“Wenn ihr mich sucht,
sucht mich in euren Herzen.
Habe ich dort eine Bleibe gefunden,
werde ich immer bei euch sein.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
Category Archives: thoughts
How a gift stole my time
And how google fixed it with the help of youtube.
I spent two evenings trying to solve the net-a star-cube puzzle and just couldn’t do it. It drove me nuts. So I turned to google to make my life happy again. And I finally found a 10 year old explaining it on youtube:
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6b5pg1ekENE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Deutsches Silicon Valley?
http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/berufsstart/so-bauen-wir-ein-deutsches-silicon-valley-a-1039844.html
Eine gelungene Betrachtung mit vielen Nützlichen Erkenntnissen für Deutschland. Dann lasst die Beamten in Zusammenarbeit mit der Deutschn Bank mal machen… Bis da was passiert mach ich mal einen Aktenvermerk und verdiene zwischenzeitlich lieber in Amerika mein Geld.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, … Deutschland? Fehlanzeige.
How do you know that your society is screwed? – RANT
This week-end we went to visit Houston and did the obligatory visit to the Space Center. Oh, how disappointing it was. How do you know you’re screwed as a society?
- When 25% of the public display area inside the Space Center is a food court filled with junk food you wouldn’t feed to your dog
- When your gift shop and photo booth get the prime floor space
- When you present a selective history of the NASA history omitting most of the accidents and sacrifices that led to the accomplishment of manned space flight.
- When many visitors are foreign speaking visitors from Eastern European and Asian countries
- When your space shuttle landing simulator is “kaputt” – both, like in “two”
- When your robots arm display has no balls (the payload) to play with
- When you show mostly mock-ups instead of the real stuff the tax payer has been paying for
Considering manned space flight was one of the biggest accomplishments of man kind in the previous century, the Space Center is a sorry display of stuff that was prepared and thought to be fun for kids, but fails on almost all levels. How disappointing! Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all that Houston ended up only with the Space Shuttle mock up instead of one of the other three surviving real shuttles. Hey, Texas already has one scattered all over northern Texas anyway. Boy, am I upset about this Space Center! What a missed opportunity to excite future generations for space travel. NASA was and is financed by tax dollars. I would expect them to spend our money more wisely and on less of this – “Oh, science is Fun!” shit. Until then, more junk food to the nation. Knock yourself out. I won’t be back.
WSJ on brain drain from lack of H-1B and Green Cards
Baby Logic #77 – Too big!
While driving from the campsite back home, I became a silent witness of 1 hour of 6-year olds conversations between Ro and Gee.
They were playing out fighting scenes all day long so they continued playing in the car with shooting things using the “super trigger”.
Ro: I touch the seat with both feet, hold the arm handle and touch the safety belt with the ellbow for super trigger!
Gee: No, I touch all that and touch the window with my chin to shoot the house.
Ro, No, I touch the window also, and also the door with my knee. Super trigger! I shoot the plane!
Gee: No, I also touch the door, and, and, <very excited, now almost rolling over backwards in his seat>, and touch the roof with the right foot to shoot the moon! Super trigger!!
Ro: No, I touch the roof, super trigger to shoot the universe!
Gee: <in disbelief and outraged> you can’t shoot the universe !!!- That’s too big! That would be shooting *everything* You can shoot a galaxy or the milky way, but not the universe!
Aha!
RV camping
TDI best features
VW features the BMW didn’t have:
– Bluetooth integration with address book
– SAT SiriusXM radio
– voice commands for phone, media, radio
– 60/40 folding rear bench
– heated seats and steering wheel
– remote opening trunk
Features I miss from the BMW:
– luxury suspension
– horsepower
– power sun shades
– adaptive window wipers
– cruise control buttons on steering wheel (VW has them on lever)
– substantial horn
First Drive – Passat TDI
My first impressions of the Passat are all positive. Very roomy cabin, with nice look and feel of all surfaces in plain sight inside the cabin.
The car is highly functional with huge legroom in the rear, a humongous trunk and split 60/40 folding rear seats for even more cargo space.
The engine is a civilized modern 2.0l directly injected diesel engine and it gets 45mpg when driven at 70mph on cruise control with the AC running – a given in Texas. The steering is responsive and the DSG shifting (double clutch manual-automatic gear box) silky smooth. The feature I like best though are the state of the art consumer electronics in the car that the 2001 BMW 740iL was lacking. Integrated Bluetooth, iPod integration, satellite radio and hands free phone integration, including sync’ed phone contacts, are all features unavailable in the BMW from 13 years ago. And I really love that stuff. The google maps NAV streams the audio for directions right into the premium speaker system – brilliant!
Low points of the vehicle are definitely (lack of) power: with 140 diesel hp this isn’t a race car. I’ll chip it at some point to 180hp but even then I don’t expect the car to outpace the 300hp gasoline competition from a full stop. Elasticity for acceleration from 35-65mph though will be the car’s strong point. Combined with the stellar fuel efficiency this is a neat package. Creature comforts are amazing considering the price tag. The suspension is just adequate, compared with the 740, but that’s kind of expected when comparing a $28k car with a $80k car when they were fresh off the production line.
So I’m quite happy with the car I got for $28.5k. Some features just stun me (hill start assist, electronic steering, SAT radio, auto dimming rear view mirrors – just to name a few).
Will I miss the Diva? Definitely. The 740 is hard to beat on the highway at 65mph+ speeds. But after driving her for 8 years or 80,000 miles it’s time to let go, as I’m not a car collector – or at least that’s what the wife says.
On the Kindle
The original Kindle Fire is one of those devices that keeps amazing me. Now after some three years with it, it’s still going strong as my son’s youtube movie platform, streaming through my phone wifi hotspot in the car. This device has been dropped, drowned, overheated, deep cycled and whatever else you can throw at a consumer device. But it has never failed us. You plug it in to charge and it just does what it was meant to do. As a first generation product it was amazingly open and I never bothered to set it up as a true Amazon device. I just used it as a cheap Android platform. And it still works well. Compared against the other shiny offerings in that space of course its glory has faded, but that doesn’t take away from it’s usability. I’m still a happy customer, not something I can say about the Asus Nexus 7 (which died after four months). I also own an original iPad 1, an iPad Air, an iPad mini, a Galaxy TAB and a MacBook Air 11″. The Fire has aged well.