my day

This is another entry that comes way to late. But this time it is because I actually did what I wanted to do last Saturday instead of October 9th. What it was? Well, my mate Bjou had this really cool idea: As he was in Sydney in August he decided to leave something for me and gave me instructions to go and reveal it. Isn't that great. I wanted to do that some times but kept forgetting the treasure map or just didn't make it to the right spot (we had some really rainy days lately). But this Saturday was the day. My great treasure hunt was about to get done! As I was on showing the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney to Laura, a friend of Labi studying in Melbourne and visition Sydney, we came to the Opera House where Bjou's hints led me to a sign (see the picture) telling about Fort MacQuarie. However, I couldn't find a mark that was supposed to be on it, but as I was seeking something that had been hidden for quite a while now, I none the less startet digging. That was a weird situation as people passing by gave me strange looks, but nobody said anything. So, in about 15cm depth, I found the lid of something, kept going and brought up a little conditioner bottle (probably taken from his hotel). It was obvious that there was a letter in it - and I was excited to read it. It turned out to be no that easy. I wasn't able to get it out without jumping on it. Jumping on it three times, to be precise. It was really cool to hold something in my hands a good friend put there. Isn't that strange to know that he was sitting at that very same place a couple of month ago? Amazing. The letter was dated to August 11th, that makes it nearly four month, and even had a message to somebody finding it by accident. What was written in it? That is non disclosure. Tell you what, I gotta keep that piece of paper. Thanks Bjou!

... Yes, my hair got a bit out of control over the past months.

I should have written this weeks ago, but there was a lack of visual material (and this one was promised to be on the web). Joachim, one of IMAGEN's researchers, is a Swedish, who not that long ago moved to Sydney. As he lives near Clovelly Pool (cause he's a passionate scuba diver), one of the beaches south of Bondi, Marc and I invaded his untroubled asylum as he had offered to show us around in the world of snorkling. Yeah, snorkling. It is just sooo much fun. I would have never believed that the under water world is already that crowded here in the southern regions and that near of the coast. But apparently there are a lot of cool spots around Sydney, hopefully we will get to see some more, let's meet some sharks. However, we did not only take this opportunity once but twice and both times got invited into a really got after show program: one time there was a cocktail houswarming party that Mani (J's spouse) was preparing, while we kidnapped Joachim to come with us. It was really nice, great drinks and tons of food. Well, and the other day Mani and Joachim came up with the idea of a homecooked dinner. Cool ... and really funny as you see how this laid back Swedish works in the kitchen. The outcome was a tasty Indish curry, didn't try that before. Thanks again. Btw: afterwards we played a board game (Carcassone), I kicked their asses.
By now I am thinking about getting a padi dive license, but taking a course might be impossible in terms of time and money.

Imagine you are a few thousand km away from home and still you can't escape some ghosts haunting you. Well, not that I tried. As I had to backup heaps of data to Nick's computer (to low-level-format mine; took about 8h) I some seconds ago started getting shit back. I was curiously browsing several folders he had shared and had to discover ... oh, I barely have the heart to tell: Do you remember this annoying kid pissing us off by chanting its even more annoying song for weeks? Yes, I am talking about the Schni-Schna-Schnappi phenomenom (this isn't a link for some really good reasons). Oh dear, he does not only have the song on his hdd but also the video that came with it. I could honestly tell him, that I'd never seen it before - this virginity is no gone forever.
But on the other hand I had a really cool incident like this the other day. While I was working in the kitchen I thought I had heard a melody I know just too good. But at first I couldn't really tell from where. This had happened before and now I wanted to know! Well, looking for the noise I found it's origin pretty fast: It's our washing machine (a Samsung) that plays the same melody as our in other regards only loosely related Samsung in KA. The first part of the (actually really long) song it plays after finishing its cycle is the same ... and nothing less. Home sweet home.

Phew, I just attended a really promising talk by Dr. Radia Perlman (don't miss out her awards; she's also written two of the top 10 Networking reference books, according to Network Magazine) titled "how to build an insecure system out of perfectly good cryptography". I was a bit late, so I missed her introduction but as I knew about her cv a bit I was sure to hear some outstanding things. In fact I was a bit surprised to get to know her opinions on "web of trust"-models (aka the "anarchy model") but had a laugh listening to the "monopoly model" bashing Versign et al. Though it's a bit disappointing that such a personality had no better comments to the open source approaches than mentioning untrustable keychains. I felt like comparing apples and oranges - in my opinion there is not a big difference between checking persons' ids at "geeks' keysigning parties" and trusting somebody I can meet in person cause he works in the ca of my company. Well, except that my key might be signed by a lot of trustworthy people you know in person that are responsible enough to only sign keys of others they know as good. I felt reminded to one of Paul's talks on GBDE when she stated that she probably would sign anything when her children where kidnapped. Kidnapped to break crypto... way out of proportion to my use (so far).
However, at least she introduced some possibilites for larger communities and gave nice case studies comparing to kerberos and MS's domain controller approach. She also stated that there is no way to pass over public key encryption when you want to gain real secure environments. By the way, it was also funny listening to her thoughts on proofs of security and the meanings of breaking hash functions. It was kinda entertaining but not a real enrichment in terms of knowledge. Talking to her afterwards I could even give her some hints on googles page rank - I would like to know if she will mention that gimmick in her next talk on this. Well, on the whole there was no solution to the ever upcoming problem of trusting at least somebody, not that I had expected something alike.

This morning I finally managed to get up early to give city running a shot. I will have to do that constantly in the future, for (even with the daylight saving) it's still getting dark before 8pm, sunset is around 7:39pm at the moment. I had decided to do the Anzac Bridge, a longe one facing Glebe Point and promissing a nice view. I planned the track at home, but neither took the traffic lights into consideration nor some quite steep hills within Glebe and Annandale. I planned to be back after 50min, this obviously didn't work out, as I got lost twice. Although I looked at a map before leaving the house, it wasn't too easy to find the ramp to the pedestrian walk over the bridge and later I took a false road in Camperdown (although I should know the area). As it got hot durning my run (don't know degrees, at the moment it's 86°F) I felt exhausted afterwards (might go together with a lack of training the last weeks) and was a little late for work. It also came back to my mind, that I agreed to play tennis today, which is great fun every week (Did I mention, that we got two courts?), so I might have an early night as well...

Yesterday, after the bike tour, we had a cool orginial Australian BBQ in our fully equipped backyard. I got to know that I live with the BBQ King, Adrian seems to have this title at least amongst the bunch of people that came over to our place. For there was no special reason for the event, my housemates decided it could be my housewarming. I invited some people from the hostel and my fellows from work and as this was just the addition to the usual suspects it became crowded. Well done. We had some wine accidents (putting unnamed persons away) and of course some jokes about my tofu on the barbie, but in the end I got even compliments for that. I got show some pictures here, but I didn't wanna make a choice... Sander told me I should just take a picture of the huge leafy palm in the yard, that would be impressive enough. He's right, I guess. Maybe this follows the next days.

Yesterday Marc, Sander and I rode our bikes to Manly. I was told before that the North Sydney area and Manly would be really beautiful and all that turned out to be true. After we had some trouble to get started (I wished Marc had a mobile phone) we had to do an unplanned stop on (yeah, on) the Harbour Bridge: a flat tire on Marc's racing bike. But this was quickly fixed and soon after that we found ourselves riding up and down the steep hills in the expensive neighbourhoods. I am pretty sure we didn't find a shortcut, but after little more than an hour we arrived in Manly. Still I don't get why everybody was shaking his head when we came up with that trip idea ... it wasn't too hard or long.
Manly beach isn't as crowed and occupied by tourists as Bondi or Cogee, there are some velley ball fields and (at least yesterday) neither a good surf nor a lot of surfers trying to find waves. So we went swimming twice and played frisbee in the sand. I love diving for to do the hard catches... Marc spent quite a while digging a really good whole but still didn't reach ground water. We should have placed a bet on that. Sander and I buried him in the very same whole afterwards and took some of the traditional pictures.
We didn't go back by bike but took the ferry from Manly to Circular Quay. It's true that you get some got shots from the front deck, although the sun was allready setting behind the city (or because of that?) See yourself.



It was my first real left riding day and I got used to it within the first 10mins. It's not as dangerous as I expected and despite the fact that people keep telling me that riding a bike in Sydney was an adventure, I feel that the cars show the same respect as in Germany. In addition to that it's obvious that within the city and on the big streets you can ride a lot faster than drive a car

Last Monday Ian had to leave. Well, I guess he wanted to leave, for his journey continues and takes him to New Zealand and later on to the United States. As he spend a lot of time with us and we did lots of funny things, it was no question to celebrate his goodbye. We decided to go to a Thai restaurant in Newtown, I hadn't done that before (so it was time) and for Ian and Greg it was kind of a revival. Marc joined in and so we got a table for four. This was also the first time for me to experience BYO (bring your own): as a lot of restaurants are not licensed to serve alcohol they allow you to bring your own bottles of wine, beer, whatever. They will charge two bucks for opening them and providing glasses, the rest is up to you. So we had a bottle of red wine. The restaurant had opend the very day before we came there and so they were excited about every guest and served us really good. The food was delicous and ... looked quite unfamiliar for me. Take a look at the picture and tell me if you saw me eating something like that (is it meat, huh?) before.
Back at the hostel a few hours later I packed my bag (as I had to check out the next morning) and we went out for another last coffee. I might have to do a Scottland tour now, Ireland could be added to this list as well. Goodbye Ian, we'll miss your accent.

Last Saturday we finally made it to Sydney's Botanical Gardens (next to the CBD). It's astonishing to see this resort directly within the city.
Marc, Ian and I drove to Central Station and walked up to the Bay. We took the long way next to the sea and enjoyed watching the nature with this really urban background. I was surprised to see millions of bats hanging and sleeping in the treetops. Looks a bit weird and is known to destroy a lot of plants there. Funny thing: they have signs encouraging everybody to step on the grass, smell the flowers and hug the trees. As you can imagine, I did. We also thought about crushing a wedding that was celebrated there, but ended up sitting on a wall watching the actions, enjoying the musicans they hired. It was nice and I checked off another must do from my list. I am sure it wasn't the last time as I didn't go running there so far. What a pitty that I once again lost Bjous instructions (printed em three times so far). Dude, I will find it!

Sooner or later everybody has to go, I knew that. But sometimes I (we?) keep forgetting about other people's view on live, work, occasions. As he started work the very same day I did there wasn't a difference for me between him and other resident researches. He was known for his million faces (including the famous Magnum), his appreciation of quiet evenings and his love of wobbeling graph landscapes. Well, after three weeks it became clear that nothing lasts forever...



... and so it came that our dear friend and co-worker Andrew Cunningham left. At the young age of 23 he took a plane back to Adelaide, his family and spouse. Take care mate, I'll give you a ring if I make it there.