This is the motto for this weekend. After today’s wedding party in the Manzini’s, we’ll need a break from urban space – a break from reflective thinking and discussing dissertation blah. A trip to one of the farther lakes in the Mecklenburgische Seenplate is in order. Some of these lakes are quite deep. Hopefully the water is still somewhat cool and refreshing, even after all these weeks of warm weather. Bathing in lake should of course be combined with nurturing yourself with food from the same, a nice fresh fish! Yum. Yum Yum. And then some relaxation. Cool evening air and a light breeze.
Well, know you know why you shouldn’t be surprised if I won’t blog anything this weekend. It for the weather to decide about this.
Archive for June, 2003
Getting out, getting to a lake.
Saturday, June 28th, 2003Getting rid of the toughest obstacles.
Friday, June 27th, 2003One 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.
Dämlich.
Thursday, June 26th, 2003Mist. Es ist schon wieder passiert. Der wohl häufigste und nervigste Fehler beim Verschicken von Mails: ich habe vergessen, das Attachment anzuhängen…
Übrigens: wenn Ihr diese Seite Bookmarken wollt, müsst Ihr ganz einfach Strg+D (bei Windows) oder Apfel+D (beim Mac OS) drücken. (Linuxer wissen wie’s geht.)
Na? Mal vorbeischauen?
Wednesday, June 25th, 2003Heute 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!
Colors. An overwhelming amount of colors. And landscape. Lots of Landscape.
Wednesday, June 25th, 2003This Monday I went to see Hero. It was gorgeous. I have only seen very, very few movies with such great aesthetics. If you like movies that create a sense of wonder about what the world could look like, this is a movie for you. It also has some martials arts fighting scences, but, please!, don’t let them keep you from watching this movie – it is a great work of art. If you were enchanted by the fighting scenes in the bamboo woods in Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon by Ang Lee, then you will really like this movie. The movie is slow, not your general action laden eastern, and it has a story with pathos (and some interesting turns). I think it is one of the most aesthetically pleasing movies I ever saw. You might want to check out the trailer. Enjoy!
Welcome to the world of audio chatting.
Wednesday, June 25th, 2003Yesterday Apple presented new stuff. I would definitely like to have one of the new G5 machines, but I surely won’t have the money. Panther is a different thing – I’m looking forward to Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) very much, I only fear that it won’t run too well on my old iBook and the Pismo that I have. The Panther release might be time for getting the 900Mhz G3 processor update for the Pismo.
But I do want to write about another thing Apple published yesterday: iChat AV, the new version of Apple’s chat program. Kerstin and I installed it and it works beautifully. I am very impressed. It is full duplex (i.e. both people can talk and listen at the same time), and the sound quality is very good. There are only a few dropouts now and then, but we might get that optimized sooner or later. It’s gorgeous. Our phone bill is quite likely to shrink by a certain amount.
The only problem I had was with my overly restrictive firewall setting and with getting the audio in to the G4 at home, but after some cooperative hacking of the firewall (thanks Kerstin!) and some plugging in and out of cables and devices (thanks Chr!) everything is vanilla.
Neue Abi-Adressen – unverhofft kommt…
Monday, June 23rd, 2003Na, dass war ja mal ne Überraschung. Bei meinen gelegentlichen Checks der AEG-Alumni Homepage bin ich doch glatt auf einen neuen Eintrag gestoßen. Wunderbar – das Projekt 10-jähriges Abijubiläum ist wieder etwas nähergerückt.
Guest Entry Trial by Chr
Saturday, June 21st, 2003This is just to try if I am granted access to these selected pages by virtue of the password I was generously given on another occasion.
IT WORKED!!! But now duty in the form of the tedious job of appartment-hunting calls. See ya later, as the Aussie likes to put it (even when the chances of seeing again later come close to being zero).
In trockenen Tüchern.
Saturday, June 21st, 2003So, 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.
Cambridge, my balcony, and Sunnydale.
Friday, June 20th, 2003This is a selection of the spaces over which yesterday evening’s most relevant events were distributed. After finishing the asparagus season with a fine meal, shared between Florian, Chr, Sofie and myself, Florian left to catch his plane back to Cambridge. I hope that there’ll soon be some time and money for a trip to Cambridge. Haven’t punted through the Cam yet. After Florian left, the rest of the crowd gathered on the balcony, enjoying the vegetation and the mild air. More interesting stories relating to intestinal activities were told ;-) and some more white wine was consumed. As time passed and the sun went down Chr got himself involved in old-school telecommunication while Sofie and I started to visit Sunnydale as it was presented in the last two Buffy episodes (7×07 and 7×08 – to say it again, 7×07 was really scary and definitely one of the best episodes I’ve seen yet. Then finally Kerstin and Olli trickled in too and we saw this week’s episode: 7×09 – Never Leave Me. It’s still not clear what will happen to Giles, and, quite a surprise, it looks like some old fiends from the first season come back into play. So the circle closes itself. It fits just perfectly that Olli bought the First Season DVD – thanks Olli!
Now, what about the space issue? Analysis of this peculiar socio-ficitonal-space is up to you. Any spaces more relevant than others? Why? Fun being back to school, isn’t it?
Monday in Japan.
Sunday, June 15th, 2003Sabu. 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 ;-)
On the train again.
Saturday, June 14th, 2003Again sitting in the ICE from Frankfurt to Berlin, I am hoping that the train will be late by about 35 to 40 minutes. In Frankfurt we were only late by about 15 minutes. Only? Wanting to be late?! Yes, yes, yes, yes. Why?
- If I am late I might be able to get some compensation in form of a voucher from the DB.
- Kerstin works until midnight. If I am late I might get picked up at the train station!
Convinced? I hope.
A place of boiling heat and rattlesnakes.
Friday, June 13th, 2003It’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.
The First Season! On DVD!
Thursday, June 12th, 2003Great news from Buffyland – our favourite guest and co-Buffy-watcher made a present to the WG yesterday: The first season of Buffy. Episodes 1-12 on DVD with audio commentary and an interview. So exciting. After watching yesterday’s episode from the final season (7×08 – we’re now getting to the scary basics of this season’s evil) we immediately watched the first two episodes. Very good dialogues. Thanks to DVD technology we could watch the episodes OmU style and therefore enjoy the subtleties of the witty exchanges. Alyson Hannigan is as cute as one could wish, everybody has weird hair and we had a lot of fun. Butter, I mean better, than I expected.
Rabbit-Proof Fence (Deutscher Titel: A Long Way Home)
Thursday, June 12th, 2003Good Movie. Go watch it yourself.
Pleasantly modest in its implementation of aesthetic features like special light, music and mystic effects. It’s the story of the three girls and a, somewhat tragic, grand civilizator. It’s a good story.
Tomorrow is another Buffy Day!
Wednesday, June 11th, 2003Yesterday, Kerstin, Olli, Christian and I watched last week’s Buffy episode Conversations With Dead People (season 7, episode 7). Spooky and very funny. It was mostly story telling in preparation for the following episodes I guess, and we got to see some super baddies from the previous season – who didn’t fare very well, I guess. It was a relief to know that we don’t have to wait long until we can watch the next episode. Perhaps our franco-canadian friend will be able to join us tomorrow. I’ll report this too, of course…
Slowly getting back into gears.
Wednesday, June 11th, 2003The trip to Buchholz, the wedding, and the transition back to Berlin got me out of my slowly-establishing-itself routine. So I spent most of the day on the balcony, reading c’t and Le monde diplomatique and surfing the web. I wanted to go play some basketball, alas, there were too many people, and not enough power in yours truly to start playing with them. My stamina is still just above bare minimum and I would certainly have exhausted myself to such a level that I wouldn’t be of much use during the next days. Instead, I am now blogging and listening to one of iTunes internet radio stations (some blues hosted by the ParaDynamic Roadhouse). Later I will probably make use of the fact that today is “Kinotag” and go watch Rabbit-Proof Fence together with Kerstin. Read my report tomorrow!
By the way, what do you think about the most recent addition to this blog? It’s called “ozean’s digest” and can be found in the left column.>