Category: Life
-
Helmar Fanselau dies aged 56
I just learned that one of my former teacher, Helmar Fanselau, died on January 13th, aged 56. He was a strange man. Many students liked him because of his antics and strange sense for humor. Others did not like him for his harsh and unforgiving marks in his subjects, Latin and History. I think he…
-
Coincidences
I turned 30 yesterday. I’m still not sure whether that’s a reason to celebrate or a reason to mourn. Anyway, there were two coincidences. Late on Sunday evening I was watching the remake of Shaft and started to wikipedia (doesn’t have the same sound as “google”, right?) for among other things Blaxploitation. Funnily, later that evening I watched Live…
-
Elevators
The elevators at mathematical department of the Berlin University of Technology where I work are known to be broken pieces of utter crap. Sometimes they stop at but don’t open the doors. The trick is to push the “Open Doors” button at just the right moment in these cases. But this is especially annoying in the evening when waiting…
-
Public Transport in Winter
It’s winter in Berlin. It’s cold and wet. There’s muddy snow. Using public transport during winter is not fun. It’s crowded and you have to wait on cold, windy stations. But today it was especially bad. Returning from university I was waiting at the S-Bahn station Adlershof. First, a passengerless train was passing the station without stop. Some wagons had…
-
Blonde Joke
Normally, I don’t like blonde jokes, but this one is really good! Oh and: Happy New Year! But the really funny thing about this is that I stumbled across it on Planet Debian, a computer-related RSS aggregator. And while following the links, I came across The Ferret’s blog. Ferret is a well-known employee of the Magic web site and…
-
Surprise Package
Yesterday we received a mystery parcel from Hewlett & Packard at work: Today we opened it. Inside we found two layers of styrofoam and beneath them we found another, smaller package: Well, we were beginning to get curious. When we opened the small parcel, we found … lots of paper stuffing. But well hidden inside it, we…