Andreas Happe

The book needed two attempts at it. The first time i stopped at the end of the first chapter, thinking it to be a lot of intellectual rubbish. Some time time later I tried it again, still found it written to complicated but conveying quite a lot of good points.

Sadly I spilled some food on the book which in turn led to it stinking to high heavens. I still feel guilty for throwing the book away, but after some days of quarantine that was the only way out.. A shame that it wasn’t fascinating enough to be bought again.

The only remainder of the book is a small note in my notebook:

“The loss of faith in objectivism often brings a temporary decay of subjective concern”. Apart from the missing proof for this claim it leads me to a disturbing problem: do so many of us need an external moral authority to lead their life?

Even more, or rather especially, if that authority will never come around to test you. To think and judge for oneself is hard, it demands of staying at least partially interesting and informed. While that should be the task of every citizen, it’s far easier to delegate it to the given authorities. Through playing sheep and following blindly we can only expect to watch the world burn. At least we’ve got front row seats for that.

And it’s Samhain again, time to think about the ones passed on.

Okay, I didn’t learn and went to the Institute again. Was it better than last time? Certainly not. This lesson was accompanied by a soundtrack made by our instructor (good idea: as soon as you notice repeating songs you’ll know that soon it will be over), it started with AC/DC’s TNT.

Guided by the song I started euphorically into the warm-up exercises. I lasted longer than the song, alas not much. At the end of the second song, which I don’t remember as I was trying to keep going, I looked at the clock and noticed that my endurance is down to approximately ten minutes.

The next song that came through my fatigue was Foo Fighter’s Burn Away. At least I only gave up during the last exercise (which was meant to power out everyone), but my body ain’t made for too many alternating push- and sit-ups.

Have I already mentioned that after that I enrolled for a three month beginners course? Might do some good.. for example I wouldn’t be able to smoke today even if I wanted. So where’s my magnesium? Maybe I can prevent some of tomorrow’s muscle soreness.

I am realizing that everybody’s lost their simple ways
and now that it’s here I see it all so clearly
I’ve come face to face with the enemy, the enemy.

Godsmack - The enemy

Finally I finished “Against the Day” by Thomas Pynchon. It went as the last one: small interesting episodes were mixed with long passages that I only read to get through the book. It’s not surprising that I’ve read half a dozen other books during that one. I must confess that I lost track of the various story lines through those escapades. Afterwards I’m not sure that it was worth the time (although there’s something with Pynchon that makes you come back to the books) especially because of the anti-climaxing end. At least “The crying of lot 49″ had a better ending.

I also had my first Krav Maga lesson yesterday. Pain ensured. I’m not sure if I should continue: it’s not a bad idea overall but I might have a small problem with a hobby that consists of “punch the enemy in his genitalia or face and run like hell”. I had fun though. By now I’m quite good in differentiating the different kinds of muscle soreness.

So on to the next book on my “force myself to read”-list.

Over the last one and a half years I’ve been involved with the SECOQC project. It’s goal was to provide a prototype of a quantum key distribution network. Such a system would provide unconditional security, thus wouldn’t be isn’t vulnerable to improvements in computing power as traditional cryptography.

The final presentation of the prototype happened this Wednesday. The last days and nights before that were filled with applying the last fixed but finally it was worth the time. But let the newspapers do the talking: orf, heise, der standard, sueddeutsche, Austrian Telekom News. There was quite good news coverage in german-speaking Europe (and some eastern europe countries) but sadly the news didn’t seem to have jumped over the pond (at least some American physicists were at the presentation so it got noticed anyway).

Feels strange to know that something that big and cutting-edge is finally successfully finished.. and that I’m an unemployed student agai

It’s been a while.. had quite a lot of work to do, throw in a couple of concerts and you know what I’ve been up to lately. The last week I’ve been cruisin’ the Mediterrean (okay, just the Crotian sea) in a sail boat, perfect way to recharge one’s battery.

Just now I’ve broke one of my guitar’s strings. Worlds fall apart.

So, it’s that time of year again. I went home early, lightened up some candles, opened a bottle of wine (thanks dad, even if you don’t know it yet), sat on my ledge my guitar in my arms and doing the thing that I’d like to call practicing.

Then the clock turned midnight: my birthday. Again. Stupid thing. And then the bell at my home mountain (well hill actually) starts to ring. My first thought: “if I stop playing the guitar before the bell stops to ring something bad will happen the next year” (actually I think, my thoughts were more in the line of “I will die that year”). Being superstitious is a bad habit indeed.

Perfect time for the bell control mechanism to fail. As the bell rang on I had enough time to tune the guitar, try some new tabs, drink some more wine.

Half an hour later someone finally had the grace to turn the bleeding thing off. I still stand. This might be a reminder that I should start playing for real.

we die and rot slowly in our graves

Forgot the band’s name, maybe that one’s mine

After some years I’ve finally come to ride my bicycle in Vienna (no, I don’t count those city-bikes as real bicycles). The journey from my flat to my company takes around 9 kilometres and should take me around 38 minutes according to the Viennese bicycle route planner.

The travel to my company took me approximately 50 minutes, on my way back I needed 35. Why? First of all the quality of the route planner is mediocre. It’s like “I’m not sure on which side of the river my route should be”. So just memorize the general direction, throw away the plan and try to move towards your goal while driving against as many one-way streets as possible. It will work. Second of all, who thought it a good idea to not label the bicycle tracks? It has a little bit of playing Half-Life: you want to get to the tall building seen on the not-so-distant horizon (some subway/tram bridge in my case) and you have three choices: the one that would lead directly towards it will of course lead you to nowhere. And finally the gear shift of my bike didn’t work as well as I remembered..

But big kudos to this morning’s Viennese car drivers: I survived them and this might have taken some steps on their parts. The same goes to the people on foot that where at high risk today.

Oh, and never, really never, try to stop with wet brakes. Now I’ve the rest of the summer to get under 25 minutes.

One hundred plus through black and white
War horse, War head
Fuck em, man, White knuckle tight
Through black and white
Metallica - Fuel

Being a computer scientist instilled a given distrust in computers in me, most of my ramblings are born in hand-written journals. This implies an everlasting search for the perfect paper notebook..

Visit modofly. Buy some etched notebooks. Endow those to me.

They ARE beautiful.

Austrians are currently bombarded by news of Josef Fritzl and his crime. While freedom of press is dire to me, a little bit of self-imposed constraint might be more helpful for the victim’s recovery. Alas in a perfect world where that would happen the crime itself would never had taken place. Unfortunately there was another similar case not too long ago where the media coverage rather reminded me of cynical movies.

One also witnesses international coverage of the events through the Internet. They ranged from good (thank you, BBC) to poor. My personal favourite was some Swiss paper that claimed after those two sad cases that Austria is collectively mentally ill and somehow created a correlation to the second world war. Another interesting thesis was that Freud (an Austrian) could have only pioneered psycho-analysis in Austria as here are enough mentally-ill persons as test cases. Being a mostly healthy person this feels a bit estranging. But this is only small compared to the irritation from facebook groups. Why do people think it’s hip to create groups whose names reference to the crimes or try to joke about it?

Is being dumb really the new black?

The other piece of news that covered Austria recently is our glorious failure to keep up with the Kyoto protocols. Interestingly I didnt’ get any news coverage of that from national news companies. Not flashy enough?

I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes

Rolling Stones - Paint it Black