My SUB

Do you know that: You have still plenty of stuff to read at home, but for any reason you end up in your local bookstore and before you become aware of yourself you have left it with a little less money in your pocket and a little more mass in your bag.

Today I had one of those situations. My laptop was out of charge, I forgot to bring along my current book and was near the store for some other reason (i.e. maize meal, taccos and tortillias) and the next moment I had THREE of Pratchett's masterpieces. (all of his works are, as far as I encountered them) They answer to the names "I Shall Wear Midnight", "Thud!" and "Thief of Time".

But I sill have plenty of Books, some even I had begun, but not finished before putting it back into my bookshelf. E.g. "Hamlet" and "The Picture of Dorian Grey". At this very Moment I read the Bartimaeus book series by Jonathan Stroud. Of which the first book has remained unfinished the longest of all of my books. I'm currently at the exact mid of the 3rd and as such last book of the trilogy. I bought them a looong time ago (like 3 years) and since then I pretty much lost interest in the genre of fantasy. But I can endure this series pretty good as they're written well.

The following is my remaining SUB (Stapel ungelesener Bücher - staple of unread books) in the currently most probable reading order - which is shortened at least by the half:

• Hamlet - Shakespeare (stuck at IV,2)
• The Picture of Dorian Grey (stuck in Chapter XI - so pretty much in the mid)
• A lovely book called "Französisch für Büffelmuffel" (Büffelmuffel is someone unwilling to learn due to idleness)
• Measuring the World - Daniel Kehlmann (I acquired it at the state (like one of the sixteen German states) Maths Olympiad) - (read my fellow-blogger's site)
• Ringu - Kouji Suzuki (the original book of the original Japanese horror film of the famous American remake "the Ring")
• Thief of Time - Pratchett (It's to awesome to let that wait longer)
• Thud! - Pratchett (This too)
• I Shall - Pratchett (again)
• Selected Stories - Edgar Allan Poe
• Startdust - Neil Gaiman (I own a German volume)

But there are also some books which I will probably never gonna read, as I totally lost interest in them. Most notable are are series of books under the name "BILD fantasy" (BILD is the biggest German Paper . pretty equivalent to the SUN) Most of these books are just the first volumes of typical unending Fantasy series.

The real cupcake

I already tweeted it earlier today, but I do not come away with not sharing it here too.
After getting up this morning I did some regular direction-less surfing around the net. I found this coincidently on YouTube and had to try it out:

Here is my slightly changed version of this chocolate-coffee cake:

2 spoons of sugar
2 spoons of all-purpose flour
a pinch of backing pouder
1 spoon of cocoa
1 egg
1 teaspoon of (raps) oil
1 teaspoon of coffee
plenty of hacked hazelnut

Simply give everything of the above list into a BIG mug and stir it completely until its fairly smooth. Then put it into the microwave for 2.5 minutes.

This recipe is totally impressive, it's simple yet tasty, it's quickly done (it was nearly faster than doing scrambled eggs and everything for breakfast) and it didn't even turn the kitchen into a mess, which is the normal result of me cooking. :)

What bothered me lately: since I try out various recipes from the English speaking world, I noticed how self-centred the shops around here are. Of course, when I try Japanese meals I am used to not finding the right ingredients in the local shops, but why do they not even sell chocolate chips ... you cannot make any nice chocolate cake without proper chocolate chips >.< (The only chance you have is to choke the chocolate bar yourself ... not nice) Also things like vanilla extract or various aromas. You just get that stuff, which is needed for the standard recipes from German cooking books. stupid

PS.: And yet I did cover another region in my Blog ^^

Thats a kinda nice PI, isn't it?

Today I want to present to you an not so famous, but even better song. OK, you probably know already some part of it: It's a parody on the VERY famous "American Pie" originally written by Don McLean ages ago (in 1971!) and re-sung by many many people, including e.g. Madonna.

But the song I mean is different: its called "Mathematican Pi" and tells the (more or less) complete history of this all time fascinating number, which is so integrally bound to all round objects.
The authors of the Π-lyrics are Antoni Chan and Ken Ferrier. You can get the lyrics with the fitting cords here and if your to lazy to unpack your own guitar (or just not capable of playing it, like me) here is a nice simple Youtube video



So if you have somewhen come to the point, where you ended up in a gathering of Nerds, you most probably can gain their favour, if you begin this song. Plus upon memorizing it you get to lern the first 29 digits of π. (I know only 6 ... somewhat bad, I know)

Another Status update

Hey everybody,
long time no see! And what a long time: I have written no entry for exactly one month now for various reasons. So I want to renter businesses with a couple of (random) status updates.

1.: The main reason for not writing (apart from missing subjects) is that I have THE final exams of a German school career just now, to speak exactly this week I had two written exams in German and Latin this week, and will have exams in maths and informatics next week. So I was somewhat busy with preps and stuff...
But what I want to say with all that: I am making big leaps towards the end of school, even though this is no sharp break for me as for others, since I am already in some way enrolled in university.

2.: Yesterday I had (as already mentioned) my big grade Latin exam, which means that this is the end. I probably will not have any bigger use of my knowledge of the Latin language for an extensive time. Or would have, but because I don't want to forget so easily (I really liked the subject in school) I came out of the bookshop with an exemplar of "Harrius Potter et philosophi lapis" (I hope you have guessed it's the 1st volume of Harry Potter in Latin language). It's somewhat fun to read, but also very wearisome to reed. So I probably wont read it until the end...

3.: The theatre club of my school,of which I am coincidently a member, has its long awaited première at April 18th. Even though you have probably either already heard of it somewhere else or you will not have the (logistical) chance to come to visit, I wanted to introduce that fact. For further information consult Facebook please, or ask me per comment/mail if you cant.

thats for now,
see you soon, hopefully on a more content-related subject

Voluntary service II: "Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

The problem is that I never had the chance to leave.
Today I have officially canceled my enrollment in the FSJ-Programm, as I could not ignore the current developments any longer. Going to Tokyo for an whole year would have been risky and even though I am very sad about the outcome, I did the final phone call.

The result is, that I am now without any gap-year placement and the typical application time frame is already over. So my only remaining option is to enter university, do my bachlor and maybe do something diffrent afterwards, before enrolling in an master course.

Of course this is not what I planned, and I am not happy at all about the devellopment, but still all my thoughts are with the people of Japan, especially with the population of shaken Tohoku and also the Tokyo metropolitan area, knowing that an evacuation of up to 40 mio. people is not possible by any means.

Avoiding flesh and The Esperanto Project

Saluton,

currently, I made to enhancements in my life. 2 Weeks ago, I decided to become a vegetarian. I do not have special reasons and had no extraordinary revelation. It's more like i was sympathetic with the idea for a longer time even though there is no reasoning like sympathising with animals or stuff. I just came up that meat is not that important to me and hence I could easily relinquish.


The second thing is kind of a project I started: around 1 week ago, I entered once more into Esperanto (Not to be confused with Español). For all who are not familiar with this name a (really) short introduction: 
Esperanto is a very regular and hence logical and easy to learn language, which was made up by a single person (Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof) in 1887. The main idea(l) behind it is the reasoning that it shall function as an language used for unbiased international and intercultural exchange, making it the language of everyone learning it, not only those whose mother tongue the language is. 
I really like the language, as it has some fun traits. Of course it is in some ways very logical and regular, as it should be (even though there are also some points which are irregular and so not coming up to the initial idea) and it's fun to have really every noun ending in -o (when not in plural or accusative case), every adjective ending in -a (the same) and every verb is regular in its flexion. Also its use of words is nice. Its vocabulary is mainly taken from spanish and other roman languages, but also some english word (guess what birdo means) and german words (knabo, deriving from Knabe, an oldstyle word for boy) are in use.


I am unsure whether I sould take part in an esperanto study summer course in beginning August in Slovakia. Probably it would be very nice and funny to go to such an event, but I am somewhat scared of going alone on the long trip to unknown country with unknown people. (Maybe someone want to come along :)

The Odyssee of Technics or How to get an portable player for your needs

Hey everyone!

It's been quite a while since I wrote a blogpost.

Like 2 weeks ago, I found my some day missing MP3 player again. It had an adventurous bath in our washing machine, probably making it pretty clean, but also pretty useless.

This disastrous events led myself onto an odyssee of Greek dimension. I want(ed) to find some kind of device, which apart from playing music can do some things, made possible by the newest developments on the technical market. This includes:

• Using Anki (An Spaced-Repetition-Software i use very often)
• Playing Videos (Maybe without big conversion issues, and with more than 1,5'' display)
• Playing some nice games (Especially retro gaming on it would be fun)

Referring to the Anki-Website, there are some versions for mobile devices: Of course the iPod and stuff, Android driven devices, Zaurus (I doubt there are still any devices of with this OS on the market anyways) and astonishingly the Nintendo DS.

I found this Archos 28 for 70 € at Amazon, and decided to buy it. After some inconveniences with the sending (the Hermes Cooperation does some bad service -.-) I received a player which is not able to boot properly. In 3 days of trying I was not able to revive it and I will probably send it back on Monday.

So I am at the same point again.
What device should I buy??

The iPod is extremely expensive: Paying over 200 bucks for something that started as simple portable player is massive! And it seems that you get nagged around by Apple all the time. In general I am suspicious towards Apple in general. I despise their attitude: It's Apple and only Apple. Everything we don't have you don't need.
Apart from that it may be (even though I heard different things too) a decent player which runs without problems (that was my old player too, but of course it had not all the nice features I would like to have). Also it should have a huge variety of stuff to run on it.

The Android players: I found only one deployer non-phones working with Android so far: Archos. Those players are pretty cheap, but I heard of much trouble with it (and I have an player with strange-non-working behaviour right next to me), so I am pretty unsure about these.

The Nintendo DS: Another device for unsureness. First problems: it does not even feature compability with MP3-data. You have to convert your music files always before you can use them. Also you need to buy an "module" for doing anything more advanced with it. And then your dealing with the homebrew community (so the least active from iPod to NDS) Also I would have to decide whether I want a DSi or a DSlite, the first one having native usage of music, but if I want to enter the homebrew market anyway, there are solutions for that issues for the DSlite too, and that boy can still use GBA cartridges. (man, I love retro gaming)

Oh god, I don't know what to do...