Concert

Since January I have been singing with the choir Laudate here in Lausanne. Yesterday we had our biggest concert yet, CEP Bach's Magnificat and Mendelssohn's Vom Himmel Hoch. Both were in collaboration with another choir, and an orchestra, who also played Mendelssohn's Die Hebriden. In all we were more than a hundred people, and the church in Lutry where we were performing was packed, with people having to stand for lack of seats. Suffice to say it was awesome, especially the Solists, who, unlike us, are professionals. I can't wait to hear the recording, but that will have to wait, as I am now sitting in a plane to Amsterdam. For business, not pleasure, unfortunately.

Bollocks to this...

... the fabulous F.  and my own good self are off to South Korea.  Oh frabjous day!

Choir

I've been singing in the choir 'Laudate' since January, and last weekend we had our first concert. Rachmaninov op.15 (very Russian, especially the first piece, 'Slava'), and 'Les chansons des roses' by Lauridsen. It went quite well, although I think us tenors could have been a bit more daring...

I recorded the concert with my new Zoom H5n digital audio recorder, an ingenious little device that produced, in my amateurish audio-barbarian opinion, an excellent stereo recording. More on this maybe in a later post.

Anyway, I put some heavily compressed mp3s online here - 112 kbps to keep the file-size somewhat reasonable.

Hydrofluoric footrest

I have been using this convenient cardbord-box below my desk as a footrest for about half a year now. A few minutes ago a colleague asked me if I knew what was inside, so I had a quick look...

... four litres of buffered hydrofluoric acid, hooray! I guess I'll go and carry them over to the lab now, where, funnily enough, we ran out of HF two weeks ago.

Bollocks to this...

...I am off to Rome, with the fabulous F. Oh frabjous day!

Well, actually we already traipsed all over Rome today... Stupid bigger for droid didn't want to post this yesterday.

The reason for the recent silence on this blog...

tl;dr: bla bla bla plasma bla.

my thesis, in nonuplicate. A hundred and sixteen pages long, including the French  (the horror!) abstract. May the gods of academia, i.e. the experts judging it, be merciful to it.

Green

My sofa always had a white cover - until last weekend, when I decided to wash it at 95 °C, together with my green rug. The result:

A really pleasant mint green. Serendipity!

More adventures in watercolour

For three days now I've been painting watercolour sketches of myself with my new waterbrushes. I use a small hand-mirror, and give myself about 30 min after lunch. Here are the two most recent results:

A good way to get more comfortable with a new medium, I hope. I really like how you can't dither endlessly using watercolour - you make your stroke, and it's there. Erasing is nearly impossible, so you have to get it right the first time, or at least make the most of your mistakes. Or not, as is the case with the nose on the right portrait. Urg.

Luzern

Mi tresora F. and I spent yesterday in Luzern, with my friend M.

M. on the right. Myself on the left. Photo by the talented F.

Luzern is a very, very pretty city, on the shore of the Vierwaldstättersee, or 'lake of the place with four forests'.

In the background on the right the third of the four forests. I guess.

A famous sight is the newest bridge of Luzern, built in 1993 out of wood, which does not even carry cars or trains:

Seriously. You'd guess the bridge was a historic landmark or something, the way they carry on about it.

Frankly, I don't get why it is so famous, since it is only a copy of another wooden bridge, which coincidentally, burned down in the same year. Also, ware the attacking birds! Birds in Luzern are a constant threat to the unwary visitor, here is one on an attack run:

Look into its empty eyes and despair.

I hope you, gentle reader, will appreciate the photo I took instead of trying to safe myself! Thankfully my life was spared, since the birds of Luzern are also known to be myopic - a boon to all ugly men, or so it is said. I wouldn't know about that aspect, of course, since I had only eyes for the lovely F.

Luzern - lovely but lethal, at least for me.

Whether she wanted to or not. Did she manage to strangle me? Tune in next time to find out!

Lac de Tanay

Last weekend I and F. (who may very well be the reason there have been so few posts here lately) went up from Le Flon to the Lac de Tanay.


View Larger Map

The weather was amazing, hence my state of near-undress (which had nothing to do with wanting to impress F. by my manliness and general imperviousness to the cold. Ha! Which cold, I ask you?).

We found an excellent spot for a pique-nique,  under a southward-facing overhang heated by the sun

The lake was frozen, and exploration of the surrounding peaks will have to wait until the snow has receded a bit, but we'll be sure to return!

I feel like a scientist now

Pictured: Science

My first paper has been published:

Radio frequency breakdown between structured parallel plate electrodes with a millimetric gap in low pressure gases,

in Physics of Plasmas no less! It's the culmination of most of the stuff I did in the last three years, with maybe a second, more applied paper to follow next year.

If you really want to read it (and, frankly, who wouldn't?), but can't because you don't have access to Physics of Plasmas and don't want to shell out the thirty or so dollars they demand (shame on you! shame!), email me and I'll send you a pdf. Go on, email me! How else will you know how to properly construct your dark-space shielding?

Bollocks to this...

...I am off to Paris, to the 63rd Gaseous Electronics Conference. There may be some physics-related posts in the near future.

Public Service Announcement, Sparring

When you see a foot coming, block. Don't use your face, though.

Back

Back home. I'll start posting my impressions and the best photos soon.

But first I'll have to sort them: more than 4000 photos and a couple of short movies.

Have this Vietnamese wanted poster meanwhile:




- tales from the road

Location:Avenue du Tir Fédéral,Ecublens,Switzerland

Bollocks to this...

... I am off to Vietnam. The US-after-action report will have to wait for three weeks more.

source:wikipedia

I don't know if the internet grows in Vietnam, so there may be silence on this blog until the second week of August - I am sure you will survive.

Run run run

While in New York (I know, I still need to do the after-action report. Before Friday, I swear), I bought these:

These are not my disgustingly dirty feet, these are my disgustingly dirty Vibrams, my new running shoes, after my first run with them. Here is how they look in the shop, before you run along the lake-shore for an hour or so:

source

The Vibrams are more gloves for your feet than proper shoes - all they do is protect your soles from glass and other pointy things. No cushioning, no air-soles, no support.

The idea behind that is simple: Our feet evolved over a million years for bare-foot running. It's what they do, and they do it well. Now we don't run around barefoot all day any more, so our soles are soft and can't deal with the ground and sharp stones like they should, but the rest of the mechanism works just fine. So just slap on an artificial sole, and everything should be peachy.

Does it work?
I am no stranger to hopping around barefoot, I train martial arts for a couple of hours a week. So I thought running in the Vibrams wouldn't be a problem for me, and in wasn't. At the start.
I am not a runner, but I am generally fit, and I know that running for 90 minutes or two hours is no big problem for me. Still, new shoes, and two hours of training coming up this evening, so I kept it down to about an hour. Here is the route I took, from the EPFL to the marina and back, about eight kilometres.


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First of all, running in the Vibrams is as much fun as barefoot running. Your feet adjust automatically so you land on the balls of your feet, your heels won't touch the ground at all. You can run on tarmac no problem, but the real fun is running over rough terrain, as you can feel the ground through the thin soles. Second of all, training for martial arts does not a runner make, and my calves are screaming at me right now because of this. Running on your toes puts much more strain on your calf-muscles, and mine were woefully unprepared, which is why I took an hour for eight measly k's. But my joints were fine, no worries at all. The feel of the Vibrams is also excellent - they are so light you don't notice them at all, apart from a vague feeling of having mud between your toes. But I happen to like mud between my toes, so no worries there. I am, as you may be able to tell, quite happy with them, and look forward to adding one or two midday runs to my weekly routine!

Stuck on the Tarmac

Stupid piece-of-shit Boeing 767 ain't going anywhere. Some kind of pressure-valve problem. If we don't lift off in half an hour, and we won't, I'll miss my connecting flight to Norfolk.
At least the stewardesses have gone into crowd-control mode, and are dispensing sweets as fast as they can fling them.

Below: big waste of metal that doesn't fly.







Update: deboarded the plane, and it looks like somebody is opening up the turbine. The captain said he'll be able to tell us more in an hour - I am not holding my breath.
Update 2: boarding again. Maybe second time's the charm? 4 hours delay all in all, I hope they'll rustle up another flight to Norfolk for me, today. Still, I won't complain too much, because: Crossing the Atlantic in (now) thirteen hours? Still awesome.
- fresh from my iPhone

Location:Route des Batailleux,Grand-Saconnex,Switzerland

Arrows

sensing the uncommon and unwelcome feeling of productivity descending upon me (upcoming talks/deadlines might have something to do with this) I quickly installed a dart-board in our office.

arrows: Four

I can already consistently miss the twenty. Go me!

Lock and Key

or: Nothing stands before the Swisstool.

 This morning I had occasion to investigate the comparative quality of a very low budget bike-lock and the awesome Swisstool, my favourite multitool.

While riding home yesterday evening, the key belonging to the above-mentioned lock had fallen off my key-chain, and I lost it somewhere on the way. This did not take me by surprise, since the key was partly plastic, and only hanging on to the key-chain by an increasingly thin strip. I was, as they say, monitoring the situation, staying on top of the developments, etc. I also new that I had a replacement key, and not only knew where it was but also found it later that evening.

The cabin of the elevator in my apartment building has no interior doors. While riding it up and down, you can see (and touch) the wall and doors of the various floors rushing by. Consequently, there is a gap between cabin and the walls of the elevator shaft, a gap that yawns about two centimetres wide and leads to the fathomless and inaccessible depths beneath the elevator cabin.

I think you can see where this is going.

Right in one: This morning, while riding down to my bike and trying to attach the new key to my key chain, I inevitably dropped the former, straight into the gap. There wasn't even a "plink" to mark it's passing - it vanished soundlessly into the abyss. Which leads us directly and finally to the following picture:

Snippety-snip

Swisstool versus bike-lock: 1-0, 30 seconds. Which is, I'll maintain, a Good Thing. Consider: A better lock would have meant calling the landlord, who'd have called an elevator technician, who'd have billed me. This way, I'll just buy a new lock (20 CHF or so). Everybody wins!
And if my bike gets stolen because of my inferior lock-technology? No worries, now I know that I can get a new one in about 30 seconds...

Thirty

A month ago I had my thirtieth birthday. I was all prepared to gnaw on a celebratory piece of shortbread to solemnise this occasion, when suddenly a horde of my friend showed up and drank all my beer:

They had come from Vienna, which is about a thousand kilometres eastwards from Lausanne, to throw me a surprise-birthday party (and R nine months pregnant, too!), which is just slightly beyond awesome. As retribution I will splash their likeness all over the internet, because that's just the kind of friend I am.

We had a full program over the weekend: The cathedral

which we left only slightly damaged behind

The chateau Chillion (which I have now seen trice - it is pretty, though)

and some bowling; here my friend Chruss demonstrates the perfect form for middle-aged males like us.

Last but not least we had some beer (the general opinion of the local  beers was devastating I am afraid. In the end, the tasteless aggression could not stand, and we had to drink them all),







saw the fattest dog of Lausanne

and had a good time here at the shores of Lac Léman. Thanks for coming (Boris' liver: and also for leaving again)!

P.s. (for the shmall one): Twix heisst jetzt Raider!