i spend the last 1 1/2 weeks in dresden, visiting my girlfriend. here are some impressions from the city; unfortunately, the weather wasn’t the best and my small camera is not the best replacement for my good one (which is being repaired now, btw).

the first picture shows a part of spiel_ort, a project at the tu dresden to build a playground with fiber reinforced concrete. the fifth picture shows some fibres similar to the ones used. the last pictures were taken on the flight from ottawa to calgary.

a few days ago my hispeed internet started to be slow. after a short time, i got the impression that the network itself was fine, but the dns lookups are slow. some minutes ago, i decided to investigate this problem a bit more in detail. indeed, host turns out to be really slow when looking up domain names, and if i enter an ip address in firefox instead of a domain name, accessing the page is really fast. searching the net for this problem, i found nothing except a list of shaw dns servers. the ones listed there for calgary differ from the ones entered in /etc/resolv.conf; more precisely, the last byte reads 143 and 145 instead of 133 and 135. to try it out, i changed the values, and voila, host ran in hispeed again. restarting firefox also allowed to access the world wide web fast, again.

last friday, i was visiting stuttgart’s wilhelma. here are some photos, taken before my camera died:

well, last friday i was visiting stuttgart’s wilhelma with a friend of mine, when after some time, my camera (a nikon d40x) stopped working, only displaying “error: press shutter release button again”. after trying a lot of things and searching the web, and finally contacting the support, it looks like i have to send the camera in for repair. so right now i’ll be without a camera for some time… :-(