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Eric's Germany Journal

This is part of a journal I wrote while living in Ulm, Germany, from December 12, 2002, to September 17, 2003.

Parts

Monday, March 3, 2003

Martin and Andreas are in Philadelphia, so I have the office all to myself. I started work on the reverse transform. That will just be some simple changes to the existing code, so I am in the home stretch for the separated-data FFT.

Tuesday, March 4, 2003

Sigh, I just finished the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. Tonight was the finale of season three. I will try to watch something else, and then I have to start all over again and try to hang on until season four is released in June.

Wednesday, March 5, 2003

Yesterday, a guy came into my office and said he needed the cable that connects the system with the target hardware to my development system for a few hours that afternoon and again this morning. I am not sure why. I think it is a standard null-modem cable that connects two serial ports. They should be plentiful. However, I said I could get along without it. Meanwhile, I finished the code for milestone five. That's right, you give me a hard job, you don't give me hardware to work on for weeks, you don't give me target-configuration hardware for months, it is slower than specified when you do give it to me, and then you take the hardware away, and I still get the project done ahead of time and better than specification. I had the target-configuration hardware for less than five days!

I could have sworn there were hard parts in the FFT. There were hard parts the first time I wrote an FFT. However, completing the separated-data FFT is the major part of this project. The remaining two functions build on it in straightforward ways. So, I will be done with this project very early.

Martin mentioned last week that Mercury Computer System's FFT runs in 9700 CPU cycles for 1024 elements. That is 300 cycles slower than the one I wrote for Sky Computers. That was two years ago, and Mercury has not caught up yet.

I wondered about the 1864 in my gym's name, TSG Söflingen 1864 e.V., and today I saw a plaque on a stone that confirms that is a year. Apparently my gym has been around for 139 years.

Friday, March 7, 2003

My train approaches.

Today was a full day, beginning with a train ride to Munich. Ulm has about 430 trains a day! The stations and trains are well-marked. Signs at each platform show what trains stop at that platform, when, the numbering and types of cars (first class, second class, restaurant, and more) in each train, and where the cars stop along the platform. The cars are individually marked with their own numbers, so they apparently are not reordered within the trains often.

Surprisingly, my train was 15 minutes late. After boarding, I looked at scenes like those below for a while and then read Analog until we reached Munich.


A view from the train.	Another view from the train.	Yet another view from the train.

We arrive in Munich.

The Munich train station is filled with businesses, including in the tunnels leading to the city's subways. One of the businesses seemed to offer restrooms and other services, apparently distinct from the train station restrooms. I did not look at it closely but noticed the name, McClean. I suspect McDonald's has invaded the language to contribute a prefix. Later in the day, I saw Mc Hot Dog. I bought a Tageskarte for the city transit system and set out to explore the city.

Munich is a big city and shares much with other big cities. In doing so, it loses some of the charm of smaller cities. I like Ulm better. Getting around was fairly easy, except for crossing streets in some places, until I realized my error. In some places in Ulm and Munich, I have ignored stairways descending underground. In Boston and New York, those are usually subway entrances, so they are irrelevant unless you want the train. In Ulm, they are pedestrian underpasses. In Munich, they are both. In a few places in Ulm, crossing the street on the surface requires going around three sides of a square, which can be a tedious process because each side may have multiple segments with individual crossing signals. So the underpass is easier. I saw an intersection or two in Munich where none of the corners were connected by crosswalks, so I was confused about how to get across until I realized the subway entrance was not only a subway entrance.

Glockenspiel in Marienplatz. The figures are life-size.

Not too far from the Hauptbahnhof is Marienplatz, a large pedestrian shopping district. At the entrance to Marienplatz is Obletter, an ordinary toy store, but the shelves full of board games (good games sufficiently involved to be of interest and challenge to adults) are overwhelming. Inside Marienplatz is the Glockenspiel seen to the right. I presume it is famous and a tourist attraction, judging by the size of the crowd watching it.

Ratskeller sign announcing Sunday Brunch

Ratskeller München.

Also in Marienplatz, I found a place for Bill and Darlene to hold their monthly Sunday Brunch event when they come visit. This is not just any Ratskeller, this is the Ratskeller, judging by their URL, www.ratskeller.com.

Pierced building.

Somebody ran out of body parts to pierce and went after this building. Actually, I suspect it is a clip-on rather than a true piercing.

One of many monuments.

The pierced building is next to the monument and building shown to the left. There are plenty of monuments and palatial or ornamental or "grand" buildings in Munich. I did not pay much attention to these. I am more interested in a city's present culture than its past, and I am not impressed by buildings built at taxpayer expense (or perhaps worse for some of the old palaces), and I will start paying attention to monuments when they are more often dedicated to people who really contribute to society (like scientists) than to warmakers.

After Marienplatz, I went to Amerika Haus Verein. The web pages of the US consulate in Munich suggested Amerika Haus Verein housed several Germany-US business, cultural, and social organizations. But according to the guard, it was just a library. I am not sure why a library needs to search and scan people on the way in. From there, I walked to the consulate, but I got there after the hours for consular services, 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Either our taxes are not paying for full workdays there or the consulate spends most of its day doing non-consular things.

Whom are they expecting?

Between Amerika Haus Verein and the consulate is the Space-Friend's café, seen to the right. East of the consulate is the English Gardens. Some scenes from the gardens are below. The English Gardens are part of a huge park in Munich. It extends at least nine kilometers, and there is more beyond the edge of my map. (My guidebook says the English Gardens are only five kilometers long, but the map seems to show some green area that goes on farther.)


Pond in the English Gardens.	Stream in the English Gardens.	Paths in the English Gardens.

Urban river with whitewater and large standing wave

Very high volume river.

The river to the left is also in the English Gardens, and the current is tremendous. Look at the size of that standing wave, and look at the amount of whitewater. I call it a river because, although it is the size of a large stream, the volume of water flowing through there is incredible.

Leaving the English Gardens, I saw a car with an Herbalife ad on the side. That's a shame. (Herbalife is implicated in some illegal pyramid schemes that have financially ruined a number of people.)

Isar River.

The river to the right is outside the park. The bridge in that picture leads to the palace shown to the left below. This may be about where the inner ring of Munich ends. The area is still densely populated and lined with businesses, but not quite as dense, and with more of the "people really live here" feel rather than the downtown feel.

Maximilianeum.

Rock-climbing wall in a playground.

Here is a photograph Simone and Eliza should like: They encourage rock-climbing in grade school.

After walking a bit more, the urban density decreased again. I was looking for one of the game stores I had looked up in the telephone directory. I found the street, and the street numbers told me I had a way to go. I had been walking for about four hours continuously, so I hopped a bus. It is easy to get around; there are buses and trains all over. I did not need to plan any routes, just check my map for whatever was in the area and going my way. After I found the game store and bought a couple of games and checked another store in the area (and saw a bicycle store with a clever name, "Velosophie—more than bikes"), I took a bus to the subway and the subway back downtown.

The subways have maps on the ceilings, so your view of a map is not obscured when the subway is crowded. The subway doors do not open by themselves. You have to turn and pull a handle. A machine does take over after you have moved the door a little. I wonder what the purpose of that is? It cannot save much power.

Munich has two sets of train lines, labeled S-Bahn and U-Bahn. I do not know what the difference is. They were both underground at the Hauptbahnhof, but maybe the S-Bahn goes to the surface somewhere?

I have mentioned the public-transit semi-honor system before. A sign on the subway indicated that if you are discovered without a valid ticket, you are charged a €40 fare, and there could also be an administrative fine and criminal prosecution. The punitive fare by itself would not be enough to deter lawbreakers, since the frequency of inspections is so low.

I reached the Deutsches Museum with only 90 minutes available in my schedule, so I did not go in. The museum could be good for a trip when somebody visits me, if we want to spend a full day there. It is 46,000 meters², and there is a 144-page museum guide (for €4). Their map shows a section labeled Mountain Railways and another entire section labeled Model Railway.

I left the Deutsches Museum and headed back toward the city center. A few blocks from the museum, I entered a quiet street. This was quite odd. There was traffic nearby, but there were no cars driving on this street. In Boston around 4 p.m. on a Friday, I would expect every through street to be crawling with traffic. This Munich street was accessible and downtown and appeared to connect points of interest, but nobody was driving along it. It was lined with parked cars, and there was little noise from nearby traffic. Actually, Munich is quiet in general compared to big US cities, but this street was particularly quiet. It was not part of a pedestrian zone. It was lined with retail stores and some residential buildings. There were a dozen or so pedestrians walking along it. They were quiet too!

Viktualienmarkt. It is much larger than can be seen in the photograph.

After the quiet street, I stumbled into this open-air market. The name, Viktualienmarkt is just one of hundreds of German-English connections I have run across of the type, "Oh, yeah, we have that word in English, although we hardly ever or never use it anymore, or not like that."

Throughout the day, I took photographs of a few street scenes, to show you some of the architecture and flavor of the city. Those are below.

I headed back to Marienplatz and had dinner in the Ratskeller. They had only a few vegetarian choices, and only one of them was German, the krauterkäsespätzle. That is herb pasta with cheese and fried onions. (Two other vegetarian dishes were a Macao platter and Swiss potatoes.) I had tried käsespätzle (plain pasta, not herb pasta) at another restaurant and did not find it interesting, so I was inclined to skip it, but I decided to favor the German dish and give it a second chance. Unfortunately, it still was not interesting. The Spätzle with sauerkraut at the Christmas Market was fine, but käsespätzle does nothing for me. There are some restaurants here in Ulm which are supposed to have other, good vegetarian Swabian dishes, so I will get around to them eventually.


Munich street scenes.

Continuing through Marienplatz, there was an anti-war rally going on. One difference between rallies in the US and rallies here is that passersby here actually pay attention to the event. People were talking to the participants and looking at the literature and so on. This of course shows that Europeans are not as well informed as US citizens, as Europeans still believe that citizens matter in democracy or that a candidate who gets the most votes will win an election.

I did not find many chocolate stores in Munich. There was one in Marienplatz, so I did not come away empty-handed, but I will have to check the telephone directory for more before I go back. I did see several Segafredo restaurants, and they have them in Ulm too, and now I have seen Segafredo so often I cannot remember if we have it in the US or not. There are also philately stores in Ulm and Munich. They exist in the US too, but it is not such a popular hobby there that the stores can afford a high-rent area like the main shopping district.

Leaving Munich.

On the return trip, I observed two things I did not notice on the way to Munich. First, the signs that show cars within each train show city names above the cars. Some cars in the same train were marked with different cities. Do they separate the cars en route and send them to different destinations? Second, a holder above my seat had a slip of paper showing the seat was reserved from Munich to Ulm. That is useful, because now I know that when I board with a ticket but without a specific seat reservation, I can find an available seat by looking for one without a slip in the holder.

Another difference between the US and Germany is that construction sites here are not obsessively walled off from the public. A site that is some distance from pedestrians may be open. A site that is in a pedestrian area may be separated by only light disconnected fencing (that is, with gaps you could squeeze through or even walk through in some places). They must expect pedestrians here not to be idiots or to be rewarded by the courts for being idiots.

Saturday, March 8, 2003

Later this week, I may go meet Simone and visit Paris, if I can arrange travel in time. A travel agent near my apartment speaks superb English (she lived in Washington, DC, for four years), but her agency does not sell train tickets, because they cannot figure out the fare structure any better than I can. Well, maybe a little better, but the commissions are not high enough to make a profit given all the deciphering you have to do. The agency at the mall sells train tickets, but communication is not as good.

I think I have finished my US income tax return. It is hard to be sure, but I worked through all the steps carefully, and each thing seemed clear by itself. Still, my return has lots of interesting features this year. First, I worked very little during the year, so my taxes are zero. Second, I did work some, so I qualify for the Earned Income Credit. Third, I paid foreign income taxes, so I can take a tax credit for those or an income deduction. Fourth, I incurred job-related expenses, so I get to deduct those.

There are additional details that I will spare you. Next year, I should be able to deduct my entire lease here and $29.50 per day for meals and travel home. (The meal deduction is figured at a fixed rate depending on the country you are in, not at the actual expense.) I will also get a credit for all the German income taxes I pay.

The Usenet newsgroup rec.humor.funny carried a great dialog regarding Iraq disarmament. Here is the article.

Sunday, March 9, 2003

I was not done with my taxes after all. I redid the return (again) to move some deductions into 2003. There are things I accrued in 2002 but did not actually pay until 2003. Generally, individual taxpayers report on a cash basis, not an accrual basis, and it will do me more good to take deductions in 2003, when I will have more income from which to deduct.

Monday, March 10, 2003

I am going to Paris. I will meet Simone there, and we will go see museums and stuff. It was not easy to make arrangements. I spent 50 minutes at the travel agency. Several people were ahead of me, and then the agent I got could not handle train reservations. I told you Deutsche Bahn fares were complicated. I had to wait for the other agent, and it still took a while. He had to look up things on external web pages and make a phone call and copy things from tables and web pages to forms and fill out and price each train segment separately.

Anyway, Wednesday after class, I get on a train to Paris. Thursday I meet Simone, and we spend Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in Paris. Sunday night, we get on a train to Ulm, and Simone visits Ulm. Wednesday she leaves Ulm.

If it were not for the complicated arrangements, international travel would be a lot simpler from here than from the US. Just hop on a train, cross a few borders, and see Europe. The travel plans have been made quickly, and I do not even have the address of the hotel yet.

Two more new students showed up in class tonight, one from Brazil and another from Estland (Estonia). It is not in my German-English dictionaries. It is interesting that the students come from so many different countries. Except for the cluster of Iranians, there are only one or two students from each other country. I would have expected immigration to occur in waves, so you would get clusters of people from various countries at various times, rather than an even distribution.

Deutsche Post has machines that dispense stamps. After you pick the number of stamps of each denomination you want, it prints them. They have the common denominations for various things, like a standard letter, an international postcard, and so on. But they did not have a denomination for an international letter, €1.50, and I did not have time on the way to work this morning to pick out a combination that added up to it. Since the machine prints stamps on the fly, why can't it print any denomination?

I wonder if the German word jetzt, meaning "now," is related to the English work "just," as in "this just in." It is a stretch by itself, but it seems reasonable given all the cognates between English and German I have seen. Take the numbers for example—eins-one, zwei-two, drei-three, and so on. Clearly they have become very different. Yet they are clearly related—sechs-six, sieben-seven, elf-eleven, zwölf-twelve. Both number systems have special words for eleven and twelve but go into -zehn or -teen patterns at thirteen. That is not just chance. It is odd that you would keep so much that seems largely irrelevant (like having special words for eleven and twelve) but change so much that seems meaningful (pronunciations and spellings).

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

I am rushing to make Paris preparations. I had almost a whole conversation in German with my landlady, about going to Paris and checking the mail and having a mailbox key and a friend visiting. I am getting pretty good with German pronunciation, too, except for the vowels and the consonants. To get the address of the hotel, I did a web search. Now I have the address of the hotel. And the name of the hotel owners' dog is Max. You can find anything on the web. I will probably not take my computer with me, so I might be offline until Monday.

I got email (from the .cy domain!) from the second of the two management companies involved in my German employment, with a statement about payments for the first three milestones. In 2002, the amount I held in a foreign bank account was low, but, next year, I will have to add a form to my tax return about having money in a foreign account.

I leave Ulm right after class and get back the day of the next class, so I will have to do my German homework in France. Two foreign languages competing in my brain at once! I am in the habit now of saying common phrases in German, so I will probably say Danke and Wiedersehen to some French people.

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

I mentioned open construction areas the other day. Work has been progressing on Ulm's Straßenbahn tracks for several days. They do the work while the tracks and trains are in service, even on the actual track being worked on! At Westplatz, some access panels in the road surface have been opened, and workers are working on and slightly under the surface. Safety/security lookouts are posted. Sometimes the trains are rerouted to other tracks, but sometimes the lookout just tells the workers when a train is coming, and they get out of the way for a minute. Trains run every six minutes much of the day.

Thursday, March 13, to Sunday, March 16, 2003

My Paris visit was very high-density. In four days, Simone and I visited at least eight museums and monuments, seven chocolate stores, and the Parisian sewers. We ate French pastry, French bread with Brie, crêpes, croissants, French dressing, and French fries. I took 272 pictures.

Monday, March 17, 2003

We are back in Ulm. Simone is visiting.

I went to class tonight and learned some new things. The period after numbers in like 17. März or building floors like 1.Obergeschoß is the equivalent of the English ordinal superscript. 17. März is not just March 17; it is March 17^th, and 1.Obergeschoß is 1^st floor.

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Simone and I visited the zoo, walked along part of the Danube Art Landscape, found four more sparrow sculptures, and more. I learned that Gift is poison and Hell is bright and clear. I took 125 more pictures.

The telephone company's computer called again and asked me to press one to do something about the voice mailbox, so I tried it, hoping it would leave me alone. Now the voice mailbox is on, which is very bad. It will take messages, and I do not know how to retrieve them or even to check if there are any. If you call me and get the voice mailbox, do not leave a message. If I cannot figure out how to get messages, I will have to get the phone company to turn the service off again.

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Update: The country I reported in a previous entry as Istland is actually Estland, Estonia.

Simone is on the Nacht Zug to Paris, so I am alone again. It was a terrific visit. We have been walking most waking hours for the past seven days, almost enough to offset the food. I learned some things about the things to do and see in Ulm, so I may update that part of my index page and will prepare for future visitors.

Tomorrow I return to work. In the evening, I will start sorting through my notes and the 436 photographs to prepare journal entries for the past week. If you have not already seen the separate web pages for the Paris visit and Simone's Ulm visit, you should look at them now.

My brother, Alex, confirms the Munich S-Bahn is mostly a street train and is designed for street loading and the U-Bahn is mostly an underground train and is designed for platform loading. [Late update: The former is inaccurate. The S-Bahn is the SchnellBahn that provides fast transportation in the city and an area around it.]

Thursday, March 20, 2003

I went to the office and found no email waiting for me! Before I left, I delivered everything for the separated-data FFT, and I expected comments. Martin is out on other business. I made some notes to prepare for the interleaved-data FFT, talked to Ottmar about what is happening, and left to catch up on things here at home.

While I was preparing for the Paris trip, I had to write a bank transfer to send money for the hotel room. Now that I have had some experience with the transfers, I do not see the advantage over checks. Anybody could fill out a transfer form and drop it in the bank's collection box, and the bank would not verify the signature any better than it does with checks. Perhaps there is an advantage in that the transfer goes to another account, whereas anybody can walk in off the street to cash a check. If the destination bank has a responsibility for identifying their account holder, the funds of a forged transfer might be recovered more easily than for a check. However, the transfer was a nuisance to use because it was days before any confirmation was available to me that the payment had been received. If an error had been made telling me the destination account number, I might not have had a hotel room available in Paris. A mailed check takes a while too, but I might have been able to hand a check to the travel agent and know right away the payment would go through.

Argh, the phone company computer called again. I think it might be trying to get me to listen to messages that have been left for me. The printed instructions that were sent cover turning some features on and off but not listening to messages. I will have to check and see if there was a PIN or something in them.

Friday, March 21, 2003

Drat, EADS asked me to think about working for them longer, even accepting employment. I really do not want to stay here, because of the language barrier, even though the city is very nice. The money would not be as lucrative as the current contract, but it would still be very good.

Saturday, March 22, 2003

I bought international letter stamps this morning. The price for an international airmail letter is €1.50. I asked for drei luftpost Briefmarken, and the guy put together three sets of three stamps totalling €1.55 in each set. I thought I had misremembered the price, but he charged me only €1.50 per set, so I guess he did not have stamps convenient for making €1.50 and gave me the extra. I cannot imagine that happening in a US post office.

I went to the telephone company store downtown and got instructions for using or disabling the answering service.

Ikea store in Ulm.

Riding around town with Simone last week, I noticed a Kaufland in Ulm, and Simone noticed the Ikea store. I paid no attention to Kaufland originally because I did not know what it was until later when I explored the Kaufland in Neu-Ulm. The Ulm Kaufland is nearer home, so now I have almost no reason to go to Neu-Ulm. I checked it out today and found a big Toys "R" Us across the street, next to Ikea. I did not know how I could have missed that until I saw it was still under construction.

I got home and found mail to me in Germany from Australia. My ex-girlfriend Jessica is there on an academic exchange program. With her letter, she sent a bunch of sparkly stickers with pictures of chocolates.

I can make out enough of the telephone service instructions that I might be able to set the answering mode or even retrieve messages, but it requires a PIN. Apparently I could have set the PIN during one of those calls from the phone company computer, but of course I did not. I do not know what it is set to now, if anything. So I just called the phone company and asked them to turn it off. That is supposed to take effect tomorrow. Monday, I will call my phone from elsewhere and hope:

I no longer have an answering service.
I still have phone service.

Sunday, March 23, 2003

I am transcribing my German class notes into my computer to organize them and for review, and I am catching up on some observations I noted to enter here. The German Garage is pronounced with a soft g, taken from French. Usually the letter g in German is hard. German shares the English characteristic that "q" is always followed by "u" and also shares the characteristic that "qu" is pronounced as a "kw" sound, so "quack" is "kwack." However, in German, the sound of "w" is our "v" sound, so "quack" sounds like "kvack." It doesn't seem right to change the pronunciation of onomatopoeic words, unless English and German ducks are quacking differently.

Monday, March 24, 2003

I called my home phone from work, and it just rang and rang, so the phone service appears to be set the way I need. That is one less thing to worry about. I still have to translate the letter from the television (Fernsehgeräte) and radio bureau. Hmm, I do do not seem to have reported that in the journal. Last week, I got a letter from a German federal agency (Gebühreneinzugszentrale der öffentlich-Rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, which means something like Fee-Collection-Agency of the Public Service Broadcast Institutes in the Federal Republic of Germany) about the television and radio fees. I have to translate it and figure out how to tell them I do not have a television and am not using the radios that came with the apartment.

At work, I got the assembly code for the interleaved-data FFT working. I still have to document it, optimize it, and fit it together with the split-data FFT nicely. That will complete milestone six. Milestone seven is the real FFT, which may take a couple of weeks. There is officially a milestone eight, but it is paperwork. It looks like I will finish in April.

Some more notes from class: Most students have only two names, no middle name. Apparently the custom in Tunisia when a student has a question is to walk up to the teacher to ask, even when the teacher is in the middle of instructing the class. Leila has done that several times.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

I went shopping this afternoon. First, I looked for a combination clock and CD player, but I could not find one. There are plenty of clock-radios, portable CD players, and so on, but no CD players with a clock function and no radio. I want one so I can use a CD to wake me up without having to pay the radio tax. If anybody in the US sees a cheap (say $30, maybe $40) CD player that can be set to turn on at a given time, please let me know.

I also looked for a jacket. It is sometimes too warm to wear my winter coat. My spring jacket was in the package that is lost, so I need to replace it if the package does not turn up very soon. I found a nice jacket and encountered another cultural difference. The jacket has a zipper, and the tab is on the left. That is the opposite of men's jackets in the US. I do not know about women's jackets. It was marked as a man's jacket. I suppose I could get used to it.

Speaking of the temperature, there is often a sharp temporal temperature gradient during the day here. Going out in early morning, it can be very cold, but it usually warms up during the day. If it is a sharp chill at sunrise, it can be tolerable at 10 a.m. and warm in the afternoon. It was a mild chill this morning, and I walked to and from the gym and the mall in shirtsleeves this afternoon.

I finished the initial draft of my web pages describing the Paris trip. There is still more to review and add. Probably this weekend I will post the pages on the web.

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Cannonball.

Simone and I passed this several times while looking for the Crooked House, and I did not recognize it. This is a cannonball lodged in the wall of the Zur Forelle restaurant. That was one very disgruntled customer.

While walking to and from Zur Forelle, I noticed three more sparrow sculptures. Andreas says 256 were made.


Barber sparrow.	*Sparrow decorated with sparrow-symbols. The lettering says Ulmer City/Alles drin!, "All inside!"*	Tuxedo sparrow.

Thursday, March 27, 2003

The interleaved-data FFT is working within specification. Way, way better than specification in most cases, so EADS is happy. They got a bargain, which partially makes up for paying me nine months' pay for four months' work.

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