It amazes me from time to time how quick things change. My little brother, who I could hold in my hand and his head would rest on my forearm eleven years ago, will tomorrow take his first flight alone to visit us here in Hamburg (which, by the way, is an awesome thing – Lufthansa has a service that takes great care of alone-travelling children – they even have special lounges for them with toys, computers and staff, and a stewardess brings them safely to – and from the plane).
On a totally unrelated note, we went go-carting today, and it was loads of fun. Did two 10min-rounds indoors and one outdoors… it is just great being able to drive like you normally only can in the realms of a gaming console!
Now we will open the weekend with a farewell dinner for Hanno, who’ll be going back to the US tomorrow. Just right on the occasion, due to a political party meeting in his hotel, there is about one thousand one hundred demonstrants (100 right wing people, and 1000 left wing counter-demonstrators) surrounding the place, which means he cannot leave on foot, only through the nearby train station, and has to undergo severe security checks upon returning to the hotel. That will sure give him a story to tell back home 
Blogged with Flock
Today, we were visited by the naughty electrician.
After we had moved into our new apartment, which is in a house from 1850-1900, we realized that the electric wiring in some rooms was not quite right. In the living room and the bedroom, the switches were not connected to the cables in the wall. In the hall and in the dressing room, there was not even a lightswitch. In some places, the ground carried electricity… not being experts on that stuff, we called the people who organize maintenance for our house to get an electrician. Today, only some six weeks after our requests (and about five follow-up calls), the electrician showed up.
Picture Dr. Doolittle without the hat, with a mustache and a wicked, crazy grin. Making dirty jokes. And repeating them occasionally, even though no one listens. Needless to say, I did not quite trust that guy instantly.
After two hours, he had…
… made the light in the living room work (yay!)
… killed a lightbulb in the bedroom and then realized that the wires carry 400 volts (instead of the normal 220)
… made about 20 references to that fact that he was looking forward to the end of his shift
… burnt him self really bad on on of our fuses, because it had corroded and gone mighty hot
… filled a whole sheet of paper with things that where not quite right with our wiring
… told a colleague on the phone that basically, the whole apartment needed new wiring, and sounded quite happy about it
… taught us that you can touch whatever wire you want to, as long as you have shoes with rubber soles and do not touch anything conducting at the same time.
When he left, I was stressed out.
And tried to remember some of the jokes he had made – they might come in handy!
I did it!
Yesterday my colleague Julia and me handed in our thesis, titled
“Führungsprozesse in verteilten Teams – Eine qualitative Analyse deutsch-chinesischer Zusammenarbeit” (Leadership processes in dispersed teams – a qualitative analysis of german-chinese collaboration)
Here you can see me, giving a copy of the thesis the official stamp of our university
After a great BBQ party yesterday, now my days studying at WHU are really coming to an end – though the official end will be the graduation ceremony on September 15th. Today I am driving up to Hamburg, where Tine and me will take over our new apartment! We will move in her stuff this weekend, and my stuff the weekend afterwards.
Memorize our new address:
Christine Preuß &
Florian Hollender
Lübecker Str. 82
22087 Hamburg
There is a big housewarming party on September 1st – if you want to come (given that we know each other or you think we should get to know each other), send me a short E-Mail (florian [at] floho.com) and I’ll get you on the guest list.
Boy, this sure taught me a lesson not to tinker with computer stuff when deprived of sleep: I just ran out of space on my computer, and considered that always getting my external hard drive to where I am or going where it is a totall cumbersome and unnecessary hardship in life. I remembered that my DSL router lets you connect a USB drives and makes it accessible to the network. So far, so good. My router stands in the hallway, on top of my beloved Marshall amp, and beside it sits a small speakerbox. What did I do? Exactly. I thought – well, under the router it might run hot, so better put it next to the router on this little wooden box. Yeah. Right. Only when the USB plug snapped to the enclosure, I realized what makes speakers work, and hard drives defunct: Strong magnetic fields. Yikes.
I am glad to report that apparently, the drive still works and no data is lost as far as I can see. Still, the jolt of adrenaline – even if it replaces the next two cups of coffee – was something that I could do without.
I have never typed so much and so long ever before. Because of some delays in my workflow (and the attendance of the absolutely essential Leidhecken event yesterday), I have condensed some of my weekend work to Sunday. This has been going on for thirteen hours now, and I guess I will need all the time until the deadline (9:30 am).
What is so damn stupid about it? The fact that you can NOT do anything else. No listening to music. No TV. No nothing in the background. You have to sit there, listen to a recording (which I put on 60% speed, so every voice sounds like it comes right off a vocoder, beautiful – but at least I can keep up with typing) and type your fingers off. I wish computers were just a wee bit more intelligent by now… I’d like to delegate that to my machine. Maybe I should have used amazon’s new mechanical turk for that… nah, I am too cheap to outsource my diploma thesis’ work
