jonny goes to england

Last saturday I found these guys in covent garden:

For anyone who doesn’t know what they are click here.

I think they were promoting the Sci-Fi-London, the international sci-fi festival taking place this weekend in London.

So, Oxfam is basically a charity organisation helping people in need. Their poster shown on the pic is communicating some message, I just don’t know which (without reading the text in the left corner). My god, I don’t even want to start writing down what I associate with this picture. Disgusting pic.

Btw this picture was taken in Seven Dials in Covent Garden .. a very nice place for shopping!

I found this book in a bookshelf in my office:

A book on Algol 68, published 1978 — exactly 30 years ago. Algol is a programming language which builds the root for most modern, mainstream programming languages today. What is the most shocking about this book is that the table of contents reads pretty much exactly like one of a modern book: Basic concepts, input/output (called transput in Algol 68),syntactic elements,dining philosophers as example program and even parallel processing.

Browsing through the book makes me realise how little really changed in 30 years of programming language research (of course things changed, but conceptually it’s still the same).

(Zoomed, pixelated) View from a bridge off Regent Canal down to Canary Wharf. If you follow down the river ~300m then the QM campus will be on your right and you would pass by my old house on campus ..

Wanna see a badly designed toilet? Come to England. Unlike in the rest of Europe, many toilets here don’t have a mixing tap but two separate taps for warm and cold water. Or rather, boiling hot and freezingly cold water. I made a pic for you of a specially ridiculous version of such a sink.

First off, it’s impossible to have a nice water temperate because it’s either cold or really (really) hot. To make things worse, you can’t just turn it on a little bit — it’s either on full thrust at 115% or off. Also the 115% are on for only 3 seconds. So you end up with one hand burned, the other hand full of soap and water spilled all over your shirt.
The experienced sink-users can be recognised as those who try to somewhat awkwardly rinse off the soap quickly from one hand. While the other hand tries to prevent the crazy tap from going into rocket-engine-mode.

The water splatters on the pic below are from turning the cold water on only once:

Letzen Mittwoch (ja .. bin einwenig im Verzug ging unsere meetup Gruppe an ein Pub Quiz. Ein Pub Quiz ist scheinbar einen sehr Englischen Gebrauch ein Quiz in einem Pub abzuhalten (who would have thought..). Wir gingen an ein “general knowledge” Quiz, wo die Fragen zum den Themas General/TV/Movies/Music kamen. Ich merkte jedoch sehr schnell, dass unser “general knowledge” in England relativ unbrauchbar ist. Von 13 Songs konnte ich gerade knapp einen erkennen und der Name des Scrum Half’s vom Rugby Team Welwyn in Hertfordshire von 1981 kam mir in diesem Moment auch nicht gerade in den Sinn.

Long story short, von 12 Teams wurden wir letztes und bekamen somit den sogenannten Titty Price. Wieso der letzte Platz so genannt wird, weiss ich auch nicht…

I found this in our student union shop. These alien-sticks are supposed to be sausages but alone seeing the texture of it makes me feel funny. Check it out:

Yesterday was the theory day of imperial,kings and queen mary. It took place in the computing department of Imperial in South Kensington. Very nice surrounding compared to our Mile End campus …

Anyway, I heard a few good talks and another few where I hardly understood a word. Most importantly, I heard a talk from a girl in Kings who is doing more or less the same research like I do.

Afterwards, me and Han stopped by at Harrods (since it was close) and I bought something for dinner .. walking past the windows I saw the following … chair or so:

Morgen findet ein London Theory Day im Imperial College statt. Das ist ein Treffen der verschiedenen Theorie-Gruppen von QMUL, Imperial und Kings College. Ich gebe keinen Talk, jedoch die Chinesin von meinem Buero wird ihre aktuelle Arbeit vorstellen ..