I got this neat-o weather station a month or so ago. I’ve wanted one for a long time, and now I consult it daily to see just how cold it is outside while I sit at my desk in my comfy chair and screw around with my computer. It’s one of those fancy ones that automatically updates its time by a radio signal, and it has an outdoor remote temperature/humidity sensor that radios in its current feelings to the base station on my desk. Nice.

Anyways, last night near 3am it started beeping for some unknown reason. Like an alarm clock or something! I was awake and trying my best to play Halflife 2, but it wouldn’t stop beeping. So I did what any normal person would do, I took the batteries out. And you know what happened next?

We had an earthquake! No kidding! In the middle of my game, I had the unpleasant feeling that someone had grabbed my comfy chair and shook it all around just to annoy me, but there wasn’t anyone there! Neat. Read the rest of this entry »

So, what’s been going on lately? Aside from looking for a thesis subject and a little bit of work on the side, I’ve been sucked into the depths of Half Life 2, a pretty amazing game (the physics engine is unbelieveable). Go get it now.I refrained from talking about the elections in the USA and the disappointment of most of the rest of the world with the results (not only here in Germany) because it seems that anyone with a head on their shoulders can figure
out what this means for the future of the USA. And as much as I miss some things about living there, I’m glad on another hand that I’m not in the middle of the mire that it’s becoming. Read the rest of this entry »

I just ran across this most interesting website this morning: www.scorecard.org.  I plugged in my home zipcode in the US, and VOILA I got a great overview of the largest polluters in Wicomico County, MD and a summary of the interesting things the pollutants they emit can do for you. Mostly negative things, at that.

Turns out that the largest polluter is Perdue farms, with a mere 217,000 pounds of N-HEXANE which is a neurotoxicant, reproductive, developmental and respiratory toxant. Neat. Plus, with 217,000 pounds of it, that equals a hefty 2.56 pounds of the stuff per person in the county.

But at least my family living there isn’t as lucky as the poor chaps in neighboring Sussex County, Delaware – while the single biggest polluter (by weight it is NRG Energy in Indian River. Right behind that is Perdue again with 550,000 pounds of Nitrate compounds, with DuPont following with a smattering of Hydrochloric and Sulfuric acids, as well as Chromium and Mercury, with thier own contribution of 145,000 pounds of Nitrates) has halved toxic releases over the last four years, the current amount of toxic output ends up being a mere 17.4 pounds of waste per person. That includes some nasties like hydroflouric & hydrochloric acid (which isn’t that bad, if it spills on your pants you just have to wash it off fast enough.. and oh yeah, that is assuming that it’s not finely dipersed into the air you’re breathing, which this stuff is), as well as the dangerous chromium and other usual heavy metals (barium, copper, mercury, etc). Anyway, you get the point (I grew up in Sussex county, and they’ve got pretty bad statistics when it comes to pollution it seems!)

So check out your community today! http://www.scorecard.org

I’m back in Germany, actually on schedule, but the missions were cut short due to the crack in front of the bombay.

My coffee maker broke. I was thinking about writing up an article about how to fix it, since it’s a complicated machine and it took me waaaay to long to get it apart. It started as an afternoon project that turned into a half-a-day event, but I learned a lot about the mysteries of the Jura coffee machine – and where all those crazy noises come from when it’s making me a cup of coffee. I always thought there was a hampster in there somewhere, intergral to the design and functionality – but it turns out there is no such thing. Funny that.

Now I just need to find a thesis project, and get down to work for the next few months… I’m not looking forward to it so much for some reason.

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I just got my first Nigerian 419 scam in German. It’s really funny – I can’t quite read all of it, but I certainly got the idea of it even with my small German vocabulary. If you want to read the sillyness (and a translation thereof), keep reading. The funny thing is that the Google german-english translation sounds like most Nigerian 419 scams do normally in English – check it out! Perhaps this one is written by a genuine German speaking citizen

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I decided that I’d vote this election, even though I never gave a crap about voting before. Why the change?

Well, I still hold to the fact that the US isn’t a true Democracy – voting isn’t fair, and your vote doesn’t necessarily count as much as everyone else’s vote. That’s just the way it is. So, despite my previous feelings of not wanting to endorse the “lesser of two evils” and that getting involved is somehow worse than not doing anything at all, I’m voting by absentee ballot this time around. Read the rest of this entry »

I was looking around for a way to clone one hard drive to another, and I ran across an interesting utility called PartImage. Originally, I tried to image one 100GB drive to another using a normal dd command, like so:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

I let that run for about 20 hours and it still wasn’t done! Partimage seemed like a better choice since it only copies the existing data on the drive, and not all of the empty space too. But better, yet, you can get a whole rescue CD that has a PartitionMagic clone included!

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Friday I’ll be off to the US to go to my sisters wedding and work for a couple of weeks. Getting tickets isn’t cheap from Germany this time of year (end of July, beginning of August), so we decided to wait until the last minute and book tickets from www.ltur.de. They have extremely good prices for various trips to the US and vacation packages to areas in and around Europe. Actually getting the tickets you want can be a bit of a problem, but overall they’re a good deal; you just have to sit at the edge of your seat, bite your nails, and hope that a ticket comes along that gets you near your destination. Not everyone can play that game – and it almost backfired when I booked one ticket, but then couldn’t get a second one until about 20 minutes later for some strange internet reason.

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I think about it every day. And feel it every day. My brain seems to be getting slower, I forget things more often, I’m growing ever more cynical and even interested in politics. Yes, getting older really does suck.

I’ve often heard people complain about how this and that body part hurts now from some sporting accident years ago, or the “I just don’t have the energy” anymore thing. I don’t have much sympathy for that kind of talk yet. But why didn’t anyone ever tell me that the older I got, the more I would realize how much things really do indeed suck in this world, which in turn makes you an unhappy person?

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Well, it’s been an interesting semester – less stressful than the last one. This sesmester I took: Robotics, Robotics Laboratory, Modern Materials (a mixture of modern/quantum physics and materials science), Microsystems Technology (microstructures – actuators, sensors, production methods, etc), mechatronics lab (industrial-type environment experiments), Space technology, and I did a “scientific project”. And I FINALLY GOT MY DRIVERS LICENSE – or “Führerschein” as its called. That was pretty amazing compared to what you go through in the US. I’ll never listen to anyone complain about paying for driving school in the US, that’s for sure…