this friday, our math institute did an excursion to the üetliberg. we took up the cable car at felsenegg, had a drink or ice cream in the restaurant there, and then walked over to the uto kulm, where we had a nice dinner. from there, we took the train back down. the weather was very nice in the beginning, even though rain was predicted and there was a lot of rain in the morning and the night before. while sitting at the restaurant near felsenegg, clouds came up, giving a nice shade for the walk. inbetween, it also rained a few drops, but that was almost welcome as a refreshment. after being at the uto kulm for a bit of time, having a nice apero outside, we were able to enjoy a nice rainbow over zürich. as we went inside, it started to really rain outside. in the night, when we left, it was dry again. i’d say, perfect weather for an excursion! only for the photos, there could have been more sun :-)

this weekend, i attended revision, a demoparty. revision is the successor of breakpoint, which in turn is the successor of mekka & symphosium. these events were held over easter from 1997 on, and i attended a few of them (between 2001 and 2005).
after the end of the breakpoint era last year, the revision was moved from bingen to saarbrücken, germany. a city i haven’t been in for quite some time. the party was held in the e-werk, an old power plant.

the weather was really good, it was sunny most of the time except a thunderstorm one evening and a few rain drops. this time, i stayed in a hotel and didn’t sleep under the tables, which resulted in much more sleep for me, except that breakfast at the hotel was pretty early compared to the times i usually ended up in bed asleep. but at least i got decent sleep and didn’t look like a zombie after two days.
it was really nice to meet some friends again, most of them after a long time, in particular trigger, kojote, t$, dynamite, and some more.

the following photos show a bit of what was happening. the first and third photo shows people watching a compo (unfortunatley you cannot see anything on the bigscreen, otherwise everything else would have not been really visible), and the fourth shows the underground hallway to the restrooms.

one afternoon i went on a walk with kojote, looking at some interesting buildings in the neighborhood. here are some impressions:

overall, i have to say that it was partially exhausting, but nonetheless another nice experience. the next time i’ll just stay some of the days, i guess. maybe i’ll drop by at the buenzli this year, since it is not very far from here.

this afternoon i did a quick trip to the üetliberg.

eventually i was able to watch a very beautiful sunset. here are some excerpts:

some of you might know harro heuser, a german mathematician. he is famous among students for his introductionary books on analysis, which explain very well and in great detail many aspects about the analysis which is taught to students of mathematics in the first year.

today, i was informed that he passed away.
rest in peace.

one thing is for sure: he won’t be forgotten by the next generations of mathematics students, since his textbooks are still some of the best ones available.

while complaining last week that all snow was gone, when i had to produce a photo for project 52, i got snow this week while staying in zürich. here are some snowy impressions from around noon:

later, it started snowing again, continuing until the evening. on my way back from my current quest, i took some more pictures (and already lamented about the absense of my big camera, which is much better suited for low-light photography). the interaction of snowflakes with beams of light is just a perfect thing to photograph!

walking through falling snow is just great!

as you might have noticed, musikwiese has its categories displayed as a tree. i did this using the wp-dtree plugin. this is pretty nice, and i thought that i might also be able to use it for spielwiese‘s archives list – after all, that list contains like 40 entries. so it would be nice to have a tree with the years as top-level nodes, which can be expanded to get a list of months. unfortunately, wp-dtree doesn’t do this. so i started programming myself, creating a small plugin which outputs the code wp-dtree should create to display such an archive. and, it seems to work fine! i also included a noscript fallback for people with disabled javascript; in that case, the “classical” archives will be displayed.
if you are interested in my plugin, ask me, and i will send it to you or maybe also upload it somewhere here.

a happy new year to all of you!

today i did a walk outside, enjoying the beautiful snowscape with a litte bit of sun.

this weekend, i was in vancouver. a second time. this time, i attended the cms winter meeting. the computational number theory session was hosted in a hotel suite on the 29th floor, with a great view over the english bay. we also had a non-mathematician attending the session:

on my last day, i decided to go to stanley park another time. in fact, i walked once around it. here are some impressions from the walk and from the view we had during the session:

and sorry for the photo quality… i forgot to bring any camera, so i had to abuse my mobile phone…

i just learned about the complaints choirs project: choirs from all over the world create a song complaining about annoying things in their life. here’s the recording from helsinki, which i like best from the few i saw. its sung in finnish, but there are english subtitles: