Einträge von florian

I was so at one with the world today. Don't no why, but everything was just fine. I could try to describe todays features, but as I am in a strange mood at the moment I reckon I wouldn't be able to capture a true picture of it. So why exactly was I suspicious enough to expect destiny's rebound? It's a Wednesday, so Thomas and I rode to the Roxbury, which by the way was more crowded than the weeks before. The students are coming back to town. Nevermind... it was a nice evening although we were hopelessly lost in the trivia. About one and a half hours ago I started my ride back to Newtown. Normally it would take me ten minutes, but this time I managed to blow of both of my beloved bike's tires at once by crashing into a huge chuckhole. This earned me another half an hour with the bike on my shoulders and a lot of work tomorrow morning, not only to fix the bike but to get all the oil off my clothes and stuff. Only positive thing about it: the bike shop doesn't open before ten, so I will be stuck in bed a bit longer!

One more thing: only 100 days left till the kickoff in Munich!

A lot of you might understand what this is about: Quite frequently sombebody asks me what my profession was and I say that I work in theoretical computer science at the moment. People might get curious and ask what that is about - and if I am in the mood I might actually try to sum up the beauty of complexity and algorithms, a thing that I myself forget about from time to time. In fact I often asked myself why I didn't stick with mathematics or physics which seem to be so profound. Well, after a while I notice that I baffeld the questioner completely so I might underline it all with some practical examples if I don't give up directly. However, the reaction I get is the same over and over again (I really dislike it): "Oh, sounds interesting, my {cousin, friend, friend of a friend, uncle, brother in law, sister}^1 is in IT, too. {He, She}^1 is {doing webpages, a programmer, a cybernanny, the owner of an Internetcafe} (as well)." SLAP! This is so wrong.
Today I was sent a very nice article, an interview with Bernard Chazelle, who is describing what computer science's potential is (in his opinion), how the world could look at it and why there should be more people taking up that subject. Maybe he is right and our guild is the next one to turn science with a great revolution. One that is yet to come. Ease for a troubled computer scientist's soul.

There've been a lot of things happening lately, this is why I simply did not have the peace to catch up here with it. But there's light. First of all I've really been working a lot if not too much. There weren't a lot of days I left Nicta before 7pm, I even met the night security guard a couple of times and my record is being home past 1am, just to give u an idea. Would be nice, if I got paid overtime - but as I don't get money in the first place... However, after some real frustrating problems I yesterday finally ran some cool and serious experiments and this is what I will do throughout the next days. There will be a lot of writing, too.
I also really wanna spend more time being a bit touristic again. I haven't been to the beach in weeks and I really wanna see some spots in Sydney I haven't been to at all before I leave in a couple of months. Of course all this does not mean that I wouldn't enjoy myself in my temporary home. Au contraire! I did a lot of nice things, spend a great Australia Day in the Botanicals was camping in Cattai (out in the west) with my housemates and friends, played tennis quite a few times, had some great BBQs, went out in Newtown (for convenience reasons), went to ZanziBar, had another really crazy night at the Roxbury and heaps more. Today (like a week ago) I went climbing with my mate Damian. He, by the way, is gonna visit us (@i11) in Karlsruhe this year in autum. I feel a bit drained and so I better go to bed soonish.
A couple of minutes ago Sander popped in, he is permanent user of our couch by now and just stopped by on his way from Perth to Auckland. This guy lives from holiday to holiday (although he would now correct me to point to the work he has done in between). Officially he left Syndey like two weeks ago, before that he was living an 3 Baltic Street and before that again we had a very nice Dutch ThankGodHesLeaving BBQ at his old place. About this alone I could tell some funny stories - another time. Well, with Marc in January, Greg a couple of weeks ago and Sander now (more or less) a lot of my usual suspects left and this is reminding me to the fact that I won't stay forever from time to time. Strange.
Good night and ... good luck.

... and please don't try to convince me it was good, I know better. Oh how could a single person stand this pain. And how could somebody reading up to this line not know what it is about? I will tell you. Today, like half an hour ago, the final ticket sell for the worldcup in Germany started. It's first come first serve. Hell knows I prepared to be first. From 9.35pm (=11.35am MEZ) I was ready, sitting in front of my laptop checking for any early possibilities. All necessary data, ID numbers, adresses, wanted matches, credit card information, my login and password ready in an extra window to be c&p'ed to the fifa form. The last five minutes were spent starring at the atomic clock seeing the minutes and finally seconds pass by. It should be mentioned here that the website was opened nearly 30 seconds late, but who's counting. And all this pain for nothing. I mean NOTHING. The form, different to earlier ones, was a list of all possible matches showing red entries telling me that there were no tickest on sale for all interesting games. So I might be able to be live in a stadium seeing the Ivory Coast matching Serbia and Montenegro, of course even for those there were only more expensive categories available. Thanks. How am I ever gonna explain to my children (if I ever have some) that I didn't attend the worldcup in my home country? That's shit. I could go on crying about this for a long time, complaining about the fifa's ticket sell system in general and my bad luck in particular. But I reckon it's not gonna change anything. And I really did what I could. My tribute goes to everybody out there who suffers from the same destiny. So what have I learned about being laid-back? Well, I think I will spend a few hours more than expected in front of the TV this summer.

Around the world in 180 days, that's what Maike and René are doing. They started back in October and are on the road, so far through India and Thailand (...) and finally Australia. I had thought about catching up with them a couple of weeks ago, but lost track - till I found out they already made it to Aussie ground last week. Placing some lead in their blog, contact via email and - voilà - they ended up in my kitchen preparing Käsepätzle. Okay, that was more due to the fact that we had pretty shitty weather during that time here. It was both, nice and strange, having people from back home in my livingroom, I didn't have real visitiors from Germany before and I reckon there aren't too many to come up either. As it kept on raining we had another dinner the next day, followed by some beer on King Street. On Friday, they went on to Auckland. Enviable vacation.

Der gute Ede Stoiber hat es aber manchmal auch reichlich schwer. Wenn die Bayern nicht so eine lange Leitung (oder Zugverbindung) hätten, dann bräuchte der Gute sich schließlich auch nicht so verrenken, um die einfachsten Sachverhalte an den Mann zu bringen. Wenigstens gibt er sich geduldig und am Ende wächst der Bahnhof an das Land, weil es ja klar ist. Worum es geht? Darum... ein wenig hat es mich an Dingsda erinnert, falls das noch jemand kennt.

We first thought we would have to wait a day for the bus we had a reserved place on to show up. But there was a second service, more a guy trying to rip us off. But hey, we had no real choice. I talked to some daytrippers, but none would give us a ride so we actually paid quite a bit of money for a trip to Hobart. But this also meant we had one more day there, an opportunity, I guess.
We soon found a very convenient hostel and the first thing I did was walking to the nearby Laundromat, to get some of our things washed. Damn, we must really have been smelling like hell, at least I noticed my clothes were. Then I had a really nice and long lasting shower. Funny, but the hostel felt really comfortable and clean (although it still was a hostel). We went out that night, but only for dinner. Marc wanted to have a pizza, I voted to share one. We found a very nice place and got some awesome looking and tasting pizzas, but both had to give up after the first half. Did that ever happen to me before? I don't know. But I still feel that my stomach shrinked during that time. Interesting to see, what you really need or at least how much you can make from how less for a while.
After more than a week without the internet or phones I turned my mobile on again. I didn't miss any of that, although I of course need it in my daily life. Living without all this geeky stuff still works, guess it's good to realize that from time to time.
The night was very nice, so warm an comfi, soft and dry. Still we both woke up early and started into the day. We walked across Hobart (which doesn't have such a nice tourist office) following a walking guide map. But feeling the urge to relax, we spend quite a while in the harbour, where the Syndey to Hobart Yacht Race ended few days earlier. Sitting there watching the crowed, drinking a coke ... what could you want more? Hobart is a small, very remote place and so I managed to breath some of its flair during the time we had, also exploring the city and discover its specialties.
And one more time we had to check out before the day had seen light, catching our flight back to Sydney. Luckily our stuff hadn't been found or at least not taken, Hobart Iternaional Airport looked the same and different as well. I caught myself smiling about my expectations and what I had seen. We boarded the plane and were back in Sydney. The last thing we had to do was walk from Newtown Station back to my house, of course carrying the packs on our backs. Walking home.

Having one complete day in Melbourne to run our errands necessary for the bushwalk first sounded a lot but turned out to be just enough. We had called Tasair and asked them to fly us in earlier, so we wouldn't need to go into Hobart from the airport anymore. Cool.
The next morning we had to get up really early again, to catch the shuttle bus to the airport. All went good and few hours later we arrived at Hobart Iternational Airport. Sounds good, like more than it is. In fact, they don't even have lockers where we could have lodged the things we did not want to carry around for a week. So Marc came up with the idea of burying our own personal treasure. Quite a few things ended up in one of our (later very imporant) waste bags that got hidden next to the airport's parking lot.
We then walked up to the Tasair building, to get some bad news: the weather was too bad (although we could see blue sky), especially stormy, to fly us out. Well, but the nice guy told us, he thought it might be possbile to get us there that afternoon, he would call around noon, we could co to Hobart in the meantime. But we decided that wasn't worthwhile or at least wanted to wait first. Somehow we were sure not to get there. Well, we walked a bit and climed up a hill for the control tower, where we spent the next hours chilling/sleeping. Finally we got told that they would "risk", and so we had to do some paperwork, organize bottles for the fuel we were to get and soon we were ready for take off. With a bunch of four people plus the pilot we were tinned into a small cessna, warned to experience a bumpy ride. And a bumpy ride it was.

Unfortunately we had to discover it was impossible to rent a car between Xmas and New Year's. There were just too many tourists flooding the city, and they obviously had planned ahead - in contrast to us. So after visiting quite a few car rental companies we gave up looking through the ads of organized tours again. Two days was what we had in mind for a visit of the Great Ocean Road, it was supposed to be a road trip in our own car. Now we had to face the facts, there were only one and three day tours offered. We had no choice and took the one day opportunity, still there were heaps of offers but I think we were quite lucky with our choice! The next morning we found ourselves in a bus with 14 others, mostly Japanese, on the way west. First funny discovery: the music for the trip came out of an iPod with playlist fitting the scenery or the upcoming sights. Very cool.
Our first stop was at an Aborigial Culture Center, where we were shown some more or less interesting facts and things (including some emus). Didn't really know that there were still Abos living in tribes, practicing there religion, for most of em you see in Sydney are old drunken bums sitting on the street in Redfern! In the end we listened to a pretty cool didgeridoo performance and than after walking through their enormous garden for a while had to be back on the bus.
We went on to Bell's Beach, a famous surf beach where the world's oldest surf competition is still on every year. Quite nice there, unfortnuately we didn't really have enough time to go have a swim. On our way there we stopped to see some Koalas. Yeah, these admirable creatures get to sleep most of the day, eating the rest of the time. Very impressive seeing them sitting just there, not really caring about us.
For lunch we stopped at Apollo Beach, where Marc and I relaxed and had a swim in the very cold water. How refreshing, some nice views and sand in my pants included. No waves. During the afternoon we had another stop for a short rain forest tour, the cold type. Only there and (tata) on Tasmania. What a preview. While driving next to the cliffs listening to some Moby tracks arranged to underline the scenic athmosphere it first came to my mind that I might be off not too bad having somebody else to drive the car while I was spacing out. They even had some games, mostly these metal puzzles, to shorten the ride.
In the late afternoon we finally came to the Apostels, which are just too touristic in my opinion. I had a hard time taking some pictures (notice the one that broke down lately) not showing all the busloads of families, daytrippers (yeah, like us) and wannabe backpackers hanging out there. First I thought the planned 45mins our stay was meant to last would be very short, but I had enough time to explore what could be explored (well, I might have wanted to climb down to the beach, but that is a different thing) and I was just about to get really annoyed about the masses when I realized I had to get back to the car. Marc even did a helicopter flight (what a tourist ). Not far from there we visited the shipwreck coast and Lock Ard Gorge, where we managed to climb into the very interesting cave, full of stalactites and -mites. Brilliant. Our last real stop was the London Bridge, which is not only cool to see but features a funny story.
It tooks us some hours to get back to Melbourne, including a dinner stop, and summing the day up I think we were really busy. But on the other hand a selfmade two day tour in a rented car would probably not have provided a lot more time to see stuff, for it would have come with the hassle of driving and finding. I guess it turned out to be okay and as I (spoken today) know that we could make good use of the extra day in Melbourne, I am satisfied with that.

Did I wish you Merry Xmas? Well, a Happy New Year then, just for the record. A lot of things happened since that last time I blogged during the night while waiting for my wallet to come back! Let me give you a short insight of what happened.
On the morning of December 26th Marc and I flew to Melbourne to hang out some days and see the city before starting our adventure trip on Tassie. I gotta say that I liked the city immediately and I also understood what people had in mind telling me that it has a European style. We got ourselves a backpacker hostel right next to the Federation Square, a good point to start our exploration. Since we did not really study the Lonely Planet before the trip we managed to make heavy use of the tourists office which (and here I am serious) is the best one I have ever been to. We got heaps of tips, maps, walking guides, car rental companies and a truck load of ideas how to see the Great Ocean Road - a lot of filtering had to be done. We decided to give the walking tours a go for shopping definately wasn't our main interest and chilling here and there while seeing the great sport locations, the parcs, some historical sights sounded just good. What I enjoyed most was the river running through the city's heart, with lots of cool things to see, especially at night, sculptures, fancy fountains, the exhibitions center, artists, funny people, ... and whatnot.
Strolling through the city we found ourselves in the Melbourne Central shopping mall, hey, this complex is soo huge, going over four blocks (including several bridges over streets), somehow hidden, really well equipped and architecturally absolutely astonishing from the inside! As we discovered it held a cinema (of course) we decided to watch King Kong that night. However, no time for a movie review.