yesterday, we visited the natur- and tierpark goldau. the weather was perfect, and we really enjoyed the visit. here are a few impressions:

in these photos, you can see red-crested pochards, whooper swans, syrian brown bears, european wolves, roe deer, wildcats, eurasian lynx and alpine ibexes.

last week, we were in seppenrade. luckily for us, the weather was much better than expected. it was sunny, with few clouds, and warm. our first trip was to reckelsum, a bauernschaft near seppenrade. here are some impressions:

our second trip was to lüdinghausen, in particular to the burg vischering:

recently, after lunch, we got two kinder surprises. both of them featured the same smurf, to our dismay. (which resulted in a nice idea for an exercise.) anyway, after playing around with them a little, the following scene appeared. only having a crappy mobile phone cam, we weren’t able to catch the scene in its full beauty, but at least, here are some crude approximations:

(sorry for the screwed up depth-of-field. my mobile phone isn’t exactly good with that.)

yesterday, a beautiful cloudy sky presented itself to us after a wonderful not-anymore-existent indian dinner (now also known as an improvised chäschüechli dinner).

cat cuteness overload. no more words to say.

today, after a snowy morning, most of the snow melted away during the afternoon, and at early evening, even the sun came out. the weather was so beautiful that we took a walk.

we even met some easter bunnies:

i have several wordpress installations running on my servers. among them, there is one instance which is not publicly visible. it uses dates which are several decades in the past.
everything was working well when i last worked on that project, which is quite some time ago. but yesterday, when looking at it another time, i noticed something odd. the dates were all replaced with the current date (and time). wtf?
now, some debugging later, i found the culprit. that wordpress installation is in german (the only german one i have), and somewhere inside wordpress, a function called date_i18n is used in that case to translate a timestamp into a date, time, or whatever is requested. unfortunately (for me), this function (in Wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php) contains a “sanity check” for “php 5.1.0-”. in case the unix timestamp is negative, it is set to current time. and obviously, any date before january 1, 1970 will be turned into today.
commenting out these lines (or removing them) fixes the problem.

today i was at the pfäffikersee, not very far away from zürich. there are still some leftovers from this year’s seegfrörni.

this weekend, i was in oslo. the second time i was in norway, and the first time i visited its capital.
the weather was perfect – mostly sunny, only few clouds – and i had a great guide! (thanks again!) we’ve visited the holmenkollen ski jump, tried the best apple cake in oslo, visited the oslo opera house, paid a quick visit to the central campus of the university of oslo and to the royal palace, enjoyed the city hall place (radhusplassen), the akershus castle, visited the newest part of tjuvholmen, the vigeland sculpture park. we also visited a great second hand store, which resulted in me leaving with a stack of used cds.
below, you can find impressions from all these places (except the second hand store):

monday and tuesday i was in basel, attending the speedup workshop, including a tutorial on intel threading building blocks and cilk plus. something i have to try out, by writing some lattice enumeration code with it, to see how it copes with it. especially the tutorial was definitely worth the time spend there.
but besides business, i walked around a bit in basel during monday’s lunch break, this time with my camera. this resulted in some nice photos, and some of these are here: