in the beginning of april, we did a trip to the bastei. i never got around uploading some of the photos. so, finally, here are a few impressions.

here are some impressions from a stop-over in schirgiswalde.

as once announced, i worked on spielwiese‘s gallery system. it is now featured by a c++ backend which generates the galleries as well as the thumbnails (if they aren’t already there), both in grayscale and color! so far, the galleries are shown as before (with some exceptions, mostly in the beginning of the blog though), but on every page you can find a clickable text in the footer, on the very bottom of the page, called “change colors!”: this toggles the thumbnails between grayscale and colors! unfortunately, this currently does not remembers the value (by setting a cookie), so if you reload the page everything will be grayscale again. but the most important part, namely the backend, is there! and maybe it will remember the state before the end of this day :)

last week, i was attending the ants ix, which was held in nancy this time (two years ago, it was in banff). this year i also presented a poster. here are some impressions from the city:

a very interesting thing are the trams in nancy. they use one rail instead of two, and work even without it. sounds better then it is, though, if you read this. (the tram in the direction of loria was broken, so we had to use a bus… the nice thing is, the busses in nancy have several screens to show information – but fail to show things like the route, the destination, the time, the next stops, or any other useful information. there is also nothing announced via speakers, so you really have to know where you are, where you are going, and constantly watch out to catch the names of the stops, and better know some of the stops before your stop…)

on my way back from berggießhübel, i visited pirna a bit, where i found the monumentum of the grey busses, reminding of the aktion t4 by the nazis in order to murder mentally ill and otherwise handicapped people. this monumentum exists in two copies, one of them being stationary and one moving. the one in pirna is the moving one. here are a few picturs:

yesterday, i travelled to berggießhübel, near to dresden, to visit the marie louise stolln, an old ore mine which was turned into a show mine and opened for public in 2006. tours are very cheap (just five euros) and approximately one hour long. here are some impressions from the tour. (i wish i would have had more time for the photos, in particular having a tripod and no need to hurry, and no one running in my view. these photos are taken with iso 3200 and maximal aperture of my wideangle zoom, which is between f/3.5 and f/4.5 – i guess this explains the crappy quality…)

one word on reaching the show mine: the official website as well as the flyer only mention going there by car. but obviously you can also reach it by means of public transport. namely, you can use the vvo page to find a trip to the station “kurhaus” in berggießhübel. from that stop, the mine is just a few minutes walk away. note that the bus back to pirna only goes once per hour, or even less, so make sure to check the connections for your way back so you won’t miss the bus by less than one minute as i did today.
and, in case you’re claustrophobic: just don’t go. it’s really tight down there.

some impressions from another visit to dresden.

today, i saw a remark on netzpolitik.org about a reportage by frontal21 titled der grosse bluff (direct video link here, will be online only the next few days). it covers the currently investigated extension of operation life span of nuclear power plants in germany, including the never-ending dicussion of ultimate waste storage in gorleben, and what is going on politically. in my opinion, its a real good reportage and you should watch it if you understand german (and it hasn’t been deleted).
another interesting link on this topic is the wikipedia article on deep geological repositories, in particular its list of such repositories and the following paragraph on safety and feasibility assessments.
future is sometimes really depressing.

while listening to a mike oldfield collection, i came across his cover of the william tell overture, a well-known classical piece by gioachino rossini. since i really like this song, you can watch it here, featuring many copies of mike:

if you want, you can listen to rossini’s piece on youtube.