I almost cannot believe I am the only one posting about this…

Last weekend we went with Utopia on a meeting in the Drenthean village Drouwen, in the bungalow parc Drouwenerzand, right in between Emmen, Groningen and Assen (that’s in the North of the Netherlands).

My compliments go to the organization: Paul, Lotte, Sjoerd and Lise, you did a great job, we had three great days!

Some more nice places:

• Bolungarvík is where they shot Nói Albínói. You most probably cannot get any further away from the European continent (except for Greenland) within Europe.
• Aletschgletscher (the largest gletscher of the Alpes) compared to Vatnajökull (yes, that is the same scale!). It is truly an enormous ice mass! Now you see why I’m fascinated by Iceland? ;-)
• I wonder what Akranes looks like from the ground. Are these rocks above or below the surface? Edit: They are above the surface, seems a friendly town to me.

What do you do on a Sunday? You embark on a trip to your favorite places :-)

• Warschauer Strasse: The border was exactly through the Spree river, thus cutting the last station of the track. For 36 years, it was a pointless piece of track. Along the River, if you’re coming of the bridge to the west is a piece of Wall of about one kilometer long preserved. This, however is not historically accurate, as it was the Eastern side of the Wall and thus no grafitti could be found on it. Consequently, it gives an impression of how the wall looked at the Western side.
• Alexanderplatz: You can see the Fernsehturm, the train station. While this was an important place for Socialism and Communism, now big firms like Kaufhof and Saturn have their biggest stores of Berlin here.
• Platz der Vereinten Nationen: This is where I stayed with the exchange student in 1998. Formerly, this place was called Leninplatz and the round pavement in the grass with the dots is where the Lenin statue used to stand.
• Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse: The border crossing place for West-Berlin inhabitants. The track of the West-Berlin S-Bahn went straight through East-Berlin and all stations were closed down during the Wall-period, except for this one. There is also a U-Bahn track from West to West through East near Under den Linden. These stations were also closed and barricaded. It is this madness which I find intriguing of the whole situation.
• Lehrter Stadtbahnhof: The future Hauptbahnhof. Currently all trains stop at Berlin-Zoo and Berlin-Ostbahnhof (which was called Hauptbahnhof in DDR-times). When this station is finished, the legendary Zoo station will become a insignificant one.
• Tempelhof: The airport where the Rosinenbomber landed during the Soviet barricade of West-Berlin in 1948. A monument was erected in the circular park to symbolise the three air corridors from West-Germany to West-Berlin. The barricade was a direct response on the currency reforms the west-allies carried out in West-Berlin on 23 june 1948. In order to prevent hyperinflation in the east by flooding of worthless Reichsmarks coming from the west, DDR carried out currency reforms, too. That same night, power lines to the west part of the city were cut off and all transit streets were closed (while the air corridors were secured in a treaty, securing the transit roads was ignored by the west-allies). Basically, it was the first step of real division of West and East Germany (and yes, it was America who took that first step, thank them for it).
• AVUS: Automobil-Verkehrs- und ÜbungsStrasse, probably the first Autobahn in the world. First plans dated from 1909, finished in 1921. It was in use as a test track and during races. It is basically a 10 km long straight highway with two U-turns at the end. When no testing or training were carried out, the road was open for private traffic between Berlin and Potsdam. The road was a success and would lay the foundation for the very good Autobahn-network in Germany.
• Potsdamer Platz: The hippest place to be in Berlin currently was ironically the most dangerous place to be in Cold War times. Standing here was equal to signing your own death certificate. S-Bahnhof Potsdamer Platz was the subject of many illustrations of the division of Berlin.

*Potsdamer Platz* Oh, it is fun to go back to Berlin this way :-)

Hmm, Düsseldorf now has two airports, one on the original location and one in the Rhine where the Theodor Heuss Bridge used to be? Of course I reported this to Google.

It’s quite an old photo, the bridge over the Rhine they are building in the left is in service a few years already.

Update: In the meantime, Google Maps was updated extensively (higher resolution pictures are now available of the area) and the error has been removed.

My first second week of classes is over, and I dropped already two three courses, leaving 6 5 courses with classes and three more independent assignments.

• Automated Reasoning (assignment + exam)
• Web Information Systems (assignment)
• Programming and Modal Logic (exam)
• Intelligent Systems (exam, assignment already done last year)
• Software Architecting (assignment + exam)
• Interactive Virtual Environments (assignment)

Furthermore, these three assignments are still open.

• History of Computing assignment still needs a subject.
• The Linux Operating System assignment will be done in the week of 3 October.
• Hypermedia Systems assignment will be started after having read all the course hypertext.

I clearly will have my hands full on this, plus that I will be working as a student assistent at the Systemenlab of SAN.

I moved the posts of the holidays in Leukerbad to the archive. This way, it won’t show up anymore in the sections sidebar, but in the static section of the site.

Because of the ordering of the journal, the holiday diaries should be read in reverse order. I’ll look into it to check whether it is possible to define your own ordering, thus enabling an ascending chronological order (instead of descending like in the journal).

Photos of yesterday’s visit to ‘s-Hertogenbosch, our province’s capital.

 Hmm, why can't I help getting the impression that Google introduced [a new service](http://talk.google.com/) today? P.S. I have some invites left for those who want to try it out.

My old black and gray t-shirt look website is gone. I moved the journal to the root of the site, building the rest around it and am now working on creating a photogallery entry type for Hobix, my blog-software. The old site will still be available on another location for a while.

In my view, it was a good design, simple yet attractive. But it didn’t fit with the needs of the journal, which became an increasingly bigger part of the site. Actually it was the only part which got updates.

So, like I said, I’m working on a photogallery entry type. The current status is that I have one single page with all thumbnails on it, accompanied by the image description. A click on the thumbnail opens a new window with the larger version. This is of course absolutely undesirable and I really have better ideas, but hey, it is only the first preview not-even-release. The final version should have automatic thumbnail generation, some navigational facilities (maybe using AJAX?) and some other cool things I don’t came up with yet (like EXIF information).

You can already take a look at the Berlin 2001 gallery.

Nice weather, “some” (i.e. around 8.000) nice bikes, but not so nice to take pictures. Why not? Downtown was full, completely packed. About 75.000 people thought of going to watch and taking 50 pictures of the same pose but of a different model isn’t really interesting to watch. I nevertheless took some and put them in my Luijten.org dump-repository.

Ah, I guess there are some alright, but not that great.

Indian

Reflections

Reflections II

This one from the 2002 edition actually was better, but I couldn’t find a nice set of bikes so nicely arranged this year, it was a mess.

3 Heritage Softails

Today, the UPS courier brought a large box, containing my all new Canon EOS 350D. I only ordered it Wednesday from TopVision in Luxembourg, got the confirmation yesterday and today it was already in the Netherlands.

Mwuhahaha! Fear, for I have a camera!

Since the camera is delivered without flash memory, I was orienting about what cards are fast enough for the 8 Mpixel images (a side-by-side test of many cards). Of course, the top items – mainly SanDisk Ultra II and Extreme III, followed by cards of Lexar – can’t be found anywhere on such short notice. So, I got a plain and simple Dane-Elec card from BCC and was prepared for a slow shooting… That became a positive disappointment, storing a full-size fine JPEG costs less than a second. I guess the speed differences between cards become more apparant when shooting RAW format. Okay, so no need to spend loads of cash on flashcards.

This Sunday is Harleyday in Breda and it will be the vuurdoop, I hope I will get some nice shots (and nice weather, too).

Today we moved the Mac mini from the study into the living room. Not because my mom wanted it, but because we’re going to be renovating the study and that can take some time, so the machine has to be somewhere. This isn’t bad at all, since it is warmer in the living room.