jonny goes to england

The last two days our own little conference was running, solely for phd students. There were about 25 talks, few poster presentations and two panel talks mostly about managing your phd. Lunch, coffee and dinner was offered and paid as well! All in all it was really well organised.

For dinner we went to Thai Vista, a nice restaurant with (apparently) authentic thai food. Afterwards, we went to brick lane. During the night, the bar Cafe 1001 beside our venue (Clemens, Jani that’s where we went! :&gt was raided by police. Both road sides were blocked off and everybody who left the area was searched. I tried to get strip-searched but it didn’t happen!

Heute Nachmittag flog ich zurueck nach London, Luton, nach ein paar Tagen Basel :). Luton war kein super Erlebnis, ich bevorzuge und empfehle eindeutig Stansted als Flughafen!

Diese Woche findet die phd postgraduate conference statt. Ich werde schon wieder ein Poster erstellen muessen …ich denke ich werde jedoch das Mastermind Poster von letztem Monat verwenden.

I bought something and when I was home I noticed that there’s something weird on the shopping bag itself. Actually, I noticed that it’s a description of how to rob a store including the description of how to build the headmask and the gun. Since it’s easter time now I thought that’s really suitable for building a weapon — so I built the gun!

Here are some pictures

The description of the robbery:

The assembly:

The product:

Happy easter!

Fullpage ad in thelondonpaper:

“Terrorists need communication. They often collect and use many anonymous pay-as-you-go phones, as well as swapping SIM cards and handsets. If you’re suspicious of the number of phones someone has, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take.”

This reminds me of the following despair.com-style poster:

Our fridge got new letter magnets. This was the free associative thinking contest. I won

I’m using X11 for good 10 years now and I couldn’t live without multiple workspaces. Recently, OS X finally introduced “Spaces” which is a virtual workspace manager. I was excited about it because on OS X windows seem to clutter the desktop relatively quickly (especially on a 13″ macbook). I’m currently switching from linux to OS X and I have to say, I’m not happy with Spaces. In my opinion it’s done wrong. Two things which annoy me most:

1. I’m expecting Spaces to create separate desktops for running application windows on it. Thus, when I switch between windows with Cmd+Tab I only want to choose between the windows on the current Space and I don’t want the list of all applications running. Like that I can’t quickly switch between two open windows on a Space but sometimes get propelled to a different Space.
2. Even worse, imagine this situation. You have three Spaces and on the first one there is a Terminal instance running. Now, I want to open another terminal window on the 3rd Space. The Dock however does not respect the current Space you are working on. When you click on the Terminal symbol on the Dock you get sent back to the Space where the first window of it is running. What I would expect is that it only activated the Terminal menubar on the top so I could trigger Cmd+N to start a new window.

All in all, Spaces pretty much defies my logic of how multiple workspaces should work. As is, they are not very useful. Oh well, I’m sure there are techniques around that .. I’m only using OS X for some days

I’m flying home for a short easter break .. from the 19 - 25 March

My first pay (for teaching stuff). Not a lot but still

Hah! This one is a very interesting awareness test from Transport for London.

Do the test now by clicking HERE.

Ok. Here goes another food story. I bought this cheese plate with a “continental selection” of cheese. I don’t remember exactly but I don’t think I managed to eat any of them completely. The Brie was especially ridiculous. It was packed in an extremely tight, air-proof, welded plastic foil. I don’t know the right name for such a packaging, but I’m sure in German it would have a streng name such as “Schmelzplastikschutzatmosphäre”.

Now you know Brie is a soft cheese — the combination of a soft cheese and super tight packaging is not ideal. It’s hard to separate cheese from plastic and you end up with cheese everywhere on the table and all the plastic bits in your mouth.

Speaking of which, I found this great cheese shop in Covent Garden. It’s called Neils Yard Diary and sells all sort of french goat cheese and other nice stuff.