Archive for 2004

Leipzig Hauptbahnhof und die Promenaden.

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

Ich habe grad mal eine vorläufige Galerie mit Bildern des Leipziger Hauptbahnhofs und des dazugehörigen Einkaufszentrums online gestellt. Die Bilder sind mit meiner Videokamera aufgenommen und noch nicht weiter bearbeitet, deswegen ist die Qualität nicht so riesig – ich habe auch einen Haufen Dias gemacht, die ich aber noch einscannen muss. Aber einen Blick kann man schon mal riskieren…

My favorite browser has been updated.

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

You can now download the newest release of Camino, the Mac OS X native browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. If you ask yourself why you should download and use this browser, check this blog entry.

Berlin – Darmstadt – Oslo.

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

BIG news: Kerstin has been accepted as a research fellow by the University of Oslo! She got one of the highly sought after “universitetsstipendiatstillinger.” Wow. In a bit more than a month Kerstin will be living in the Norwegian capital. OMG!

Wir Vogelzivis.

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004

So ein bisschen Gemeinschaftsbildung ist doch immer wieder erfreulich – insbesondere, wenn sie einen meiner schönsten Lebensabschnitte betrifft: Meine Zeit als Vogelzivi auf Juist.
Auf der Seite www.vogelzivi.de haben Zivis meiner damaligen Dienststelle StAIK (heute NLWK) ein recht umfangreiches Informationsangebot zu Ihrer Arbeit auf den Inseln und an der Küste eingerichtet. Respekt! So wie es aussieht, sind die Zivis der besten aller Ostfriesischen Inseln für die Seite verantwortlich: die Juister. Yeah, Juister Vogelzivis rocken!
Werde demnächst mal ein paar Bilder von den mir bekannten Ex-Zivis an die Jungs schicken. Jetzt fehlt nur noch ein großes Ex-Vogelzivi Treffen, dass schon zum Ende meiner Dienstzeit 1995 von Martin Reuter angekündigt wurde…

Actually entertaining, therefore much better.

Monday, June 21st, 2004

I never thought I would go and watch another Harry Potter sequel in a movie theater, thinking that I might as well throw the money from my balcony and be a happier Lars than I would have been after watching The Prisoner Of Azkaban. Then I heard that the director of this movie is the director of the fabulous Y Tu Mama Tambien and suddenly became interested. I liked this movie a lot more than the other two; it was magical and the setting both gloomier and more fairy-tale-like. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t recommend this movie to people who don’t like fantasy settings or the Harry Potter series. For such an audience, the movie is not good enough. I was very relieved that it wasn’t as bland and superficially funny as the first two movies. Do I have to mention that I would have totally adored Emma Watson (a.k.a. Hermione) in my teens?
IMDb entry | Trailer

Waves of comment spam.

Saturday, June 19th, 2004

Comment spam is becoming more frequent these weeks. Yesterday I had to delete about 20 comments that were linking to a bunch of porn sites. Usually, I only have a few scattered comment spams per week, but sometimes there is a more massive generation of comment entries. I am hoping that the next revision of my blogging tool Blosxom will include some kind of anti-comment spam mechanism that does not rely on password protection (which I wouldn’t want to introduce).

Darmstadt goes Berlin. Later, Berlin will go Leipzig.

Thursday, June 10th, 2004

During the next week or so I won’t have much time to spend writing entries to this blog – today the post-graduate college’s excursion to Berlin starts (they already arrived at Zoo station), and I will have visitors and a tight program until Sunday. We will be visiting the Cargolifter site in Brandt, Brandenburg, the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften; I will be the guide for a tour through eastern part of central Berlin and so forth.

On sunday or monday I will go to Leipzig to do field research at the main railway station – to this I am really looking forward, the Leipziger Hauptbahnhof is quite an impressive building.

Postkoloniale Küche mit südhessischen Einflüssen.

Tuesday, June 8th, 2004

Hier mein Rezept für Bratwurst à l’ancienne europe. Zutaten: mindestens zwei Schalotten, eine frische grobe Bratwurst pro Nase, reichlich frische Petersilie, Reis und (tata!) Äppelwoi (a.k.a. Apfelwein oder Eppler). Den Reis wie sonst auch kochen, die Würste in heisser Pfanne kurz scharf anbraten, dann rausnehmen und bei kleiner Flamme die kleingehakten Zwiebeln glasig garen. Dann wieder rein mit den Würsten und bei mittlerer Hitze ordentlich Äppelwoi dazukippen. Diese Chose runterkochen lassen, dann noch einmal nachfüllen und mit der kleingehakten Petersilie noch ein bis zwei Minuten köcheln lassen. Das wars. Würste und Zwiebel-Petersilien-Apfelwein Soße über den Reis und reingehauen. Ist angenehm leicht. Dazu vielleicht ein bisschen Brot reichen.
Das Ursprungsrezept (Saucisses fraiches de Pomy), stammt von Herbert Schui, Vereinfachung und hessische Einflüsse gehen auf meine Kappe.

Ignoring that the private is political.

Sunday, June 6th, 2004

Without following this motto watching The Day After Tomorrow is barely bearable. Too many clichées and stereotypes, bland dialogue, and unconvincing storylining. However, not only are the special effects adequately large scaled, but there are also some pretty funny stabs at US politics and the north-south divide – I for my part wouldn’t have expected so much (albeit implicit) criticism of US politics. Which doesn’t say that much because I expected almost nothing…
IMDb entry | Trailer

More information about you.

Thursday, June 3rd, 2004

Me? Yes, about you. SiteMeter, the service which I use to analyze the traffic on my site, seems to have upgraded its statistic tools so that their diagrams now differentiate between Netscape and Mozilla browsers (the detailed reports of single visits always did) and between Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X systems (again, the detailed reports show the information as provided by the browser, which usually includes such information). These are welcome additions which I have missed for quite some time in their diagrams.
By the way: the percentage of people accessing my site with Netscape 4.x browsers has dropped below 0.5% now…

Pink Panther at Tiffany’s.

Tuesday, June 1st, 2004

Yesterday we saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s on TV – it is not only a romantic but also a seriously funny movie. Somehow I haven’t noticed this before knowing who the director is: Blake Edwards, who won this year’s Honorary Award Oscar. He is the director of many notoriously funny movies, including The Party and the Pink Panther series starring Peter Sellers. With that information in mind I paid more attention to detail while viewing this movie, making it an even better experience. Olli and I were planning to eventually host a Blake Edwards movie night party, which most certainly will be a big success.

More wikipedia.

Saturday, May 29th, 2004

After making several minor updates to the entry on Ethnomethodologie and linking to the German entry on conversation analysis, I quickly updated that one too. This is fun! Finally a possibility to contribute real content to an open source project without having to know a programming language. I urge you to try it out yourself, makes you feel good.
German wikipedia | English wikipedia

Joining the wikipedia.

Friday, May 28th, 2004

I just participated in the German Wikipedia for the first time. Inspired by today’s reading I edited the entry for Ethnomethodologie. We’ll see where this is going…

Getting back into gear.

Thursday, May 27th, 2004

Now that I did my presentations at the college, graded last semester’s papers, and finished the hopefully-to-be-published conversation analysis article I can hopefully can fully re-engage with the actual work on my dissertation. Today I read some more Garfinkel. Referring to my short essay Am I an Ethnomethodologist, you can see that I haven’t read Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology at that point in time – this was one of the theoretical gaps that I definitely wanted to close before I start to write my dissertation. Well, I am happy about having made that decision. It is quite an inspiring, if sometimes cumbersome read. Here’s a small citation:

To treat instructions as though ad hoc features in their use were a nuisance, or to treat their presence as grounds for complaint about the incompleteness of instructions, is very much like complaining that if the walls of a building were only gotten out of the way one could see better what was keeping the roof up.[Harold Garfinkel – Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), p. 22]

Another favorite:

Although it may at first appear strange to do so, suppose we drop the assumption that in order to describe a usage as a feature of a community of understanding we must at the outset know what the substantive common understandings consist of. With it, drop the assumption’s accompanying theory of signs, according to which a sign and referent are respectively properties of something said and something talked about, and which in this fashion proposes sign and referent to be related as corresponding contents. By dropping such a theory of signs we drop as well, thereby, the possibility that an invoked shared agreement on substantive matters explains a usage.
If these notions are dropped, then what the parties talked about could not be distinguished from how the parties were speaking. An explanation of what the parties were talking about would then consist entirely of describing how the parties had been speaking…
[Harold Garfinkel – Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), p. 28f]

And finally, if you have ever asked yourself what to study as a professional sociologist, here is Harold’s answer:

Not a method of understanding, but immensely various methods of understanding are the professional sociologist’s proper and and hitherto unstudied and critical phenomena.[Harold Garfinkel – Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), p. 31]

Been busy, having visitors.

Tuesday, May 25th, 2004

Last week I had a presentation at the post-grad college (which went reasonably well, as I might discuss in more detail in another post), over the weekend I’ve been in Hamburg, and yesterday I came back together with my mom, whose Windows machine I am currently de-sassering… Soon!

Bluetooth scare.

Saturday, May 15th, 2004

On my way to Darmstadt this Wednesday I had the luck to sit in an ICE2 wagon, which provides power for my PowerBook – usually you only have ‘powerless’ ICE1 wagons going from Berlin via Franfurt to Basel or Zürich. So I had my PowerBook up and running including digital paraphernalia such as my USB bluetooth dongle to connect to my mobile. Well, I was pretty surprised when suddenly a message popped up that a file called “vorsicht.pwi” was sent to my computer via bluetooth! A look into the directory which I have designated to be the receiving directory for bluetooth files revealed that indeed, there was a new file bearing that name. This was the content of the file (there were a lot of non-readable characters in the file too, you can download this and the other file as a zipped archive if you want to check out the exact contents):

 Vorsicht, sie wurden gehackt! Sit auch im Zug!!    B ”   #     O 

A minute or two later I got another message with the same name. This time the content read:

   d d    P   /   =
    S     S    @    
    F    E *  !   A *   E L     +
 Vorsicht, sie wurden gehackt! Sitze auch im Zug!! Bitte aufstehen!!!    B +   $
 !      ’
 A !    B ” 

Well, I did not stand up, as the ‘hacker’ requested, instead unplugging the bluetooth dongle and then checking my bluetooth settings. So far I had both not changed the default settings which turn on visibility for my bluetooth port and which disable encryption for bluetooth connections. I then used my mobile (a SonyEricsson T68i) to look for other visible bluetooth devices in the train compartment, and subsequently discovered a device with the name “Nokia6610” (not sure if the model number was this or something else). I didn’t do anything related to the Nokia though and later decided to turn on my bluetooth connection again, this time with visibility turned off and encryption turned on. No more detectable hassles for the rest of the trip. Strange nonetheless. I guess this person did at maximum have access to the directory which I have designated as being accessible for bluetooth devices. Seemed to be more a joke to scare people off (and correctly point to the weaknesses of unprotected bluetooth connections). However, Heise has posted an article on bluetooth device security problems on the same day that I was ‘hacked’ – nice coincidence.

Massive silence and the accordion.

Wednesday, May 12th, 2004

Horst Krause plays a retiring miner, who slowly (very slowly) discoveres life after and outside the mine and his small hometown in Eastern Germany Schultze Gets The Blues. Both time and space play a major role in this movie, and they are used accordingly – if you have a problem with dialogue and action poor movies this is probably not a very attractive movie for you. If you sometimes find joy in the solitude of people and places and small moments of genuine community you will find plenty of that. Preparing Jambalya in a conservative Sachsen-Anhaltinian setting, playing something that is not Polka on the accordion, and running aground in Lousiana’s swamps all have their particular charms in this pleasantly open minded and well casted movie.
IMDb entry

Oslo – Europe’s warmest capital.

Monday, May 10th, 2004

This morning Kerstin told me that VG, Norway’s popular yellow press newpaper, features a story in which we are told that last Sunday, temperatures in Oslo have been higher than in any other European capital. Awesome! Now, that’s something to celebrate! Wohooo!

No glitter necessary.

Monday, May 10th, 2004

Yesterday evening I saw Veronica Guerin. I admit that the picture of Cate Blanchett on the movie’s poster was the main reason why I wanted to see this movie, besides it obviously being a politically correct “true story”. The story is indeed politically correct, the fate of Veronica Guerin a moving, but not revolutionary one. Guerin obviously was a very courageous woman, and Cate Blanchett plays her role in a most excellent manner. Other than that the movie is very solidly made, and seems to have been carefully researched, – however, from a cinematographic perspective is has nothing inspiring to offer. Which may be a good thing for this kind of documentary…
IMDb entry | Trailer

The elegance of showing worlds collide.

Saturday, May 8th, 2004

On Tuesday I finally saw the Barbarian Invasions. Lars, Master Berking and yours truly entered the audimax in Darmstadt equipped with a six pack of Pfungstädter and good moods. We left with empty bottles and even better moods. It was an excellent movie – the best I saw this year together with Lost In Translation. Although several reliable sources told me that this movie would be worth seeing, I have not exactly felt like watching a movie about a dying university professor who gets visited by a bunch of relatives and friends at the right place and in the right time so far. I do not regret that it took me a while to watch it, because the setting was fun, and the movie was in French with German subs, which made it possible to appreciate some of the very crafty, intellegent and funny dialogues. The translation was fine, but it still was a welcome enhancement to listen to the actors talking a charming mix of Canadian french and English. The conflicts between father and son, between junkie and broker, wife and ex-affairs were developed in a plausible, dramatic and definitely entertainingly un-boring way. In a very elegant way, this movie combined pain and joy, without resorting to clichée or special effects. If you haven’t seen it yet, take steps to rid yourself of being in such an unfortunate situation.
IMDb entry | Trailer