Imagine...
There is a G8 summit and three out of eight head of states are... female. It's not completely impossible if the French do the right thing in two weeks and vote for
Segolene Royal and the Americans go for
Hilary next year.
It wouldn't probabely change much on the contents, but it would look nice (yeah, yeah this is a matter of taste, but women are normally dressed a bit less uniform...) and
slightly unusual on the pictures. And then again if it doesn't change much on the contents why is it so unusual.
Noch mehr Unfaehigkeiten
Vor ungefaehr vielen Wochen habe ich mich mal bei der
Packstation angemeldet, weil ich ja nie da bin, wenn die Post kommt und das Postamt zum Abholen hier auf dem Lande ja bereits um 18.00 schliesst. Ausserdem gibt es eine Packstation, die naeher bei mir ist
als die Hauptpost, wo ich die Sachen abholen muss.
Seither versuchen die alle 10 Tage mir ein Begruessungset zuzustellen, da ist u.a. eine Karte drin mit der ich die Schraenke in der Packstation dann aufmachen kann, wenn was fuer mich da ist.
Aus irgendeinem albernen Grund, verschicken die das per Einschreiben, aber wie gesagt, ich bin ja nie da wenn die Post kommt. Also bekomme ich alle 10 Tage von denen ne SMS, und kurz darauf ne email, dass sie versucht haben mir. was zuzustellen und ich soll da und da anrufen (viele Cents pro minute im deutschen Festnetz) oder eine email schreiben. Da schreib ich dann immer hin, sie moegen das doch bitte bei meinen Nachbarn hinterlassen (was sie nicht tun, weil das per Einschreiben kommt, und meine Nachbarn eine Vollmacht dafuer braeuchten, aber sie sagen auch nicht, wann sie kommen. Ich kann ja nun nicht allen Nachbarn Vollmachten verteilen, oder einem Nachbarn befehlen rund um dir Uhr zu Hause zu sein.) oder mir wenigstens einen Zettel in den Briefkasten tun, damit ich es (wie das klassische vor-Paketstation-Paket) bei der Post abholen kann. Das passiert aber nie, nur immer diesselbe SMS nach weiteren 10 Tagen. Letzte Woche habe ich sogar bei der Hotline angerufen, aber es schien nicht, dass die Dame hintern Telefon den Zulieferungsdienst von der DHL irgendwie beieinflussen kann. Ich warte also auf die naechste SMS und habe vor der DHL bei jeder SMS/mail wieder zu antworten, dass ich noch Interesse an der Packstation habe und dass sie mir doch sagen sollen, wann ich das Zeug bei der Post abholen kann. Das scheint zwar niemanden da zu interessieren, aber die mail hab ich ja schon. Moegen sie halt an ihren ewigen Zustellversuchen verrecken.
What physics is good for...
There is an
nice article on Spiegel online about a physicists analysis of a
mysterious manuscript from the middle ages. He runs several physics inspired tests (including a random walk analysis) on the text and concludes it is nonsense, because the patterns are very different from what you find in a natural language.
theoretical physics rules...
Now, with the start of the summer term and the arrival of the students, the number of bikes has again
increased by one half. There are six now. And two of them belong to people working on the theoretical physics floor.
The long way to Frau Müller
One of the rather stupid things I did in the last two and a half month (sic!) was to buy a laptop. Well that is not so stupid as such, but the point is that
Wo
convinced me that it is much more rational to buy a used three year old former top end machine, rather than a up-to-date one (which is overprized and in the end you don't really need it, but of course you have the technology geek thrill) or a cheap new bargain laptop (which I never really considered because I kind of started to like IBM Thinkpads). When it comes to rationality it's a good thing to believe Wo, and hey, after all he is right in principle.
So I decided to buy a Thinkpad T40p for around 750 Euros on ebay. And that is where the misery started. I tried two merchants (that's already one too many!): I got the first device from
Magic Devices in Munich. The screen was faulty (it had a white spot the size of a thumb), and one of the 'enter keys' at the touchpad was broken. Of course on ebay they had claimed that the device was in perfect conditions. I sent it back. They offered me a new one instead, which I refused because I didn't trust them anymore. If one computer has such obvious shortcomings, and they still ship it, it means that they either want to fool you or they have not looked at it at all, so why should they look at another one? That's what I thought. So I preferred to try out another shop:
Luxnote. I got their notebook and guess what? Well the screen was imperfect (there was a dark shadow at the bottom) and one USB port was broken. And it was broken in such a way that you could notice just from looking at it, you did not even have try it. The guy from Luxnote proposed to pay me back 50 Euros, but who wants a laptop with a faulty screen? I would never have bought it, if had said in the description that these things were broken. So I sent it back again. This time I agreed, as they proposed to send me another one instead. Because, hey, why should any second hand notebook retailer look at his devices before he ships them? That's a completely silly idea, if you come to think of it. I made him promise that it would be ok this time. Which of course he did. In dubio pro reo, you see as long as you have not looked at the computer why should anything be broken, see?
So I got the replacement, and wow, a nice screen, working USB ports, but when I configured my internet connection, I noticed that linux could only detect one network interface, but there should have been an Ethernet and a Wireless card. I updated the BIOS, I made sure wireless was enabled in the BIOS, I run the
IBM System update under Windows. Nothing. No trace of a WLAN interface nor in Windows nor in linux. So I complained with the guy. I told him, what I had done.
The answer was "you have to install the driver."
Fine, but which one? I asked him for the specification of the card in order to find the right one. No answer. Of course. Why should
he know what's in there.
In the end I opened the laptop, and as I already suspected there was simply no Mini PCI Wlan card. I wrote again and he promised to send me one.
He promised to send me one and yesterday it arrived finally, of course it's not as good as in the original specification, but hey, who can expect to get what he was promised.
These people seem really to sell any crap that comes into their hands and then hope that the customer finds it too complicated to complain or is too stupid to find out. What would you get for a Thinkpad with a bad screen and only one USB port, if you announce it as such? Not much, certainly not 700 Euros, so he would make a very good deal if somebody accepts his generous 50 Euros discount.
I just don't understand why they don't check a machine they get, before they sell it? And then state honestly what's in there? This sending laptops forth and back and complaining every second day is just ennoying.
And imagine it wasn't me but somebody like my parents who freak out when a new icon appears on there Desktop, you cannot expect them to open a laptop to find out what's in there.
These days, I read an article in a Linux magazine (don't remember which one) where they tested second hand laptop shops and their experience matched pretty much mine.
But hey, I should be grateful for their rubbish. I will never get rid off windows in a more elegant way:
During my search for a WLAN adapter I installed a driver from
Broadcom hoping it would work on the "card". The installer didn't find a certain file and hanged with an error message, whenever you click away this error message, it pops up again after two seconds. No way of killing the process with a task manager or so. So after a while I opted for a power cut. But the driver had found the time to install a link in the windows boot scripts, so now when I boot windows I get this lovely error message popping up forever and booting is stalled. That's what you call quality software. On the other hand I cannot mount the windows drive writable in linux and delete the link, because it complains about some other corrupted stuff due to the power cut and asks me to boot windows first and check the disk. (Not even forced mount works). Nice. But well, who wants windows anyway?
And finally you see, I would never have had the pleasure to meet
Frau Müller who was hiding in the PC Card slot. I am still wondering whether this laptop is actually trying to tell me that it wants to be called "Frau Müller. But I have my standards, it has already been baptized "Frau Malzahn".
On the other hand at Augsburg University there is a
Frau Müller working in office 2088. So it must have been her computer. Thanks a lot Frau Müller!
das gute an Wuppertal ist...
... dass man hier problemlos auf dem Gehweg radeln kann, gibt sowieso keine Fussgänger.
conundrum
What's this?!
(Well, I know it's a little paper where it says "2088 Fr. Müller" in red letters and some other numbers and letters in blue, but the real puzzle is to guess, how it came into my hands.)
If somebody finds out, before
I give it away by tomorrow, I will invite him/her over for dinner.
Satz des Tages
Die Werte können dem Graf entnommen werden.
Hab ich heute bei
LEO gefunden. Da uebersetzt wohl einer ein Drehbuch zu einem Splatterfilm oder er hat da was nicht ganz verstanden mit der neuen deutschen Rechtschreibung.
University traffic
There are too many people who use the vast parking garage of this
university. (Unfortunately it was built in the 70ies, when people thought that in the brave new world of the future everybody would own a car (which is true) and that this would be paradise (it's pretty much the opposite). There would be an easy way to change this: Charge money for it. You could f.ex. have those students that want to use it, paying twice the new
inscription fee, and this money would be used to lower the inscription fees for students without cars. Or at least the one with cars have to pay the money for their own Semesterticket, plus a
Semesterticket for somebody else. Of course, this is impossible since here in Western Germany climate change is something you talk about, not something you live accordingly. Especially in Wuppertal because they always have this fishy excuse: "Huh it's so hilly here, you cannot possibly bike, you need a car here."
I know some people in Switzerland who crossed the alps with an old bike with only three gears. And not that they trained for it before.
