BPI inside

Tag: Personal

  • More illness

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  • Cough, cough…

    Headache, fever and hurting arms and legs.

    I’m getting ill in the last two days of my attendance, but I don’t expect something to happen in these last hours. Been in bed the whole day, watching TV/DVD, reading magazines and sleep. But I don’t feel much better now, perhaps the peak of illness will strike this night or tomorrow.

    Damn, I have to get up on Monday no matter if I’m ill or not:

    • I have to pass on the attendance phone
    • I’m getting new shock absorbers onto my car, this should be the last thing to fix from the accident. Hopefully…

  • Moron’s hightime

    Perhaps you remember my girlfriends programming teacher. This year he doesn’t teach her C++ anymore but Delphi.

    Different language, same problems. He gives a homework/test, then the studends give them back more or less correct and then he tells them their mark and that they should correct it. BUT without giving the tests back, so that the students would know, what they made wrong. And he doesn’t tell them how to make it right.

    Recently he tries to hang the boss out: If the students want two tests per term, he chooses the time and date. If they want to choose theirselves, he only permits one test/term. So you have the choice of "all or nothing" but you know when or "a bit more security with a second shot" but you don’t know if the shots fall around dates where your schedule is filled up with tests in other subjects.

    Sidenote to the tests: His exercises are formulated in quite technical language, come with a pre-defined layout, class- and function-structure and if you don’t build your solution into this, you get a worse mark. This is like learning a language just by copying letters written in that foreign language.

    How should anyone learn programming in that way???

    I think, he just has a problem with acceptation and so he enjoys forcing his students to do exactly what he wants, no matter how insane it is.

  • Other peoples food

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  • Car repaired… almost

    Today I’ll finally get my car back from garage. It was delayed another day because the mechanics "didn’t want to fix it in a hurry".

    But if they took that much care of it, why didn’t they fix my right-hand mirror? "…overlooked…"

    Well, I’ll get a new one the next time I have to show up for service there. I hope, they remember that by then.

    Odd. I’m sitting here at work, and let my girlfriend take up the car although she’s the reason why it halted beside the road in the first place. But I believe, this just was bad luck in a terribly bad week for us all, and so I trust her. She also surely takes a bit more care now while driving, but I don’t want to say that she drove dangerous before, far from it. But this just has to look strange from third person view 😉

  • This and that

    Saddam’s an OutKast: Hey Allah! (updated 2013-07-14) If you like the current chart-breakers Outkast with their song "Hey yah!", you’ll surely like this one.

    My car is still apsent one more day because the garage got already-damaged replacement-parts and has to reorder them.

    And I corrected an old post from me, which directly connects me with my employer. As I don’t want this because of job security, I modified the name of my employer, so that it should be safe for both sides now.

    Today’s "Hit the Bush" Bush still defends Iraq war on CNN.com. At the core, Bush now says he attacked Iraq, because Saddam only "was able to" produce WMD. Well, then now he has to make war on almost every country on earth, because even less experienced scientists can build WMD’s with the power of (some) money and the internet. Surely, everyone knows a report on a TV channel where the reporters get their hands on dangerous materials.

  • Taskzilla progress

    Wohoo… The TaskZilla train is rushing in, usage increases, migrations are running and task numbers are rising 🙂 Now got a helping hand for the design of the stuff. I’m not really a good designer, I’m much better in implementing an already created design. But being creative (in arts stuff) myself is not my thing.

    Seems, that I will have to introduce an separate "New Task"-page for PM’s to better meet their requirements and to split the PM-stuff apart from the initial developers-page.

    Offtopic: My girlfriends C++ – teacher is a moron. Or is it common to build the double-include-prevention like this:

    #ifdef include1_define_h
#include "include1.h"
#endif

    additionally inside the headerfile itself there is another check, where it belongs to. brrrr Imagine the code-block in one of our source-files where 20+ includes occur. And now the teachers reason for such idiotic stuff: "Because the application runs faster if it has not to open the include-files twice"…. Gosh, C++ is not VB, go back to your QBasic editor, if you don’t know the difference between interpreted and compiled languages! Save your and (more importantly) your students time.

  • The future of our energy sources

    Strange thing, I’ve written this article during my vacation and what happened a short time after I were back?

    • Power outage in America
    • Blackout in Great Britain

    I swear, I have nothing to do with that! But could it be that I have somehow received a subconscious message? Can I feel the future? Or am I just thinking of too many things at once? But this confirms my general paranoia somewhat.

    Let’s go on with the stuff that comes out of the wall. Sorry, that it’s a bit outdated, but this is the way I thought BEFORE the power shortages happened.

    Energy and Power Energy consumption is increasing. The modern world as we know it today is not able to survive a single day without electrical power. Computers, fridges, even vehicles could not work and the modern economy would sink into chaos within a few hours. People today don’t think about, how they are addicted to electrical energy. In the year 2000 more than 50 percent of the produced electricity relied on prehistoric energy carriers as oil and coal (see IEA Fact Sheet). As we all (hopefully) know, these reources will be depleted within the next few decades. I think it doesn’t matter if they last for 40 years or for 80 years, estimations vary, in the end the result will be the same. If we begin to plan new energy production techniques THEN, it’ll be too late. Luckily, today many people and companies already have realized this and are researching in areas of alternate power production technologies.

    One of the most promising inventions seems to be the fuel cell. But this is only part of the solution as this lessens the need of not-renewable energy-sources only on the consumer side. The hydrogen has also to be produced and this production also needs energy. It can be produced in several ways and for the most effective technique the only thing (besides water) is electrical power (which currently is produced using oil or coal). One may ask, where the sense behind converting electricity intro hydrogen just to make a bit less electricity out of it (because there are some leaks in the conversion processes). Well, electricity has one very important flaw: It can’t be stored effectively. Hydrogen can.

    In the future, when fossil materials are depleted, alternate sources of electrical power for hydrogen production will have their peak time. This will be the era of solar power plants, wind parks and biomass-reactors. And the best of all is, that the resources which are needed for them are not available in only special parts of the world (as it is today) but evenly distributed all over the globe. Everyone can take advantage of them. This opens the opportunity to an all-new world order, with more democracy than we can imagine today. Ever noticed how often the force of a country is tied to it’s access to resources? Think of America. Cut the pipeline and say bye bye.

    In the days to come everyone can sell the power he produces and the ‘energy-sellers’ of today have to fit more into the role of distributors than producers. This conversion has to be a global process because the main source of power in the future will be solar power and the sun only enlightens 50 percent of our globe. The other side will have to live from the hydrogen it has produced over the day.

    The main beneficiaries of the change to alternate energy will be the poor countries. Many of them have large, unused surface which then can be used to build huge, cheap photovoltaic power plants for example. Today’s large power companies will rely on many little electricity producers instead of fossil resources under their control. Today the countries with the most resources under their control play the big roles in world politics, countries with less resources (or the opportunity to use this resources) have small roles, even if in sum they overweight the big ones.

    Perhaps, if political influence keeps tied to resource-access, the whole world will be politically re-ordered and can become more democratic in the future because, as said before, the access to alternate energy sources is largely evenly divided all across the world.

    Some links: http://www.renewableenergy.com How biomass works How electricity grids work

  • US executive orders for Iraqi oil

    Do you want to get juristic immune to practically everything? Then get access to oil in Iraq!
    As said in Executive Order 13303 everything which has somehow to do with Iraqi oil gets practically invulnerable to justice (Section 1b). The Bush administration tries to push US companies into the Iraqi oil-market and now these companies are immune to everything? They could break human rights and couldn’t be punished. An ecological accident could cause huge damage to the environment and nobody would be responsible for it.
    Well, they could even intentionally harm people if it would happen in conjunction wit the production of oil products. I may be a bit paranoid, but I don’t think that it is a good idea to set some companies free from the law. Any other paranoid thoughts out there?

  • Lazyness note…

    I’m back but still off from work for another week. Another small article is being prepared but I don’t know when I’m not too lazy to type it up.