Category Archives: Real Life

Eno River State Park

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The day before yesterday Andy took me hiking at the Eno River. Eno River We saw a bunch of different animals, including a large snake, fireflies and numerous frogs and toads. In total we spent about two hours walking the narrow trails by the river.

Dog TickYesterday I was sitting at my temporary Duke office, and found, what I thought was a bit of dirt, on my right leg. It turned out to be a tick instead. It must have been sitting on my leg since the Eno trip the day before. I raced up to Andy and got a tweezer and some antiseptics, I succesfully removed the tick, and it is now alive and well, crawling on my desk inside a water bottle. I am keeping it for now in case I caught any disease from it. It looks very much like the one in the picture, which is an American Dog Tick (Dermacentor variabilis).

Hooligans

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Today Lars got me a Duke CS t-shirt, I wonder if I dare wear at at Turing-0. In other news I am going to see some baseball this evening. The game is supposedly very boring, I know it will be jazzed up sometime in the next 994 years, but that will not do me any good now :). Yesterday I went to a pizza place called Randys Pizza, their pizzas looked huge so i ordered two slices and some fries. Apparantly, in America even the pizza slices are large, in spite being quite hungry, I only managed to eat one slice and the half of the other one, I left my fries mostly untouched. Another weird thing over here is that they have chloride in their tap water, now I have seen that many places – but here they actually use this kinda water slightly filtered for the coke machines with the result that I get an distinct after-taste of chloride with every sip, like drinking pool water. Or maybe it is just a combination of a placebo effect with my paronoia mixed with the fact they actually have a slightly different way of making coke here (they use a different kind of sugar or something).

Americana

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Today was my first day at Duke University, Lars took me eating – american style. For breakfast we went out and had scrambled eggs and sausages/bacon, for dinner I had some weird fish thingies with rice and we just returned from a sports bar where we had dinner. For starters we had chicken wings and following that I was served a huge cheese burger with fries. The coke was ad-libitum :). Right now I am both very jetlag-tired and very full, goodnight people :)

Back In Denmark

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So I am back from SWAT now. We had a nice time and a lot of beers :). Pictures might follow if I can persuade GRUB to boot my old Windows XP installation. (Samsung only releases windows software for their cellphones, grrr).

Going to Riga

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In a few hours I will leave for the Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory (SWAT 2006) with Allan. We will take the bus to Aarhus Airport and fly via Copenhagen to Riga. It figures that we are leaving Denmark just when the summer is peaking ;|. Apparantly Copenhagen Airport is rather crowded these days due to added security requirements and low staffing, I hope we will make our connecting flight. Anyways, have a nice week everybody ;)

Busy Days

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Mikoline arrived on thursday, we met up at the irish pub Tir Na Nog in downtown Århus with some people from the university for the weekly pub quiz.
Friday I went to the annual party of the Department of Natural Science along with Martin, Stephanie and Mikoline. Steffen Brandt from the danish band TV-2 performed for about 2 hours with some good music mixed with jokes. There were around 600 guests I think, so the place was quite packed. Initially there were some special lectures and the presentation of a honary price, during this I guess we were among the only people there younger than 35 :), luckily there were more ph.d.-students present at the dinner so were not completely “alone”. Marting and I were the only students from the computer science department though :|
Saturday I went to the university for a couple of hours to study sigma protocols with Martin, I then went home and showered and took Mikoline out to eat at Restaurant Lotus, which was very nice. They have this buffet thing were you pick some meat and accessories and hand it over to a bunch of guys frying the food in a wok. Afterwards we went to see The Da Vinci Code, it was not as bad as we had feared.
Me, Philipp and Gabi at the maze on Samsoe
Sunday I went with Christian, Gabi, Mirka, Phillip and Christine to the island of Samsø. We went to the Samsø Maze and spent about two hourse there, before taking a bus to some town for food. It was a very nice, and very hot trip. When we returned in the evening Chris, Philipp, Gabi and I played some ultimate in the university park.
It will be nice with a relaxing week now :)

Air to Ground Chemical Weapon Practice

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Apparently I was the target of a chemical air to ground missile practice test on my bike to the university this morning. The weapon industry is getting quite inventive regarding fighter planes and the plane dropping its load on me were very, if not completely, similar to a standard small danish bird, and the projectile was indistinguishable from ordinary bird droppings. Just think what kind of damage this weapon could cause in a major city, the plane-to-bird and missile-to-turd disguises were excellent.

On the other hand, I might be that I just got hit by an actual bird taking an actual dump on my way to the university this morning. Coincidence??Â?  I think NOT!

Research Food

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I had just had a nice supper with Lars here at the university. Lars had bought a sandwich and I got nostalgic and created my good old Demo Party Food. I skipped going to the gym today since I went to donate blood and I thought it best to avoid any risk of tearing the needle-wound up and get blood all over. I also went to a chiropractor today, so this has been yet another minimally productive day.

Yesterday my sister and her friend visited me, very nice. This recent comic at Piled Higher and Deeper really shows what it is like to show family and friends this place.

New Shoes

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Since yesterday was pay day I decided to spend some money. My bike got equipped with a brand new crankset and chain, much needed, and today I bought some new shoes, a couple of ECCO Receptor, with lots of ventilation in preperation for a warm summe :). Unlike that other time, you will have to settle for the picture at the ECCO page :). Tonight Mikoline and I are going to visit Brian to get some nice food and help him consume some of his wast amount of cheap imported german beer (well, it is danish beer, but it was imported from Germany). See ya.