Busy in a way

Missed a few posts...

Went to Chalmers to work on the light organ for two weeks. Making electronics and computers do what you want them to is not always a whole lot of fun. Was great to see some friends though, almost all having families and lives. At least I have no chains attached :p

Been preparing a trip to Paris, R3B collaboration meeting next week there. Will hold two talks, ugh. And in March or so I'll go to the DPG in Heidelberg with a similar talk. And in Jan-Feb I'll spend a few weeks at RIKEN integrating NeuLAND into the RIBF DAQ. Fun fun.

I'm thinking of physics very differently these days, I've learnt a whole lot of things recently that I should have figured before, but suddenly I enjoy "getting it". I've inhaled a lot of lecture videos and reading lately. Maybe something will come out of it one day...

Baked lussebullar this Sunday for the 1st advent, but baked way too many for myself. Dumped two bags at the TU Darmstadt, but I took some photos before that:
I'm gonna bake so much more after my trip to Paris, with my huge pink baking bible "Patisserie!". Oh, French pastries...

Ruined my old Canon compact camera with a leaking water bottle recently, so I bought a new one for the trip to Paris, which will come in handy for RIKEN as well. Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ60. Nice to hold a new piece of electronics every now and then, too bad the nice wifi feature is a no-no with Linux. Snappy buttons and interface, fun optics that's like a magic trick in that little camera, and seemingly good photos. Not exactly camera crazy, I don't know what I'm talking about, but it seems nice :)

Time to round off the day, and have a final wrap-up lecture...

Let's end the summer with an experiment

Weather is shifting a lot, it can still get quite warm for my cold Swedish blood. I can finally think in my office without having to constantly wipe off the perspiration that builds up between the two little feet on my glasses and my nose. A little less than one month left and the last experiment for R3B at GSI/FAIR for a few years will kick off... Better do my best.

Still planning my radiosity project, there are quite a few tricky parts to it that need to be resolved. I'm getting closer to something that makes sense to implement. Been looking around at what has happened and is currently happening in high-level graphics. Cool stuff, but where's the good stuff? The 2001 Doom 3 and 2003 Half Life 2 reveals were freaking incredible, haven't seen anything like that since. I miss those moments when I was thinking "...no way..."

Been moving from the mathsy into the physicsy bits lately, refreshing the various flavors of relativity theory and all its peculiarities. I cannot fathom how I never reflected over the twin paradox before, or in fact that I never saw the real paradox. Not at all weird once you solve it, but some attempts at explaining it are weird, and dare I even say misleading. I wish I had taken this more seriously many years ago, but at least now I do.

Cannot stop listening to Meshuggah. Behind the Sun, Koloss, is amazing.

No pix this time, I guess nothing happened.

EDIT (2014-09-18): I was reading some news just now and some things in life I just don't understand.

For example, why are people still discussing sugar vs sweeteners? One more dangerous than the other, or not, etc. If you really need to know, you perform proper tests. If you don't care, you drink whatever, and don't ever complain. If you do care, but cannot perform the tests, you don't drink either. Sweeteners taste like ass anyway, completely negates the point of having some pleasant.

And how is Netropolitan about discussing the "finer things in life"? An exclusive club for rich people, fine, but a place to talk about fine things without the backlash? If you have money, it means you have money. If you're willing to spend it for an exclusive community, you don't like people (one of the finer things in life, no?). And having money does not imply a sense of finer things. The potential members are also referred to as accomplished people. What about the people who work really hard for the "finer things in life" which generates no money? I don't get it, and the worst part is people just don't care...

I needed to vent (this is a blog for myself anyway, I don't do this to become an online celebrity). The network went berserk at work, and I found "cable rot" when investigating. Stripped out every single cable and reconnected the most important devices, and now I've documented where all cables go, through switches and patch panels. I didn't come to R3B to do that, but someone has to do it, while everybody else plugs and unplugs whatever they feel like they need to without telling the people who need to make sure everything is rock solid so they don't get crap from the IT department. *sigh*

It's 21.44, time to go home. The experiment starts in 2 weeks and I'm already working evening shifts...

Back and forth

Sweden was just as hot as Germany, so my plan to escape excessive perspiration and agony didn't quite work out. Oh well, at least I got a glimpse of normal life for almost three weeks. And then it turned out the internet in my apt is busted. Typical.

Mulberry paper + methyl cellulose is one of those wonderful combinations that should go into a book titled "Things that actually, really do pair up well". Not the weird garbage they put into edgy cooking shows these days, but properly tasteful things. Oh right, I got this before I left, so I made these:

Little Bird and Phoenix 3.5. I'm starting to fill up my origami exhibition shelf in my office. And I now have quite a few meters of 1.5m wide kraft paper in my bookshelf in my apartment, I just need to find the courage to start working it...

I also ordered some Meshuggah albums at the same time as the powder, good stuff. I'm so glad I found my amazing Denon headphones at that ridiculous price, they are perfect for this kind of music (it is music, shut up).

Been reading up on old course literature, I miss maths. The "mathy" bits in my thesis were the most fun to work out and jot down. *whirr go the gears in my thick head*

I should really try to compose something for the guitar, seeing how much I spend on that crap. I have a plan. Don't hold anybody's breath (did I write that already in an earlier post? Nvm).

Anyway, headache, gonna leave work.

I'm alive!

So life kept pounding on like normal, I've had very little interesting to report.

My parents came to visit and made me buy a bike.

And my interest for origami has seen a little surge recently, here are two little things:

Oh, the beauty of shoddy paper. I have some methylcellulose on the way from Amazon, and a big piece of mulberry paper. Might try to fold a Phoenix out of that, would be nice to have one not made out of kraft paper. And then it's time for the _big_ challenge... After I've been to Sweden to pick up some of my 1.5m wide kraft paper.

I might edit later to add something new. I'll try to bake a cake for my co-workers on my birthday.

Experiment done, celebrating

Experiment done, and people were happy with the way my co-DAQ:er and I set up our high-rate stable DAQ, so it's time to have fun.

I started a bit too early to be honest, I bought a Caparison Dellinger7 a little over a week ago. As black as my heart (not really true, I'm just compensating), with a 7 string whammy. Now how do I get hold of an Axe-fx...

I also started working on my XCB-based WM, I need to fix a few stupid bugs and get rid of the mouse even more...

That's all for now, time to hax!

So I work quite a lot

Had nothing to do Friday evening, went to bed at ~22 and now I'm at work, trying to fix a code bug in some DAQ readout.

Discworld 2 is pretty shoddy compared to Discworld 1. Still a lot of fun, just... Ugh, a bit too thick somehow. Funny how already in the intro sequence Rincewind says 'Won't you miss these sorts of games?' Yes, we do... Bloody mainstream attention, it destroys everything :p Hipster alert? No, it's just that quirky passion is what makes things good, and mister Mainstream doesn't like that, and people with fat wallets are clever enough to know that.

I miss my guitar so much. That's one reason why I'm at work now I suppose. Still, I get to do a lot of programming here, so it's not so bad.

My life is either miserable or very busy if this is all I have to say. (It's busy, I'm doing quite alright, no worries.)

EDIT (2014-03-23): Caparison Angelus7 M3B White :p~~ I need an apartment and a spender's open wallet...

A big day

I'm now a proud owner of a brand new HHKB Pro 2! Yep, I finally shelled out the money, including a trip to downtown Darmstadt to pay up at the customs office... Ugh. Anyway, I got to go to Darmstadt alone for once, but most importantly, I'm typing on one of the moth revered enthusiast keyboards on the market right now. It's a very different experience at first, but it grows on you. I was a bit scared of the Fn combos for certain keys, but it turned out not to be a big problem at all. And the size of the keyboard and placement of certain keys is wonderful. The main problem I had was that the space bar was cutting into my thumbs a bit, but I knew from my forum lurking about flipping the space bar and that made everything ok again. Now I just need to test-drive it in a working environment at GSI, ala:

Been making strides with the DAQ, the one guru from Chalmers made a trip down here and showed me the tricks of the trade. I've also managed to help out with various programming problems already with smiles abound and promises of "payback", and lots of people seem to be very happy of my new job. Feels nice.

So. after I had watched Sunder blow up, I landed on Democratus. Did what I had to do, which included being a bit of a hero, and left. And they wanted to pay back, by shrinking the entire bloody planet to the size of a human and they're now floating around me as a team member. An entire planet. I love Anachronox. And the mini-game for the tractor-beam with shutting up council members before they get to spout their bs... This the reason I play.

EDIT 2014-02-14: Another big day:
I played through all of Discworld 1! Finally, after probably decades of attempts and complete restarts because my save-games have disappeared, and frustration of just impossible puzzles, I have prevailed! All the way through. Is that an evil game or what, thank goodness for the occasional walkthrough. Fitting end with two dragons in love on Valentine's Day, injected a bit of life into me as I'm spending my evenings and weekends alone in a small temporary room... I'm alright, don't worry, the weissbier here in Germany is cheaper than water. Plus I need to gear up for Discworld 2.