On the other hand I just had a soothing conversation on the phone with the astonishingly unfit almighty administration of the university I used to go to. As always they didn’t fail to surprise me once again in matters of stupidity, regression, unfriendliness and a relentless misperception/misapprehension of their own job.
Probably I shouldn’t go into detail too much, but let’s assume a situation where you wanted to send an application for something that is perfectly reasonable, what would you do? Also consider the fact that you already consulted the dean of your faculty and that he confirmed your thesis about the application being not only reasonable, but perfectly valid. What I did was to go the the universitiys’ website, get the form, filled it out and send it to the fax number I found on the application which should have been the last pro-active part of mine in this matter. Six weeks later, I’m still not done. What went wrong? It’s easy to figure.

You probably knew it all the way when I mentioned the fax machine. I have used moderately modern and therefore too complex inadequate technology during the first contact; I even went so far as to use an e-mail address I found under “contact -> administration for students -> computer science department” to send an inquiry on whether my former request has been received. Today, when I called and asked for a confirmation of receiving my application, this most certainly hilariously ugly woman spontaneously burst into shouting. I immediately felt as if I had shot her baby. Turns out I was head-wrong. In the next 15 minutes I came to realize that she doesn’t hate me for personal reasons, but she still behaved as if I were claiming she never has paid taxes and I came to get them from her all at once. Certainly understandable – I wanted to know whether my application has been received and probably is being processed already; that could certainly be considered a matter of existence for her.

In the meantime, she taught me a great many wise things. For example I would be half a year behind. Behind what she didn’t tell. Plus I couldn’t do any exams. Which exams exactly, I also don’t know. When I asked her, the shouting resolved in angry yelling – stressing her vocal cords to a level close before the point where I might have considered it unfriendly. She repeated the upcoming facts that I would be behind and that I couldn’t do exams, because there would be no sixth semester. Never again, I thought? Great! I heard that one stinks, anyways. Then I made my first mistake – I tried to outsmart her. That’s something people usually don’t like very much. I told her I could take courses from the seventh semester. Oh, baby. She didn’t like that too much. After a long and shiny tirade I thought to myself “So what? Couldn’t hurt to tell her a little about her job, could it?”. I told her that it is possible, that I have colleagues doing something similar, that the examination regulations allowed me to do courses whenever I see fit and that I planned everything in full agreement of the dean of computer science. What I should have known is that everyone’s colleague is only telling him lies, that taking courses was not as simple as I think it is(yeah, probably she didn’t bother graduating from knitting school, because taking courses has been just too much a grind..) and finally that the dean simply had no say in these things at all.

Her fury began to annoy me a little by now, but when I tried to tell her that I only wanted to know about the status of my application she told me to shut up and wait. What followed should be considered the greatest accomplishments of mankind – complete and utter disregard for humbleness. She asked her colleague(remember; those are the guys always lying to you – so better don’t ask them too important stuff) whether it is possible to officially be in one semester, but take courses of another. Surely she was determined to start whatever she tried to do to me all over again after hearing reassuring words. Well, she didn’t. The nice, and officially most intelligent person in the bureau, told her that I’m in the main course and that I could do whatever and whenever I wanted to. Hearing this, I expected anything from a sign of insight to an apology of some sort. What I didn’t take into account was that her life already was very confusing and not that pleasing. So she went on hating the phone, me and herself. However, I had enough of this senseless waste of time. I gave her my best wishes and hung up.

What I still don’t know after having to put up with this miserable performance of a bureaucrat is whether my application will ever be processed at all. Today I even received a mail from a professor. He told me that “he heard” I would be taking his classes – he already designated me into a group and told me that next Monday would be a mandatory kick-off meeting. Well, I guess, I won’t pay the semesters’ fee and then I will be banned anyway. That’s what I wanted from the beginning, I think.. And if one thing is for sure: I won’t be in Stuttgart next Monday; for whatever reasons. Apart from the mail from the professor, I am very glad that I had this experience on the phone. It proved once more that just about any random person living in Stuttgart is miserable, unfriendly, conservative, boring and dumb – a combination of attributes I simply don’t want to face in aggregated form. How I miss Stuttgart! not.

Coming home, I realized that my fellow housemates were meeting with the landlord. The last months we were living like insects in a more cold than warm and more stone-age-ish than electriced cave(well.. it has walls and a ceiling of stone, at least). We were told that the house would be torn apart after we leave; granting us the choice whether or not to clean, to fix stuff and to let all the garbage obsolete furniture just inside. Today everything changed. The formerly liberal and avuncular landlord turned into Satan himself; demanding unscrupulous things like painting the tainted walls. Of course they were as stained when everyone moved in as they are now, but I guess that’s no argument to make. There’s more, of course, but it’s probably best not to think of it right now. Having rent apartments for the last years, I know a little about rights and responsibilities in this area – and I just spent my evening funnelling those insights into my fellow housemates.

All in all, I’m pretty impressed. I didn’t even bother to mention that I have been at home tonight for just about six hours before moving back to work; even though I have been there for 14 hours straight yesterday. Well, I even had darn good reason for that. I found code that locked itself out in not less than four places – giving my middleware a little bit of trouble. I also won’t go into detail that I found out about databases that have configuration tables for transcription tables which lead to statistics tables – only to never be read, but to be redundant to other configuration tables for another transcription table leading to its own statistics table. Since none of the tables have any keys or indices and there are lots of statistics to be saved, one of the tables has outgrown the state where queries going in will bring back a result different from a timeout. The most obvious part here is that both tables are never being read in a meaningful way. There is only one daemon process(the same that’s been filling these tables all along), reading one column of only one of the tables, sorts it and writes the top result in a third table. There the data will finally be read from a program and translated by a third transcription table. Apparently it proved impossible to fill these 4 bytes of information in the third table skipping the overhead before. And good for me I had to reverse-engineer all that great business logic; it’s not as if my todo-list is giving me any trouble recently; there’s still some space on the monitor that I can read in between the piles of notes.

I could go on, but then it might seem to you, my dear and noble reader, that I am a bitter old man having a hard time keeping my heart from exploding due to too much pressure. But the truth couldn’t be farther apart. In fact, I don’t think of myself as a truly smart man – I mean, I have my good parts that I have worked pretty hard for – and I am proud of them. But I’m no genius and as it seems never will be. On the other hand, being confronted with those massive amounts of stupidity in the world, I feel pretty neat about myself. I am deeply grateful for what I have not become.  Others missed out on that opportunity and are now stuck in a demeaning life of sluggishness. I look forward to the great journeys of tomorrow, they undoubtedly will be fun.

Annotation: Recently I kinda struggled with the problem on how to nourish myself effectively while not getting broke at the same time. The day before yesterday for example, I spent 40CHF on lunch and dinner alone. Yesterday on the other hand, I probably solved the matter completely in buying a trail mix which got me from lunch at 12PM until 00:00AM without any hassle at all – I even felt more awake and open to productive thinking. And for final reasoning, a trail mix even conforms to Fruitarian lifestyle which is a definite plus(not implying that I can live up to this standard in any mentionable way). Further testing is definitely needed.

It’s been a couple of days since I gave myself the chance to post; merely because I’m running in a range of three and four hours a day concerning sleep this deathlike stone-mode, already. Fortunately so much has happened in the past days alone that I can forgo my unwillingness of not writing any non-dedicated posts whatsoever, but consolidate at least a few impressions.

Yesterday I was talking with a dear friend of mine about a magazine she would love to publish, but felt herself in no condition to do so. Since I liked her ideas very much I instantly bought her the domain bella-nonna.com while installing WordPress 2.7 in a new apache2 virtual host. This makes three Drupal and two WP installations on my Fire 280R/Solaris 10 machine already – of course my version of WP is the most archaic of them all. Well, now I’m looking forward to see her style the page and successively generate content.

The day before yesterday was pretty uneventful – until a co-worker and I decided to have some Pizza after our project marathon. Driving to the pizzeria we came to be spectators of a burning car; without any trace for a crash. And I’m not talking about a car emitting fumes; it was completely and utterly encapsulated in flames! Until this moment I didn’t realize how well a car is suited not only to combust fuel, but to also serve as such. Even more so I was impressed, because it(the petrol tank) simply didn’t blow up. Afterwards I learned that modern petrol tanks are built from plastic which melts early on – pouring out petrol nice and slow without giving it a chance to built up pressure and explode.

Considering the already advanced time, I should probably skip any more details great experiences like my weeks favourite: my second trip to Weimar or my new found love for audiobooks(see librivox.org for books that are in the public domain), the lost and re-found ring, the first excel sheet I’ve ever done(“I won’t ever need office – I’m in computer science”..) or the fact that I have accumulated over 7 days overtime in only 14 days of work..

I can’t even express how much I’m looking forward on the days to come – for so many reasons at once.

Life is good.

One influence that covered my newly found monetary income was the fact that my best friend Falko began working at our software company just today – which is going to be a  very welcome diversification in day to day life; also because we haven’t seen each other for quite some time now. It helps that he will sit on the same table with me(;

Now I’m going to start with the real good stuff. Coming to work for the first day of the year, I came to realize in several meetings that even tough I haven’t been given the tasks until today, I am already friggin’ late in absolutely every project that I have to put up for in the future. Our marketing has promised deliveries that should have stayed in some peoples dreams just a bit longer..

The next thing I know is that even tough I am working 70% now, I found myself before 14 windows – connected to four computers at once, trying to fix that terrible mess. Where’s the catch? I already have been working constantly for nine hours even tough I shouldn’t even work six any given day..

Another catch is that now I finally reached my bedroom and it’s already 2:15AM which is kinda lame since today I wanted to sleep more than the four hours that I had the night before. And why is that? Because I hung with my new room mates; that’s why. Something about two hours passed on our first meeting on who should do what and when concerning bath, kitchen, the garbage and these things – I quit the discussion by taking into account that I’m going to hire cleaning personnel. As one might imagine we socialized afterwards and I have had the pleasure to take a first evaluation of the two dissertations my two new computer science buddies are working on; and it has been a blast. Some time has passed since I had such a deep discussion about the potential of neuronal networks, implementation of kohonen propagation, optical character recognition and pattern foretelling. The good thing about it is that soon I will have the pleasure to propagate their work in a color of deep red*mew*

All in all, this day has been great – even though I will only get something around three hours sleep now, my throat aches since a week like it is going to explode any minute while having no voice at all and I absolutely had no time to work on some very important even more time critical tasks, this has been just a normal crazy day of my life.