"This, madame, is a faithful narrative of every event in which we have been concerned together..."

The following is a faithful transcription of every thing that I wrote whilst I was without the use of my computer:

It is currently 21:25 on Friday, 23 February 2007. I am sitting at the large table in my room; with my back to my computer. I am writing this by hand. Do not worry, your eyes have not mislead you: I said by hand. The reason for this [as you already know, due to my earlier posting] aberration is that my computer finally lost its battle with terminal hard drive warping, brought on by a dysfunctional cooling system thanks to the ineptitude of Dell. For the record: Because of this, I am never going to purchase a Dell again. (On a side note, a song by Herbert Grönemeyer, very popular German crooner, that we had to sing in German class in high school is currently playing on the radio.)

As I was saying: Never again Dell. This was a great machine, and because of business decisions made by Dell, I have had to put up with a dying computer for the last two years and a half years (note that they computer is not quite three years old). At first this was not too bad, just a Blue-Screen-of-Death every once in a while, until it finally escalated to the current issues. Fortunately I have been able to nurse the poor thing along, hoping that I could get it to last through university, as it got increasingly worse. And, instead of dying some time inconvenient last semester, it just had to hang on long enough that there was no hope of getting things fixed before I left the country. It just had to wait until I was out of the country, where the warranty does not hold. And, even better, I still have at least two months on my warranty.

Things like this are completely typical for me. It is a good thing that I am not superstitious, because if I were, I am sure that I would be hunkered down somewhere, waiting for Armageddon. This is just the crowning glory of what has been a chain of interesting events, that, if I had been State-side, would have just been a passing phase that I would have looked at as being rather amusing. Since I am abroad these things tend to pile up a little bit, and, while trifling, are a little more irritating. ‘Good grief,’ says Charlie Brown. No wonder. If my luck continues like this, I will take up ‘Good grief’ as my mantra.

I am now getting powered into reviewing-my-options mode – similar to the mode that our esteemed president was in at the time of the State of the Union Address. Hopefully my reviewing process will yield better fruit than his “process” of review did.

Speaking of politics. As much as I enjoy following politics (why did I not major in poli-sci? – Do not ask me, I have yet to figure it out), I am already starting to get worn out by the constant presidential/Hilary/Obama coverage. You would think that it was currently January 2008 and we were gearing into the first round of primaries. It is my hope that every one will chill out over the summer and we will not have constant coverage of who is running for president. And, frankly, if the media focused more on who WAS NOT running for president, it would take a lot less time. [Except, that would include Al Gore, and every one has a lot to say about Al Gore.]

Enough of politics (who talks about that stuff anyway?). If anyone is keeping track: I had an altercation with a door today. It won, of course, as the doors always do. I will never understand why I have so much trouble with things like door handles, especially the lever kind. (Note: German door handles are all levers, I have yet to see a knob.) You would think that, since I just used the door handle to open the door, I would know where the handle is and manage to keep my arms from getting caught on it. Apparently not.

25 February 2007
I will begin today’s commentary by relating an observation of mine from sometime last week. First, I will tell you that the DLR has some programmes for school children, and once a week or so, two teenaged boys, not older than fifteen can be seen getting lunch in the canteen. On the day in question, as I was taking my tray to the kitchen, I noticed that these two boys were sitting at a table. They were finished with their meal, since the table had nothing on it. This was not remarkable in itself, except for this one detail: What were they doing while sitting at the table? They were not talking, or doing any conversing with each other. They were sitting at the table, playing there handheld gaming things. [I recently heard the PSP mentioned in an article, and this is what they were playing]. I tell you this because it was completely something you would see teenaged boys doing, but it was so out of place in a company cafeteria that I could not help but chuckle when I saw them.

Now, if you ever had any doubt, you know how awkward a story tell I am, and why it is probably good that I have recognised this and do not harbour any wish or have my heart set on (using two well worn clichés) being a writer. Truthfully, this journal (ok, yeah, I have succumbed to the craze, it really is a blog, but since I am currently composing this with pencil and paper, humour me.) is the most non-lab-report/technical writing that I have done since the research paper days ended in early high school (oh, how I miss those paper days…).

Another amusing thing. The student residence that I am living in has a ‘clubhouse’ on the premises that has a little bar in it. They put flyers up in the buildings to try to get people to come. This week’s flyer says (translated, of course) that most of household accidents happen at home. It then shows a Venn-diagram like picture, all filled in and captioned: Household accidents at home: 100%. At the bottom of the flyer is says, Better that you are not at home. This is quite a persuasive argument, and completely factual.

27 February 2007
That is the end of my… ok, not so faithful narrative, but you got the gist. I will now update you on what has been going on since. We were able to get my computer to function again by taking out the hard drive and then putting it back in again and pushing it very firmly into the case. Not so technical, but it worked. I am still going to get a new computer, I have had quite enough of this one. This one will get sent home with my father when he comes in a couple weeks, and will finally get sent to Dell. (By the way! Dad is coming! He has a meeting or conference, or something like that, in Norway, and is coming to see me a few days before that. We are going to go to Berlin, and maybe San Souci in Potsdam.) In summary: I have a working computer which will make finding a new one a lot easier and I will be able to stay in contact with the world until the new one arrives.

Breaking (Broken) News

Those of you who have been acquainted with my computer these last couple of years know that it has been suffereing from a terminal form of hard drive failure. Well, as you might expect, it seems to have finally made its final spin. Last night, the ominous clicking started, so, as usual, I turned it off to save it from further distress. After a resting period, I attempted to reboot. To no avail. The bootable hard drive 0 is not to be found. Future options include trying to figure out if Dell will help, even though I am over seas, or, waiting for my paycheck to come in, and just replacing the poor soul. May it rest in peace.

President's Day and Karnival

Background for the amusing anecdote of the day: There are restrooms on each floor of the building I work in at DLR. They are located in the area where the stairwells open up to each floor, which is also the crossway between sections of the building. This area is also enclosed by fire doors on both sides. One computer that I work on is on one side of this area and the other computer is on the other side. Hence, I am frequently crossing through this area. Now that the scene has been set, here is the amusing anecdote of the day: Today, as I went through this area (every five minutes I think) I noticed that there was a workman doing something in one of the restrooms (they do not have doors yet). It looked like, at one point, that he was painting the ceiling. The reason that this was amusing is because he did not have a light on. Usually the workmen will bring up a light to hang somewhere while they work, but this guy was working away on what ever he was working on… in the dark. You might not wonder as to why I found this slightly diverting: how are you supposed to see what you area painting if you cannot see the surface that you are painting. Beats me, but this guys seems to have it down.

Moving on. Today is President’s Day. Happy for those of you who are off work and school, and not so happy for those of you who are not. Tomorrow is Mardi Gras and the day after is Ash Wednesday. Which means: we are in full Karnival swing. Well, not really here, in the north of Germany, but if one goes a little south and east into Nordrhein-Westfallen and Köln and Düsseldorf then you would have had today, and perhaps tomorrow off as well, but for only the purpose of revelry. Braunschweig did have a parade yesterday and I have been told that it is the largest Karnival parade in the north of Germany.

On Saturday I managed to take myself down into the inner city and take some pictures for your edification. I also bought a pair of everyday shoes. This will take off the great burden from my running shoes, which is good, since while looking at shoes I looked at running shoes and comparable shoes to mine were some where around 100 € which is way more than I am willing to pay for running shoes.

On to the pictures…

These pictures are of what is left of the Burg 'Dankwarderode'. Which was the castle of Heinrich der Löwe. As you can probably tell the Lion was his symbol. The statue is a replica of the original, which is now in the museum that Dankwarderode has now been turned into. Benches such as these are all

around the Cathedral which was founded by Heinrich. The following pictures are of the Cathedral. You can sort of get the idea. The other pictures are other scenes from the Burgplatz and streets that branch off of it.

On the other side of the Burg is the Altrathaus of Braunschweig, it is quite an imposing structure.

I also made it out to the area where I work and took a couple pictures. I did not want to get too close to the airport. You never know who will accuse you of taking pictures for some nefarious purpose. The picture on the bottom is indeed the airport building. You can see air traffic control sitting on top of it. In the

pictures to the above that, you see the hill that the DLR compound sits on. My building is toward the back next to the airport building and is just along the runway... very distracting for aerospace engineers to have an excellent veiw of all planes and helicopters taking off and landing.

Now, since my computer is having issues, I will stop here before I loose everything. I also have more pictures of the woods. But, since they look like woods, I figured that if you want to see them, you will let me know. Speaking of which, if you would like an electric copy of any of the pictures you see on here, or you would like to see the other pictures that I have not posted, just let me know.

Next up: Avian Influenza

To start off with, I would like to thank everyone who sent me Valentines. The Reese's’ heart lasted maybe half an hour and, as soon as I find some tape, the beautiful rose card is getting hung on the wall; my first wall decoration, by the bye. (I really need to do something about the white spans of the walls…)

I am sure by now that you have heard about the Peter-Pan-Peanut-Butter-Salmonella Outbreak. All I have to say is: THAT IS MY PEANUT BUTTER!!! (Please look to the right. That is my jar of peanut butter. Seriously.) I get sent this wonderful jar of peanut butter last week. And now I find out that I really ought not to eat any more of it. That makes me very very sad. I now have to wait for another jar to be sent from my mother, if she can find a jar in Bannerpole that does not start with the product code 2111 (as mine does). Though it might be interesting if she could not, because that would mean that the grocers have not taken it off the shelves. In which case, we could sue. Which might be, as I said, interesting.

So now, within the last week, I have found out that I have had a close call with Salmonella poisoning, as well as Consumption. (How a person can go for three (yes, three) months, with contagious TB without thinking of going to the doctor is beyond me. Especially when this person is a mechanical engineer, so supposedly he has some sort of brain in there—unless it has been rotted away by excessive Halo playing… but that is a whole other issue, and, since I have no idea who this kid is, except that I had a class with him last semester, I will not venture further into his mental capacity.) I now ask this question: What will it be next week? h5n1?
Or maybe the black plague. Which ever, I will be sure to tell you about it.

Also, last week was Fashion Week in New York City and this week was Fashion Week in London (on to Paris next week and Milan after that). Now, tell me, is this at all attractive? Feel free to zoom in on her face... try really really scary. Not to mention what-ever-it-is that she is wearing. A walking skeleton in an oddly shaped dress made out of some one's old bomber jacket.

On a completely different topic I would like to quote to you from Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach Third Edition by Daniel P. Raymer, pages 364 and 377, respectively:

“All real wings operate somewhere between 100 and 0% leading edge suction.” Really? That is a quite interesting statement, I had no idea that you could have more than one hundred percent or less than zero percent of anything. Oh well, maybe this is some thing that I have not learned yet, since I am but a mere undergraduate engineering student and not the Writer Of An AIAA Textbook. Who, by the way, dedicated his tome to ‘all who taught’ him. Which includes C. T. Sun of Structural Analysis fame. I will not say more, other than that he was probably one of the worst professors that I have ever had, but, since I was only taking Structural Analysis I, he was not inclined to think us intelligent enough for his condescension.

Continuing with a comment Mr. Raymer made about the necessities of making a grid for a panel method CFD code: “Rather than a brick wall appearance, the unstructured grid looks like the work of a demented spider attempting to capture your aircraft!” (One of many exclamations in this book. Completely unnecessary for a technical text.) Let us just say that, for the most part, engineers should stick to being engineers and writing boring engineering manuals and leave the riveting writing to their more scintillating, non-technical counterparts. This is a book on Aircraft Design, not a novel.

Stick it in the Pot on the Way to Bedlam.

So, Purdue has called a snow recess. Amusing things always happen when I am not around. But, the crew team still has practice, which is completely typical. Maybe they will go out for a run on the golf course like we did last year in the middle of a blizzard (for which they did not close the school).

I have discovered one of my favourite German words. The word is Eintopf which is a stew or soup (an item always served on Thursdays (also known SchniPo Day, because some sort of Schnitzel and Pommes (French (or should I say… Freedom? Oh wait, that was so 2004) Fries) is always served)). If separated into its two parts Ein and Topf and literally translated one gets In and Pot. So, a stew is just something that has been thrown into the pot.

Other than that, Purdue is trying to drive me to Bedlam, and, despite the fact that I do really want to go to London, I do not think that that is the best way to achieve it. Hopefully their scheme to get me kicked out of school and out of Germany (thanks to saying my tuition is due two weeks before the loans are supposed to be disbursed and telling me that I should be tested for Consumption because some random kid wandered around campus for three months with TB.). Luckily I have a wonderful mother who is taking care of all of the mess for me.

My internet connexion is also trying to drive me mental. For periods on and off I cannot get any where online (in my web browser), but my radio stream and my IM, for the most part, work fine. Go figure.

Also, it looks like we might actually get a weekend with little to no rain (and maybe even some sun!), so if the forecast holds, I will be going into the city to get some pictures of the great buildings.

Handball, Football, and REAL Football.

Yes, I have been procrastinating. So, since it is the weekend now, I will take a minute to up date you on what has been happening this week.

As I told you previously, I was invited to a Super Bowl party on Sunday. It was very long. Starting at noon and I did not go to bed until five (the game ended at four). What was very interesting was that the championship game for the Handball World Cup (nothing compares to Football in Germany, but Handball comes in as a distant second). The Cup took place in Germany and the Germans ended up defeating the Poles to win the Championship. So, that was very exciting. One interesting thing that I saw was that Aljazeera was one of the sponsors of the match.

Fast forward a hand full of hours to midnight thirty. The Super Bowl game finally starts. And guess who the colour commentator was for the German broadcast. None other than the most famous American football player in history… who am I kidding? It was totally Boris Becker, one of the best tennis players ever. And the only reason I could see that he was the colour was because he lives in Miami. Since we got a German feed, there were no Super Bowl adds, and, from what I have been hearing, I do not think that I missed a whole lot. We got to sit through a whole ton of TV timeouts and see what the players do between just about every play (they play so many advertisements). There were some interesting crowd shots, the funniest being when a kid, who what sitting behind his father, tapped his dad on the shoulder farthest from the kid (you know the drill, I am sure), and the father completely fell for it and looked around. It was funny mostly because it was caught on television. The game really was not that good, even though Peyton won. After some shakiness at the beginning, baby Rex fell into his normal routine, and the Colts got it together (after Mr. Perfect proved that he is not actually perfect after all).

In some more exciting football action, I went to a second tier Bundes Liga match yesterday. FC Köln at Eintracht Braunschweig. While rather damp, and not the best football I have ever seen, the atmosphere was amazing. It sort of reminded me of the Purdue Student Section at Ross-Ade times five thousand. And, even though Eintracht dominated the entire game, and had way more chances on goal, FC Köln won 1-0, on an own goal by one of Braunschweig’s defenders. Which was too bad. But it was still amazing to watch live European football.

Other than that, I have been having issues with my internet. I can listen to streaming radio for the most part, and talk to people on IM, but I cannot get the web browser to function. While annoying, it is not too bad, since it comes back eventually and everything is happy.

I hope all of you in the Midwest have not frozen to death and those of you in the Southwest are enjoying your balmy weather. We had about three to five centimetres of really wet snow on Thursday, but it all melted again on Friday, leaving some very large attempted snowmen on the green and in the middle of the path.

Yes, More...

Yes, this is actually the cereal I bought yesterday. Why they think that something called Choco Blop would be appetising is beyond me.


Since these get published the most recently first, you will get to read this before you get to all of the pictures that follow. I guess that is good if you just want to get the news without all of the fluff.

With out further ado... the news update:

I have finally managed to collect all of the necessary documents to finally finish all paperwork with the DLR. This is happy. I am steaming along on my first assignment; I have started running my first rounds of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code, and we will see how it all turns out, and if any conclusions can be drawn from it. We will see.

Other than that, there is not a whole lot to say. It is still rainy, but not quite as cold as it was last week. Super Bowl on Sunday (yay for staying up really late for a game that begins at one in the morning); and if it is not too rainy, I might look around down town... there are some amazing buildings, so do not worry, more pictures will come...

Speaking of pictures....

Photographs II: The Walk Through the Woods

My building (there are two others identical to it just to stage left) and some trees that were blown over by the storm the other week.

The trees, again. They are on the other side of a little stream that runs next to the path just outside my building.

The beginning of the path through the woods and a pile of logs (one of many in the wood) that are the remains of all of the trees that got blown over.

A path coming off of the main one. They have finally barricaded it off. For obvious reasons.

Coming up on the lake.

The lake.

Some nice views near the lake.

A fork in the path (sorry, at this point, I do take the one more traveled) and just down from where I enter onto Waggumer Weg. (Which was an actual road at one point.)

The large head. I have no idea what it is there for.

A little block just behind the head. The lion is the symbol of Heinrich der Löwe(1129-1195), the founder of Braunschweig, and hence the crest of Braunschweig.

Waggumer Weg. Did any one say.... Hobbit?

Further along Waggumer Weg. The railing was killed by a very large tree.

Back to the lake, you can just see it through the trees and another down tree, though I think its demise was not as recent as the others.

Debry and a little rivulet, the wood is full of these little streams.

Another downed tree, of a more recent demise.

The woods.