yesterday i was told by t. that there is a direct flight from zürich to calgary, offered by edelweiss air. (they fly to calgary each friday, return each monday.) today i checked their website and found out that they also offer flights to vancouver, anchorage, whitehorse, and also two scandinavian destinations, umea (in sweden) and kittilä (in finland), as well as keflavik airport on iceland. most of these flights are only offered during special seasons, though.
so maybe i have to try them out :-)

today i had a problem with latex. i’m working on graphical output of computational results, and created graphical representation of certain large matrices using libpng, and wanted to include these graphics into the automatically generated .tex files which present the results. it turned out that latex got stuck when image file names such as 1.4-0.362578-10.transform.png turn up, complaining that 4-0.362578-10.transform.png is an unknown file extension. after doing a little research, i found the grffile latex package. including it solved the problem right away… maybe some more people find this useful.

someone just sent around this link:

(theoretically) infinite pendulum fun with a period of 60 seconds (since gcd(51,52,…,65)=1)!

some time ago, a friend borrowed me his copy of logicomix, a comic on logic i heard a lot of good about from various friends. yesterday, i finally got around to start reading, finishing it today. i must admit, the idea of telling the quest for finding a foundation of logic, of mathematics, in a comic sounds somewhat strange, like a hopeless endeavor. but my friends were right: this comic is excellent! telling a story in a story in a story, sometimes with less layers, introducing all important characters of this quest, whose names are familiar to most people interested in mathematics, logic and philosophy, this comic manages to present the quest for foundation of logic and mathematics in a nice, easy accessable way. lots of explanations here and there, hidden as story elements, as well as an appendix containing more information on certain topics as well as the involved persons, hopefully help readers with less background than me.
if you get a chance, read it! even if you are no mathematician, logician or philosopher. it’s worth it.

yesterday, my mind came up with a good excuse to make a strawberry cake, so i went shopping, bought a cake pan, some strawberries, and other necessary ingredients, and this morning i began crafting a strawberry cake:

it tasted pretty good, in my opinion. i could have eaten much more of it, if my colleagues wouldn’t have helped me… anyway, here are two strawberry cake macros, which might make you even more hungry :-)