| Path: Eric's Site / Eric / Travel / Germany / Journal 7 | Related: Germany, Journal 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10, Visits (Site Map) |
The two web pages for Simone's visit are ready. There is one for
my visit to Paris with Simone and one for
Simone's visit to Ulm.
I have been reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on my PocketPC while waiting for buses and such, because it came free with the PocketPC. Spoiler warning: If you have not read the novel (which contains more than the movie) and might, you might skip this paragraph. In the movie, the Wizard grants the protagonists' wishes by pointing out things they already had. In the book, there is more, including a stupid pun. To give the Scarecrow brains, the Wizard removes the Scarecrow's head, inserts pins and needles to make him sharp, inserts bran, and then tells the Scarecrow he has bran-new brains. I read all the way through the book for that?
The mail is here. One of my new DVDs arrived. I ordered a bunch of movies
from Amazon.com to be sent to my New Hampshire apartment, where Kathy
converts them from new to used (reducing their value to reduce import
duties) and forwards them. First up is Navigator: A Time-Travel
Adventure by the director of What Dreams May Come. When
shipping things into the US for personal use, there is a generous daily
exemption in duties. I could not find corresponding information for
Germany, but the customs office did not charge for this DVD, so this
method seems better than having Amazon.com send me new DVDs directly.
Microsoft handles this change with its normal aplomb: My PC starts to boot, changes the time, puts up a dialog box announcing the change and asking me to verify it, and then suspends the start-up process, doing nothing else until OK is clicked. It is like Microsoft never heard of using computers as servers or automated devices that should start and do things on their own, without constant human monitoring.
Ergh, I'm working on my German homework. Here's a passage from the grammar section of one of the dictionaries I brought: "Except for the modals (see p. 360), the auxiliaries (p. 356), and wissen, to know, conversational German uses the present perfect tense to indicate the past. The simple past is used in newspapers, books, and articles." What this means is that when I mean "I saw," I have to learn to say, "I am seeing," but still write, "I saw," but I have to remember there are exceptions for "know" and the auxiliaries and the modals (whatever those are). Got that?
I suppose it is not as weird as it sounds. English does funny things with tenses too. In "She is going home tomorrow," the verb "is going" is present perfect, but the sentence is about the future. Strictly, the sentence does not say she is going now. She will go home or will be going home tomorrow. However, it is still a nuisance to learn. So I won't. As far as I am concerned, everything in Germany is going to happen in the present.
Pots rattle on the stove more in Germany than in the US, at least than on my US stove. I have mentioned before how long the stove heating elements take to heat up and cool down. They are more massive than elements I have seen in the US, so they hold more heat. They are also flat and have solid surfaces, not spirals like US electric-stove heating elements. That gives them more surface area in contact with a pot (or a pan), so they may conduct heat to the pot better. The bottoms of the pots are also flat, which means there is a close fit between the pot and the element. Any water between the pot and the element will be converted to steam when the element is heated. Since the fit is so good, it cannot escape easily. Instead, it lifts the pot, causing rattling or occasional thumps.
We are supposed to bring something to eat to class tomorrow night, so I
made brownies. They turned out better than the previous two batches.
The batter was more viscous, as it usually is at home. I think they are
now pretty close to the results I get at home, except that I have only
ordinary chocolate chips instead of raspberry chocolate chips. (Simone
brought the chocolate chips with her from the US, and they are used up
now.)
Tonight's class included discussions of food and drinks and ordering in restaurants. Leila, from Tunisia, did not understand what Schinken was, and the teacher tried English and asked other students for Schinken in other languages. That was amusing, seeing it go around the room in multiple languages. Schinken is ham in English, prosciutto in Italian, and jambon in French. Finally, the Iraqi said something, in Persi, I think, that Leila understood.
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| What the brownies look like at home. |
Maryam brought something like cotton-candy, except it looked like threads
instead of fluffy cotton candy, and a salad with everything in it (eggs,
tuna, tomatoes, carrots, peas, and more). Maral brought a couple of Iranian
fruits I have never seen before.
The interesting thing that showed up this week is that the dinner shows up
at 1 a.m. this week but 2 a.m. on its next occurrence. That is also correct;
it will be held in Eastern Standard Time this week but in Eastern Daylight
Savings Time next time, while the time here has already changed and will not
change again soon. So Outlook has specifically associated the time zone
and its rules with the appointment and can dynamically figure out what time
it will be here when the appointment begins. That is a nice feature—or
it would be if the user had control over it, if I could type "7 p.m. Eastern
Time" to set the time zone with an appointment. But, of course, the user
cannot; Microsoft will do that and give you no choice.
Martin Lang does not seem upset by this, and he realizes he might have
miscalculated what they should expect, so it may be okay to change the
specification. If so, I will spend a few days tuning the code and trying to
get a little more performance out of it. Then there is some clean-up work
to do, formalizing documents, making edits, and documenting the test
procedure. EADS also wants some method to test the test program and the
timing program, and I may have to do some work for that, but it should
not be much. If we can get the primary documents ready before Sandi arrives
next week, EADS can review them while I am on vacation, and then we might
finish up in the last week of April.
I am probably contemplating options needlessly, because EADS has asked me to consider more work, so they must be happy. Today Martin gave me the details on the IIR they would like optimized. Just analyzing it to estimate how long it will take will be a significant part of the work. That is because it is not well organized for optimization, so first I have to figure out how to optimize it. That is the creative part, and then the rest is engineering. Martin calculated the operations involved to estimate the time, but I have to explain to him why that does not work. (It is the same reason you cannot always fit twenty jigsaw puzzle pieces into twenty jigsaw puzzle spaces, plus the fact that not all the pieces in their IIR fit together.)
Problems like that are good news, because it is why people want to give me money. In this case, it will either be impossible to get the time Martin estimates (although something that will do them a lot of good is likely possible) or I will find a completely different method that is even better and impress them with my optimization magic.
I wanted to get another stamp for an international letter today, but the
post office is closed when I pass by on my way to work and, as I have
mentioned before, the machine does not have a stamp of the right value,
€1.50. What it does have is .04, .05, .10, .44, .45, .55, 1.00, 1.44,
2.20, 4.10. Some of those make sense—a domestic postcard is €.45,
a standard letter is .55, and larger envelopes are 1.00, 1.44, and 2.20.
But there is nothing for 4.10 in the standard price list, nor for the smaller
amounts, and they do not seem convenient for combining into useful sums. You
need three different stamps to form €1.50 postage for international
letters.
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| Sauerkraut juice. |
I added a new link near the top of each of my journal pages, under the typing computer image. The new link will change the page background to white, removing the image. I tried to make the images I used not interfere with reading, by making them all very light, but colors differ on different monitors, and I hear some people have had problems. If you have JavaScript enabled for my web pages, clicking the link should make the page appear as black text on a white background (or whatever defaults you have set).
I learned a new word today, Mittel is the noun "means," as in "ways and means." Not too interesting by itself, but it explains the word for groceries, Lebensmittel. Lebensmittel is literally "living means."
There was an article in yesterday's New York Times about another US citizen, Maher Hawash, who has been arrested by the federal government and held without being charged or brought before a judge. The New York Times asks you to register before you can see the article, but here is a Wikipedia article.
The government does not even claim he committed any crime. They are holding him as a "material witness," but they will not say witness to what. The difference this time is that Hawash has prominent friends, including a former Intel vice president, so the case is getting some attention. Unfortunately, I do not think anything will change. Hawash may be released after some members of Congress ask the FBI to explain, but that would just mean people with influential friends have freedom. It will not help the many other people arrested, held, tried, and and punished without public trials. perhaps even killed without public trials. Freedom has to be protected in the Constitution, not at the mercy of whatever support you can gather.
Here, at the White House web site, is an Executive Order authorizing "military" trials. Military trials can be kept secret. The Executive Order even explicitly says the death penalty may be used. [2021: White House link is broken, redirects to main page.]
A side effect of the government's detention of people as "material witnesses" is to taint the judicial system. Holding a person in jail for months and denying them any court hearing is likely to make them think the only way to be released is to do what the governments wants, even if it means testifying to something that is not true. Therefore, a person who has been held in this way is not a reliable witness.
I need more vanilla, and I want to get a large bottle, because the tiny vials cannot be poured into a measuring spoon easily. You have to shake the vial to get the vanilla to come out, and you cannot direct the vanilla into a measuring spoon while you are shaking the vial. But Marktkauf and Real Markt only have the vials. I must have gotten the bottle at Kaufland.
Oh, foo. I took the dictionary off the shelf, and the other books fell over,
and that pushed the bookend, and that knocked the lamp off the shelf, and
the bulb broke, and I do not have a spare, and the stores are closed for
the day, so I have to wait until Monday to get a replacement.
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| Frustrating machine. |
The machine was particularly frustrating today. I will spare you the details of how changing the outward journey caused the machine to mess up the return journey, and trying to fix it in the obvious way did not work, so I just started over. Once I gave up trying to do fancy stuff (like schedule a brief stopover), it was not too bad. But when I inserted my card to pay, it showed a message about insufficient funds on my Pay Card, which worried me. Eventually, I figured out it meant I had not inserted any cash card, and it was, as expected, prepared to charge my bank card.
On the way home, two ticket inspectors boarded the Straßenbahn. I had seen them before, but this is the first time I was in the net, so that is one inspection for four months of daily travel. They caught one man and three kids without passes, and it seems the inspector writes you a ticket on the spot.
To keep up my professional development, I have been reading the 1999 C standard a little at a time, during breakfast and dinner. I just read an amusing passage. The standard says that calling the system function may cause the program "to behave in a non-conforming manner." The problem there is that a program that obeys the standard is conforming—so a program that obeys the standard's permission to behave in a non-conforming manner is conforming. It is like telling somebody, "Do not obey this sentence."
I saw in a recent episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that
Buffy Summers' birthday is October 24, 1980. Mark your calendars.
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| Toy model of a Straßenbahn. |
Hmm, we have a serious problem. In tonight's Buffy episode, they showed one of her tombstones (she's been buried at least twice), and it showed her year of birth was 1981. Which was wrong, her school records or her tombstone?
For those keeping track, Buffy was once buried alive, once killed and not
buried, once killed in an alternate reality, and once killed and buried but
later returned to life.
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| Uhrenmachergaße, Clockmaker Lane. |
There was some fun at work today. Martin used Matlab to examine the data from my FFT routines and found the results did not match. They were in the wrong order. I asked about the sign in the exponent of the coefficient in the DFT definition. Martin investigated, and, sure enough, Matlab uses a negative sign, where the specification for my work has a positive sign. Their application uses a negative sign, too, so that is what they need in the code. It would have been nice to know that a few months ago. It was in the first specification I wrote, back in October, and running code has been available since January.
Well, I fixed it. It is not a lot of work in the source code, and, in less than two hours, I gave them new code that could do the FFT either way. It will actually be more work to change the specification, the design document, and the source code comments.
I have grown accustomed to the cold here, which can be a problem. It got warmer as spring started and then turned chilly again. I went out with a light jacket and did not find the chill particularly uncomfortable. However, within eight blocks, my ears were complaining. I have to remember to allow that it may actually be colder than my current impression.
According to this news story [2021: Link is dead], the United States attacked a restaurant, or at least a residential section of the city, in an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. The US dropped four 2,000-pound bunker-penetrating bombs to do that! Now, unfortunately, if an enemy puts a tank in a residential area or positions soldiers in a hospital, the residential area or the hospital becomes a legitimate target (supposing the war is legitimate at all). And Hussein, as commander, is part of the military. But dropping 2,000-pound bombs in a residential area to kill one person seems beyond the pale.
Here is the
BBC's report on the incident. What I do not understand is why the news
services report this as if it is perfectly normal. Doesn't it occur to them
that readers might want to know whether using that much firepower in a
residential area is allowed by the rules of war?
German has two words for the number two: zwei for normal use and
zwo for the phone, because zwei and drei (three) sound too
much alike.
According to another BBC report about the deliberate bombing of a restaurant by the US, "Monday's bombing left an 18 metre-deep crater, broke windows and doors up to 300 metres away. Eyewitnesses said two houses were flattened and nine Iraqis were killed." And still not a word is reported about whether this is a legitimate way to conduct a war. I know the laws of war require combatants to try not to harm civilians. You can target combatants amongst civilians, but there has to be a limit. Does not using so much firepower to kill one person violate the law?
Sandi woke up, walked around briefly, and then went back to sleep. Time to process my photographs from yesterday.
I got my credit card bill with the charge for train tickets to France. MasterCard's conversion rate amounts to $1.1316 per €1. That is a bad rate. Visa was better. So, when you visit, use Visa. I will avoid US credit cards for the rest of my stay, since I have euros to pay with.
Speaking of exchange rates, Sandi said she was given €.83/$1 in
Atlanta and saw about €.89/$1 in Frankfurt. I saw €.922/$1 at
the airport in Munich, so change your money in Munich.
The city workers here clean the sidewalks with old-fashioned brooms. They look like bundles of twigs attached to a stick.
My dentist sent me a postcard reminding me that it is time for a cleaning.
I may call and ask if they have a branch office near me.
Meanwhile, I was rummaging around my system and happened across this passage from "All the Way," the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired October 30, 2001. It is an entertaining example of the prose on the show.
Dawn is Buffy's younger sister. (Not really. Dawn and her history were created by mystical forces, so everybody has memories of Dawn growing up in the family even though they now know it didn't occur.) Dawn is a high school freshman, and Buffy is her guardian since their mother died. Dawn and another girl deceived Buffy and have gone parking with older high school boys. The boys turn out to be vampires and are attacking the girls. Buffy runs in with a wooden stake in her hand, expecting to find your average everynight vampire fight.Back to work tomorrow. I made some progress on the IIR. There is still a little work to do before I will feel comfortable negotiating a price.
Buffy: "Dawn, are you—" (Stops, looks.) Buffy: "... Were you parking? With a vamp?" Dawn: "I—I didn't know he was dead." Vampire: "Living dead." Dawn: "Shut up." Buffy: "How could you not know?" Dawn, shrugging: "I just met him." Buffy: "Oh. Oh, so you were parking in the woods with a boy you just met." Vampire: "We've seen each other at parties." Buffy, to vampire: "Shut up." Buffy, to Dawn: "I don't believe you." Dawn: "Oh, like you've never fallen for a vampire." (Refers to relationship from previous seasons.) Buffy: "That was different." Dawn: "It always is when it's you." Other vampire: "Uh, excuse me. Can we fight now?" Buffy: "Hey, didn't anyone come here to just make out?" Teen couple in bushes raises their hands. Buffy, to couple: "Aw, that's sweet." (Gestures to couple.) "You run." (Couple runs.) Buffy, to vampire: "You scream." Lots of fighting ensues. Vampire: "Your sister's the Slayer? I totally get it. I knew there was something about you." Dawn punches vampire in abdomen, disabling him. Fighting continues.
Hmm, strange. I visited the web site of a French chocolatier that somebody recommended to me and tried to place an order. The shipping is very expensive, but I will try it once since it was highly recommended. Their web site is entirely in French. (So far, I have found French web sites are less likely to have English than Germany web sites.) Nevertheless, I figured out how to build an order and filled out the forms that were presented. Finally, it asked me to confirm the order, and I clicked, and it did something, and it never asked me how I wanted to pay. Their server did send an email message confirming the order, but I still do not see how to pay. Maybe something will show up C.O.D.? The email does not seem to include any instructions or notice that they will call or anything.
I guess I will wait and see. If nothing shows up, they will not be reviewed
and listed on my chocolate web pages. I don't need their French
chocolate; I'm going to Belgium.
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| Sparrow at Bayer Fahrschule. |
There is one more routine in the FFT where there might have been some significant performance gain to get, but I worked on it today without finding any improvements. We are finishing up the paperwork. Martin scheduled a review meeting for Monday. He also tested and timed my FFT routines with EADS' own programs, and everything is working as expected. So, Monday is the review, then I make any documentation changes requested, then we do the acceptance test, and I am done.
We continue discussing the IIR routine.
So now I have reading material again. However, I am going to save the books
until I travel around Europe, so I have something to read on the trains.
| Path: Eric's Site / Eric / Travel / Germany / Journal 7 | Related: Germany, Journal 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10, Visits (Site Map) |
© Copyright 2003 by Eric Postpischil.