Archive for the ‘darmstadt’ Category

New homepage for the Graduiertenkolleg.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2003

Soon I will change the layout of our post-graduate college’s homepage – it is utterly ugly and confusing now. You should take a look and try to navigate a bit. It’s embarassing. I hope you’ll like the new layout: it will have no tables, it will be W3C conform, more accessible for handicapped people, no frames – but, it doesn’t work well with Netscape 4.x …
A test page will go online in a few days, I would appreciate any feedback then.

Mehr Deutschlandfunk – dieses Mal sogar mit Online Portrait.

Friday, September 5th, 2003

Der Deutschlandfunk hat auf seiner Campus&Karriere Seite eine Vorschau auf die Sendung vom Vergangenen Samstag gestellt. Da gibt es auch ein Portrait von mir. Schon komisch… bin natürlich stolz drauf, aber etwas unwohl ist mir dabei auch.
Leider gibt es da keinen Link zun Anhören des Features vom vergangenen Samstag; falls jemand die Sendung aufgezeichnet hat: Bitte sagt mir Bescheid!

musste den Eintrag noch mal ändern, da ich vergessen hatte, dass “&” in Campus&Karriere zu kodieren… so geht’s ja schließlich nicht!

Das Kolleg im Äther.

Saturday, August 16th, 2003

Meine lieben Blogleserinnen und Blogleser: Am 23. August (ein Samstag) wird es eine erste Sendung über das Graduiertenkolleg, an dem ich promoviere, im Deutschlandfunk geben. Die Sendung läuft um 14:05 Uhr im Rahmung der hochschulpolitischen Reihe des Deutschlandfunks “Campus und Karriere”.
Die Sendung ist die erste (lange) Vorab-Sendung zu unserem Kolleg, über das im Anschluss monatlich in einem Beitrag von ein paar Minuten Länge berichtet wird.

Stellt die Empfänger an – Hörfunk rules!

*sigh*

Wednesday, July 30th, 2003

It had been time. I’ve been away from Choriner Strasse, away from Berlin for almost three weeks. As I’ve realized, this is pretty long, especially if one spends most of the time in Darmstadt. It is quite refreshing to be back and watch the capital crowd moving through the streets and flaneuring below our balcony.

The real holidays are almost there (I’ll be gone during most of August). However, actually being here in Berlin can be relaxing too. I would never have believed that I would say that seven years ago, when I was living in quiet Kiel ;-)

Offline until Monday.

Saturday, July 26th, 2003

Another wedding… This weekend Kerstin, Christian, Maja and yours truly will be celebrating the wedding of Jascha and Sabine! Later today we’ll introduce Chr and Maja to one of the local Biergartens here in Darmstadt – at least if they arrive before nineish. There seem to be some heavy traffic jams on the way from Berlin to Darmstadt. Poor them. Hopefully, it won’t take us too long to get to Tübingen tomorrow. Perhaps we’ll drive through the Odenwald. As we all know, the shortest way is not necessarily the fastet…

It’s too darn hot.

Monday, July 21st, 2003

I want to apologize for the absence of posts during the last days. Right now my weather app reports 36° C. Kerstin and I are living a vegetable’s life here in southwestern Germany. However, yesterday we spent a very nice and refreshing afternoon at the Griesheim outdoor pool. After languishing a bit more here in the Arbeitsraum in Darmstadt, we’ll probably be back to the pool with a big *sigh* later today.
After that we’ll have a tête à tête barbecue with lots of cold beverages on our balcony… Hopefully we’ll have a big thunderstorm soon, things are really drying up. Especially those supposedly greyish and squishy things in my head.

What are you doing to cope with the heat? Any refreshing tips and strategies to offer?

35° Celsius?!

Wednesday, July 16th, 2003

Das sagt die Wettervorhersage für morgen. Kerstin, viel Spaßbei der Anreise im PKW… Ich war gerade im Woog (d.h. im öffentlichen Badesee hier) und werd mir nun mit einem meiner Mitbewohner zusammen eine Pizza gönnen. Bisher hatte ich noch keine einzige leckere Pizza hier in Darmstadt – vielleicht wird’s ja die Premiere, der Laden ist uns jedenfalls schon mehrfach empfohlen worden. Ich werde berichten. Und schwitzen.

Back from science + fiction and bustling Karlsruhe.

Monday, July 14th, 2003

The exhibition was good, we had a nice guide. You should probably check it out yourself. This is a link to the brain that they had on display. They also had some other interesting exhibitions and installations at the ZKM and they also had the obligatory nice museum book store. After being pointed to an interesting book by my co-Kollegiat Lars Meier (Urban Encounters by Helen Liggett) I spent some money for the mentioned book and for Iconoclash by Bruno Latour. Now I am feeling somewhat more like an intellectual again.
On Friday, we had the opportunity to see some Nanotechnology dinosaurs from the University of Karlsruhe. They were acting as one would expect: After some people were asking critical questions about nanotechnology in general one of the first questions they asked us (the members of the Graduiertenkolleg) was “Who of you studied physics? Chemistry? Mathematics?”. Well, looks like we’re not qualified… ;-) It was fun anyway especially since we were werved water and juice in measuring glasses that are usally used in labs.
Besides the work-related things that we saw, we also had some time to roam around the city. I must say that I am positively impressed. There was a lot of life on the street up until late in the night. Is this because of the proximity to France? Is it because of the climate? Whatever it’s causes, it was quite a striking difference to the Darmstadt experience. Although… yesterday, Sir Elton John gave a concert here in Darmstadt. See?

Getting rid of the toughest obstacles.

Friday, June 27th, 2003

One of the major hurdles on the way to finishing my dissertation was taken today. I now am a proud bearer of an ID card for the Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek Darmstadt (the library I will use mainly here in Darmstadt). And, I do not only have a standard student ID, no no, I have a special feature member-of-the-TU-Darmstadt-staff ID. What a feat! Now everything else looks like it could be done with the wink of an eyelid.

Na? Mal vorbeischauen?

Wednesday, June 25th, 2003

Heute hab’ ich vielen Leuten meine neue Anschrift in Griesheim gemailt, vielleicht finden ja einige davon den Weg von meiner Mail auf diese Seite…
Für Menschen aus meiner ehemaligen Stufe: Ich habe mittlerweile Adressen von 26 Leuten aus unserem Abijahrgang. Das reicht noch nicht! Wer mir also noch keine Adressen gesandt hat: E-Mail an mich schicken :-)
Ansonsten muss ich sagen, dass dieser Sommer sich ziemlich gut anlässt – das Wetter hier in Darmstadt ist schon seit Wochen tipp topp. Es wäre eigentlich mal wieder an der Zeit, den Grill anzuwerfen. Doch heute Abend wird Sybille in Space, Place, Power über die Geschichte des Potsdamer Platzes sprechen und da geh ich natürlich hin!

In trockenen Tüchern.

Saturday, June 21st, 2003

So, zur Abwechslung mal in deutsch. Und zwar weil ich den Ausdruck in trockenen Tüchern so gerne mag. Stellt sich bloss die Frage, was nun eigentlich in trockenen Tüchern ist. Es ist: Der Sommerurlaub. Warum? Weil das alte Mietkautionskonto endlich freigegeben worden ist. Jo.
Und sonst? Hier ist’s Wetter netter als daheim, was mich ja schon mal erfreut; desweiteren werd ich heute Abend wohl zum ersten mal seit vielen Monaten wieder eine Runde Neverwinter Nights mit Timo dädeldaddeln. Sozusagen in Vorbereitung auf das (hoffentlich baldige) Erscheinen der NWN Mac Version. Die hätte ja eigentlich schon vor einem Jahr fertig sein sollen, aber manchmal ist der Mac dann doch eine exklusivere Plattform als ich es mir wünschen würde.
Bis Timo so weit ist, werde ich vielleicht noch mal ein paar Buffy Folgen aus der finalen Staffel rekapitulieren, auf dem Schlossplatz wandeln, mir einen kleinen Snack besorgen und ein bisschen das Treiben anschauen. Und vielleicht auch noch ein bisschen mit meinen Liebsten chatten.

Monday in Japan.

Sunday, June 15th, 2003

Sabu. Know the name? I didn’t know it but I will try to remember it from now on (his real name is Hiroyuki Tanaka, probably too complicated to remember for my measly mind). Thursday at eight p.m. I went to the Audimax of the TU Darmstadt where the university’s filmclub shows movies every Tuesday and Thursday for only € 2. The screen is big and the quality of sound and picture nice enough. The movie itself was very good. Slow shots but a lot of crazy content that develeops it’s own speed. I’m not too much into the content summary business. As I myself prefer to not know much about a movie before I watch I won’t say too much about the story and events in this movie. (Trailer)

There are a lot of tragic and funny ideas in this movie and the way tragedy and humor are handled reminded me of a good article I read in the May issue of Le Monde diplomatique (in Deutsch, in English). In this article, Milan Kundera (I didn’t like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, sorry) writes about what tragedy and humor in a novel could (or should?) be like – what he describes is similar to what I enjoyed most about the movie. Why the change of mind about Kundera’s writing, you might ask… he likes and cites Cervantes’ Don Quixote. This ensures my sympathy for his text. It’s quite easy to satisfy my intellectual expectations ;-)

A place of boiling heat and rattlesnakes.

Friday, June 13th, 2003

It’s too damn hot. Says Ella and she’s right. And we don’t even have time to go swimming. And the Woog’s (outdoor swimming pool/lake here in Darmstadt) temperature will probably be too high to be refreshing anyway. Therefore, I’ll try to doze through the afternoon dreaming about a Gespritzter in the Biergarten.

An idea for a common project for the Kolleg.

Monday, June 9th, 2003

Thursday night, when I drove home alone from the Kraftwerk to Griesheim I was fighting with the squatty WG-Mountainbike, stomping into the pedals. At the same time I was fiercely engaged in thinking about how we could find a good common subject or theme for the seminar which will be kindly offered by Andreas Hetzel beginning in the Winter semester 2003/2004. We had serious difficulties in finding a subject that would enable everyone in the Kolleg to really contribute something without straying too far from the path the individual dissertations are taking. After producing a decent amount of sweat and wrinkled brows an idea was generated: We could pick up these difficulties and make them our subject. We could combine the efforts we put in this seminar, into the Kolleg, and into our dissertations by writing and working on the subject of Technology and Interdisciplinarity. We could reflect our own theoretical and methodological (and perhaps even our personal/social) position. It might even be possible for a few to try to map the positions we take in a Bourdieuan sense, distributed on a field of knowledge and power. Yeah!>

Gruseliger Style.

Monday, June 2nd, 2003

Gestern nach abgeschlossenem Spaziergang auf der wirklich wunderbaren Mathildenhöhe (viel schöner Jugendstil, viele Boule Spieler, es gab gerade ein Open Air Klassik Konzert) und nach anschließendem Aufenthalt im Biergarten zurück nach Griesheim geradelt. Da “zum Einschlafen” noch gemeinsam mit Christian The Others mit Nicole Kidman geschaut. Eigentlich bin ich ja nicht son Gruselfan, aber das war schon ein echter Knüller. Mit coolen Wendungen in der Handlung, düsteren Kameraschwenks und der richtigen Portion Wahnsinn.

Another sunny day, the Mathildenhöhe is waiting

Sunday, June 1st, 2003

Back in our working room in the Kraftwerk, a strong iced coffee in my veins. The plan for today is to pretend to work a bit, write another entry for the blog, and then take a walk to the Mathildenhöhe, a nice hill with a park, some museums, and a Russian chapel on it. There Eleni, Christian and I will loiter around a bit and probably consume some more coffee containing beverages.

Other than that, I’ll check out the trains going to Mannheim or ‘Mannem’, because I’ll visit Master Reimer tomorrow. My first visit to the City of God. We’ll see what kind of entertainment David will come up with …

Steinbruch – a disco experience

Sunday, June 1st, 2003

Ah, the internet, a marvel… you can check out where I spent Thursday night here. Seems as if this joint has quite a history.

It was a real old school experience. The thing was already full of people dancing and drinking when we arrived at around 23:30h. No to-cool-to-start-dancing-before-who-knows-when-style like in Berlin. Instead, it was quite similar to the Romaris back home. Rock’n’Roll. Yeah. Nice distribution of ages, no aggressive people, and a dancefloor that is just big enough.

I’ve been there together with Alex and Andreas, both of them co-kollegiates, both of them jumping and dancing until we were all sweat and exhaustion. If this is what life in Darmstadt will be like, well, then there is some fun in store for us…>

The first ‘real’ stay in Darmstadt

Saturday, May 31st, 2003

When I arrived here in Darmstadt yesterday I was wondering what the coming days would bring. I’ll stay here until next Friday, when I’ll be going up north to attend the wedding of Meik and Katja on Saturday (old school, stylish wedding – yeah!). They brought a lot of warm and moist weather and they also brought the nicest side-effects warm weather can have: allowing one to loiter around in outdoor swimming pools. Here in Darmstadt we have the “Woog”, a lake close to the city’s center. It’s nice, only 1 EUR entrance fee, not too crowded and the water was as refreshing as one could wish it to be.
After enjoying the weather, doing some water-diving for the first time since ages and even playing some volleyball I was pretty exhausted. And happy. Praise going to outdoor swimming pools together with some nice buddies!

Tomorrow I might want to tell you about my first visit to a discotheque in South-Western Germany. The ‘Steinbruch’….