We now have an official team blog, you can find it [here](/photos/clustermeister.jpg %}

I forgot that one:

Hi there,

with our cluster beeing shipped to Austin tomorrow morning, we still have some work to do.
Some nice pictures of the last few days:

This afternoon we visited Torsten and Timo at Lindley Hall, which is located in the heart of the IU campus. It's really nice there: old buildings and colored trees:

Preparing a pizza can be a little confusing for the ordinary European as a look at the oven shows:

By the way: I found the American beer to be much more drinkable than its reputation might suggest. Just stick to the ales :)

This seems to be a nice place to stay in autumn, it's warm enough to wear a shirt and leaf colors are great.

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Everything went fine with my flight and I finally arrived in Bloomington. Guido and Torsten picked me up at the Indianapolis Airport and we drove back. Next thing was searching for a grocery store to buy something for tomorrow's breakfast. We gave up after a one hour odyssee of countless ignored stop signs and closed shops. Future GPS really need this get me to the next grocery store that's actually open at the moment-button.
So now, after this 24h-struggle to stay awake in order to minimize jetlag, I feel really tired and will write some more tomorrow, probably with pictures of our nice appartement. Good n.... whatever.

A few pics from climbing one of Elbsanstein's finest routes: Höllenhund Talweg

Thanks for Henning for the lead and to Daniel for the company at the belay stations :)

Looks like some german banks that have previously denied VISA payouts from cards issued by their competitors have finally been sued. I think it's quite a shame that you can withdraw money at any VISA-capable ATM in the world except here in Germany.

So here I am, back from Scotland. Here are some panoramic impressions:

When I bought a Macbook this winter, I was impressed by Safari's slim look and excellent rendering performance. But I was soon missing some features with the most important one being a user-friendly and configurable Ad-Blocker. Although SafariBlock is quite usable, I miss the block-this-image context menu option, the filters are not as mature as those used by Firefox' Adblock Plus, that even removes those nasty boxes surrounding banners.
This morning I read an interesting blog post, in which John M. Harrell uses some plugins to make Firefox3 look much like Safari. The only thing left for me to do was to provide Firefox' Fission Plugin with an image of Safari's original gradient-style page-loading status bar. The result looks quite promising:

Please note those missing boxes labeled "Anzeige" on the right column, which are correctly removed in Firefox. Use this image for the Fission plugin:

My 3-month-old Teva X-Fi showed some cracks in the soles, so I returned them to SportScheck Dresden yesterday and they replaced them after a small discussion.

Seems like good service to me.

A few days ago, I was the lucky first guy to respond to a small ad. Someone wanted to sell his kayak for a very reasonable fee, the only problem to me - lacking a car - was how to get it from Nürnberg (Bavaria) to Dresden (Saxony) without spending a fortune? I checked several logistics companies and found out they either charged immoral sums (~500 €, dhl) or just refused objects longer than 3.30m (GLS, Hermes as well as several others). Sixt wanted >100€ for a transporter per day, without extra kilometers and gas.

So the only alternative left to me was to use the train, which proved to be a very cheap and comfortable way to transport the kayak. Thanks again to Peter who agreed to help me. Of course there were doubts about fitting a 3.90m boat into a 2.80m wide train, but it worked out miraculously well. We were even able to take the bus home from the station, but that
required some serious thoughts and a little crunching in the end :)
I hope I can test the kayak next weekend, so stay tuned...

For those of us not possessing a conventional TV (or one of those nice HDTV ones) there is a nice possibility to watch the current Euro 2008 matches. tveuro.ifrance.com enables you to watch a high-resolution stream, the only con: french commentary. I still hope that quality will available in German cable television some day.

Haven't you ever wondered how they create those player statistics like distance, number of complete/incomplete passes, ball possession, etc? The answer: high definition camera arrays and image recognition software. Details

After years of cloudy, muddy water from the nearby Oder river, the water quality of the Oder-Spree-Kanal turned out to be sufficient to swim in this season. I welcomed that quite strongly as the weather was really hot when I visited my parents two weeks ago. Tevas are recommended though :)

Sorry it took so long but I had some busy time and hope that I can post in more regular intervals from now on. Here are some expressions of my last ski trip:

Strong winds near Kebnekaise

Kaskasapakte

Near Sälka

Storm clouds

My selfmade pulka

Aurora Borealis

Tarfala

I planned last year's Scandinivia trip (Sarek National Park, photos here) using a wiki. It proved quite helpful, thus I will use it to plan my upcomming winter trip to northern Scandinavia as well. Google Maps integration rocks as hell (unfortunately not with Safari, but that's another story).

Expect some nice pictures in the 3rd week of march.

jupp