New Year's

Tuesday 09 February 2010 at 02:38 am An here are finally the pictures from this year's fireworks over Steinenberg:

Silvester 2009 Steinenberg

On travelling in Europe

Tuesday 09 February 2010 at 02:36 am Now that I'm traveling around here quite a bit there are some interesting things to note:

* Buying a train ticket between Germany and the Netherlands is almost guaranteed to be cheaper from the Netherlands. It seems that the cheap tickets are not sold as fast as on the German site.
* The German website (www.bahn.de), half of the time, is unable to calculate the actual price between a German city and a Dutch city - whereas the Dutch website (nshighspeed.nl) is always able to name a price (and a cheap one, too).
* Other Germans seem to have noticed this because it is not possible to buy a train ticket on the Dutch website without a Dutch bank card, or a Dutch credit card. On the German website I never had the problem that I couldn't pay with my Canadian credit card.

Gribubgeb

Thursday 21 January 2010 at 03:35 am I had to fill out a form today where my current city was already filled in. This really made my day

October 2009 trip

Monday 11 January 2010 at 02:47 am Here are finally the pictures from our trip to VisWeek in Atlantic City, NYC, and Purdue. The NYC trip was unfortunately really rainy and cold and I was sick, so I wasn't taking quite as many pictures as I would have liked.

USA October 2009 (VisWeek, NYC, Purdue)

November/December in Calgary 2009

Saturday 09 January 2010 at 07:26 am I finally managed to put together my pictures from last ilab visit. It includes events such as my PhD defense, the surprise party, the ACM Tabletop conference, & the ilab Christmas party.

Calgary November/December 2009

Steinenberg End of 2009

Friday 08 January 2010 at 10:22 am As some of my foreign readers may not know, the changeover to the new year in Germany is typically celebrated by people shooting off fireworks and firecrackers of all sorts and varieties. In contrast to many places in North America it is legal to buy these (within a certain timeframe of the year, usually about 2-3 days before Dec 31st) and to light them. For the past two decades or so, I've celebrated New Year's with my friends in my home village of Steinenberg by climbing a little hill overlooking the village and valley behind it. This year the colours were particularly nice. Here is a small image as a teaser. I'll upload more in a full album later.

What's Wrong With this Picture?

Thursday 07 January 2010 at 11:18 am

As a hint: I have clicked on the little icon next to "Date of Birth"

- Still haven't seen it?

Answer: It popped up a calendar widget that points to today's date. Now am I supposed to scroll 30 years into the past without a year-changing button? And no way to even enter the birthdate by hand?

Sometimes I think we should force every cs student to take a basic HCI course!

Window1 No Longer

Monday 04 January 2010 at 06:20 am Yeah! Microsoft has fixed a small but annoying thing in the new version of Visual Studio (2010). If you're a coder you know what I mean when looking at the image:

My real PhD hat...

Friday 11 December 2009 at 6:27 pm Here is a picture of the PhD hat my friends at ilab made for me. It's now hung on the ilab-hat-hall-of-fame just above the sink in the kitchen. If you're wondering why there are gravestones on the hat, it's because I've been using a dataset for my user studies called the "causes of death" in the US in 2004 (in case you're wondering - 47 people died of lightning strikes - pretty interesting, isn't it?). The funky bubbles represent proteins, another type of data that I have used over the years.

U-T-A in the House

Saturday 05 December 2009 at 11:54 am Speaking of cool Secret-Santa gifts, this is a rap video that Paul Lapides from Ilab made about my friend Uta. If you know her you should watch it. It's hilarious!