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 :-)

one of the video/animation compo entries at revision was raum/zeit by subdream. it displays a lot of three-dimensional fractals and scored the second place. this was one of my favorite entries for that compo, and so here it is:

another fractal based compo entry was electronenmultiplizierer by akronyme analogiker, which is a 4k intro, i.e. an executable of size four kilobytes (that is a very small amount!) which plays something in realtime. you can watch a low-quality recording here:

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.

here’s my project 52 shot for the sixteenth week. the topic was

süße verführung.

while visiting basel a few days ago, we ended up in a confectionery. chocolate of the month was banana chocolate, which i had to sample. and since it tastes really great, i have to share it with you. please click the photo to get a larger version:

technical details: 3s, f/32, 105mm, iso 200.

here’s my project 52 shot for the fifteenth week. the topic was

vernetzt.

i grew up in two different worlds. first, i was outside mostly, playing in the woods. then, later, i started growing up with computers, and after some years with the internet, which was brand new back then. computers had fascinated me, long before we got our first one. later, when networks became fashionable, first in terms of network games and later in terms of sharing data, connecting computers, etc., we got more and more cables. my favorite cable color was blue. nowadays, it’s more and more wireless, though i still like the idea of having a cable. (not just for security.) i still have a lot of network cables flying around, including a hub and a switch which i haven’t used for years. this all isn’t visible in this week’s photos. instead, i chose a different topic, the cable tangle which can be found at my university. of course, not easily visible. the cables are well hidden, mostly. sometimes, if you know where to look, and if you have certain keys or know people with these keys, you can see not just one or two, but many of them. please click the photo to get a larger version:

technical details: 1/20s, f/4, 50mm, iso 200.

in case you wonder where all these cables go – they all “end” here, not far away from the first shot:

technical details: 10s, f/32, 105mm, iso 200.

here’s my project 52 shot for the fourteenth week. the topic was

wetterfrosch.

this topic was harder than it sounded. i don’t have any frog available (to honor the german word “weather frog”, often used for weatherman), so i had to use something different. during the last weeks, i had some ideas, threw most of them away. eventually, i had the next two project 52 photos done, while this one was still missing. then, while attending revision this weekend, i made some nice shots, some of them i’ll upload later. one of these was a nice pic of some dandelions, without a macro though (that would have been even better), which looked rather nice in the end. so i chose that one for the fourteenth week, as the weather this weekend was really fantastic, and for me the dandelions represent good weather. please click the photo to get a larger version:

technical details: 1/200s, f/8, 50mm, iso 100, aps-c.