US

Yeah, I’m not homeless anymore!!!! I moved yesterday into my new place in Maxwell Terrace! It is sooo great, my room is amazing, it’s very close to campus (6 blocks, 7 mins by bike), very close to Kroger (also 6 blocks) and even closer to Brian Park (4 blocks, 3 mins by bike). Here are some pictures of my room:

My bed. Yes, I’m sleeping under a German flag! I was so sick of seeing all those American flags at every corner that I just had to buy a German one. But I’m still not tough enough to hang it to the balcony :-). Next year for sure!

My working space directly next to the window with a nice green view *aaaaahhhhhh*.

The decorative wall, my bow, one of my Katanas and some cool license plates.

More Katanas and some sports stuff on the ground :-)!

The view out of my window – great! Okok, ignore those weird cables … yeah, it’s America!

Our Kitchen …. nothing to say, bright and clean! Yes, clean!!!!

The living room …

View from our balcony to the remaining complex. It’s a great place to live in!

AND: we have a WINDOW in the bathroom. Yes, a WINDOW! That’s so cool … and at the same time so non-American :-). I love it!

That’s it for today, more to come!

Aug102007

Meeting Albuquerque

Travel

I came back from the Open MPI collective meeting in Albuquerque. It was amazingly fruitful and we had many new ideas for non-blocking collectives. Many of the are actually new problems but it’s good to discuss them before I am challenged with those questions at conferences without preparation. The meeting was hosted by the university of New Mexico

To be precise, the Center for High Performance Computing at the UNM:

We ran through the discussions pretty quickly (actually too quickly for my taste, because we “dropped” (i.e., decided not to implement) most of the nice collv2 things we designed last year) so that we finished early. We had the last late afternoon (5pm) off and I decided to go with a guy from Sun Microsystems to do some sightseeing. We went to the Petroglyph National Monument to see some drawings of native americans.

We had to wak through the hot desert to see them

and they were really disappointing!!!! :-(.

Anyhow, we went on and wanted to see the “Vulcanoes”.

The first one was pretty lame …

but we had a nice view over Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains

And of course the *real* volcano!

That we finally climbed! *yeah*

So that’s pretty much it! The afternoon was over and we flew back the next day. A very productive meeting!

Aug32007

Armed Robots?

US

The US army uses the first tactical robots in Iraq – moving the war to a new technological level. Those little beasts seem pretty efficient (see video). But being in the Army and coming from an information security background, I’m wondering how the data-transmission works. I think it would be fun to hijack those thingies on a battlefield. And even if they are not easily hijackable (what I hope for the US troops), who prevents the bad guys from jamming the whole battlefield with strong signals? I could build a wireless jammer in a week … this would render their iron friends pretty useless. As a starting point for the bad guys, the manufacturer pus the datasheets online :-). I’m getting a 404 when I try to download one though ;-). They’ll need supercomputers on the battlefields soon … ah, my job is secured forever!

Jul312007

Cycling :)

US

From the ‘Bicycle Neglect Series‘: “In fact, young Cascadians don’t even match the bicycling levels of Germans over the age of 75. That’s right: Germans in their late seventies and eighties bike more—on 7 percent of all trips—than Cascadian teens and twenty-somethings.” … “Cascadia, especially its populous heartland stretching from the Willamette Valley through Puget Sound to the lower Fraser Valley, has a superb climate for cycling. There are neither icy roads in winter nor swampish humidity in summer. The famous rain is more often a drippy ambience than measurable precipitation. Northern Europe’s climate is worse for cycling than ours: it snows. Besides, the nights are much longer in winter there.”. So what’s wrong? Read the articles and you’ll see! Very interesting! Here is another nice article …

Jul262007

McCormicks Creek

Travel

We’ve been to another State Park this Sunday. It was great, we hiked the whole day and got totally lost in the wilderness (there were deer paths that looked like human paths :)). The waterfall is really ridiculous (see picture), but the wolf cave is really cool.

It’s a small (very small) tunnel-like cave where one can go (crawl) through. It’s not really advertised on the webpage (I guess they are afraid that some people just get stuck in the middle – this nearly happened to me as I realized that my shoulders are to wide for several passages in there :)).

Jul262007

Burglary

Uncategorized

Yes, right …. somebody broke into my room and stole (nearly) all my electronics. Only the GPS is left and two laptops (one was the lab’s), a cell, an MP3-Player and my lovely Palm PDA are gone :-(. That sucks … I hate this house. Especially those windows, I am able to open the *locked* windows with nothing more than a knife from the outside without even damaging anything. That’s how the burglars made it in (window was open when I came back). I even know exactly when it happened, Sun night at 1:31 am (when the MacBook was disconncted from the VPN tunnel). I came home around 2 … somebody can be happy that I was not around. Now that I come slowly back to actively doing martial arts and now that I have my combound bow with the “killer arrow”. An, anyway, it sucks but I can’t change anything.

Update: The Bloomington Police is really nice, but they can’t do much. The IUPD seems rather incapable in comparison. IUTS (IU Technology Services) seem very advanced because they are going to track their network for the MAC addresses and get a notification (to send the IUPD) whenever somebody uses the MacBook on campus. We’ll see if this helps.

Jul42007

Independence Day 2007

US

Yeah, after a very very very nice independence day last year, I’m trying to repeat this experience :). We’ll see. I’m right in the middle of it – and the parade is over. It was as bad as last year (actually slightly worse). But I have some pictures this time for you to enjoy (or not):

The Bloomington firefighters and sheriffs :).

Ambulance (BHAS) and the beginning of the Veteran trailer (one of the central themes …)

More Veterans and the Harley Club (????).

Of course our nice National Guards :).

Jul32007

Lake Monroe & Some more links

Travel

Yeah, we biked to Lake Monroe on Saturday :). The bike ride was great even if we lost our way due to my misinterpretation of “Moores Pike”. I know I know … American cities are organized in grids and one can not get lost. But somebody decided to rename streets in the middle of town!!!!! Anyway, we finally made it :). The beach was nice but the swimming area was ridiculously small. And the worst thing is that the Indiana Department o Natural Resources (DNR) seems to be *really* stupid. So their goal is to protect nature (sort of I guess). Ok, here’s the deal: if you come by car or van or truck or minibus or whatever vehicle, you pay $4 gate fee per vehicle. Fine, but if you come by bike, it’s $2 per bike!!!!! So, calculate how many people fit into a minivan (I’ve seen a van loaded with at least 10!). And we paid $4 for two bikes! That’s such a rip off. And I must say it really encourages me to take my car next time and get 3 people to join me – it’s half the price. Seriously, they must be completely retarded. And we’ve been pretty much the only two cyclists who came from “the outside” (there were more, but they seemed to come from the campground which was 100 meters away). Oh my gosh! I have to file a complaint! I don’t know where yet, but I’ll do!

To the links:

The boys project .. pretty interesting. Boys are “extremer” than girls in many regards ;).

A funny airline complaint – awesome ;-). Don’t choose this seat!

Did you know that yoga and sex are related? Let’s test it ;-)!