Bollocks to this

I am off on holiday. Back in about four weeks. Intermittent posting may occur, but don't hold your breath.

Size-issues

For some reason, the francophones only eat small pizzas. I don't know about the original pizzas (pizzi?No, the Italians say "pizze" for the plural, but the internet assures me that pizzas is the correct form in English. I am relieved; thank you, internet.) in Italy, but in Austria you don't get a pizza with less than 35cm of diameter. In France or here in Lausanne on the other hand, they rarely reach 30cm. This one (with extra cheese and bacon lovingly arranged by myself) has a diameter of 23cm. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it is still enough for me, and I won't feel sick afterwards like with our huge Austrian Mega-pizzas.

If you take me for a total nerd because I like to quantify my pizza-experience, you are probably right. At least you are in excellent company, as my girlfriend agrees with you.

On a completely unrelated note, there are only three countries in the whole world that don't use the metric (or SI) system: Burma, Liberia, and the USA. Burma is in really bad company ;)

Yet Another Rainbow

It seems that my flat is at the local rainbow-hotspot - not that I am complaining. This time I had my camera handy. So there it is in all its glory, a rainbow produced by the low evening sun over Lausanne.

You can even see a faint secondary rainbow to the left - it has it's colours reversed. It is produced by the light being reflected twice inside the water droplets instead of once - a quick explanation with diagrams is to be found here.


Also, note the small tree growing in the chimney (behind the Antenna). Fire-hazard much?

Canon Remote Control

A couple of days ago I stumbled over a 3.5 to 2.5mm audio jack adapter. Yesterday I finally had a couple of minutes to build a Canon remote control. I found out about it here, and it's pretty simple: All you have to do is build a switch to connect the tip of the jack to the sleeve - that focuses the camera and then releases the shutter.





Above the parts I used, to the right the result, and on the bottom myself trying it out the first time. Eventually I want to use a light barrier to photograph quick-moving stuff, but that will have to wait until after our holidays.

Casual references to the bible

What I don't get about American Christians:

Austria is not the most secular country in the world. Indeed, according to this map (warning: wikipedia. As far as I know, this was coloured in by a demented 6-year old technorat), nearly 50% of us believe in god. More than those go to church ('cause it's the thing to do, particularly in small villages). But never in my life did somebody reference something from the bible to make a point that had nothing to do with religion. But now and again, when aimlessly surfing the internet, I stumble about an otherwise well written, or well thought-out, or just amusing blogpost like this one, and then suddenly there it is. Noah's ark.

In this case, the post is about stuff it took the author a long time to learn, i.e. general life advice, and one of the points made is

15. Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

Pardon me? Are you telling me that you are comparing a stupid fictional boat (and not very well thought out at that - a bit too small to get two of each kind of animal in there) with the largest passenger steamship of her time?

Stuff like that causes me to immediately classify the author as a crank, i.e. somebody who is prone to believe all manner of things without evidence. Is this bible-quoting thing just an illness of American-Christian fundamentalists, or don't I know the right people to hear it here in Europe? Or maybe it's the internet that brings out the weirdos?

Must... have... coffees!

Ahh, coffee in the morning. Comes right before I leave for the EPFL, where I will brew up a pot of green tea (Huang Shan Mao Feng at this time) to carry me through the day ;)

Unfortunately I haven't found a coffee-roaster (roastary? roasting-facility? coffee-vendor? Unbelievable that I don't know this essential English word!) in Lausanne yet. In Vienna this is no problem, with Eduscho and Tchibo all over the city, as well as other, independent Kaffeeröstereien.

But the coffee-culture is sadly lacking here in Switzerland. Today I will check out a small 3rd-world store, they sometimes have decent coffee. There's also a Starbucks, but going there to buy coffee goes against the grain of my small, Viennese soul...

Fishy

Got my girlfriend and myself some fish yesterday, because we have to get in the mood for Losinj. Fish is surprisingly cheap, those were 12 CHF/kg, which is about half as much as you would pay for beef.

Filled with a mixture of garlic, thyme, rosemary and basil, roasted in the oven for about 10 minutes - fast and delicious. As you can see, my girlfriend was impatient for me to stop shooting photos so we could eat...

As a side-dish we had Indian-style vegetables with a garam-masala yogurt sauce and rice. Njam!

What kind of fish, you ask? I have to admit, I haven't got the faintest. In my haste to get at the good stuff, I tore the wrapping off and threw it away without getting our meals genealogy. My bad.

I am getting a car

For the first time in my life I am joining the motorized, environmentally challenged, exhaust-producing crowd.

After copious research into car reliability, spare-part prizes and the like, I settled onto the Mitsubishi Colt safety on the left. (I also considered an Opel Corsa, a Seat Ibiza and a Renault Twingo, thus earning much ridicule from some of my friends) I hope I will be happy with it, ultimately it was the ABS and AC that convinced me, since my second choice, the Opel Corsa (or Vauxhall as it is known across the lake) had neither, nor servo-steering. I ended up paying a bit less than 3500 Euro, which is probably a pretty good indication that I'd be unable to bargain if my life depended on it.

Rainbow

There was this humongous rainbow on Monday evening. Of course my beloved SLR camera was at Uni, so all I had was my crappy phonecam. So I did what anyone would do - I took a gazillion of shots, and hoped that autostitch would be able to make something of it.

Well, it, worked, sort of. Unfortunately the phonecam messed up the colours completely, they varied widely from shot to shot, thence the weird sky. And the rainbow was much more vibrant. In the future I will know to schlep my camera with me wherever I go.

Update:

Ha, take that, evil phonecam! Picasa to the rescue! By judicious use of colour temperature and the like I got something that vaguely reminds me of the actual view. All hail Picasa!

Evidence of Dementia in Swiss Companies

I am used to seeing my name written wrong. I just live too far west, nobody here can cope with "Legradic". Even "Boris" is a stretch sometimes. But that's all right, I can live with it. I am not even trying to pronounce my name properly even more, I just go with the French pronunciation, which saves me a lot of hassle, and makes me a dirty conformist. I can live with that, too.

But when I received the envelope on the left yesterday, I was a bit flabbergasted. Picking it up, I guessed it would contain the labels for my door and postbox, so I thought: "Shit, they couldn't read my handwriting, for now and evermore I shall be "Logrodic". Not so, because to my delight the plate itself was spelled right. Except that I am not, and have never been (nor do I have the intention to become) a "Doris". But then, the small plates had a "B" for the initial.

So tomorrow I will try to call the company, and ask them to explain how in the world they could come up with three different spellings and not notice. Without doubt I won't understand the explanation.

Sparing Sparrows

I love my girlfriend, but sometimes she hampers my photographic development. Point in case:

Last weekend we visited the Chateau Morges, which doubles as the local military museum. They had an exhibition about women in martial arts I wanted to see, and because I am cruel I dragged her with me. The exhibition was not the greatest - turns out it was about drawings made by a martial artist who thought that meant he could draw as well. His technique wasn't too bad, but in style his paintings reminded me of the better executed japanese manga - something I would have drooled over with 18 (Hey, hot chicks with swords!), but not something I would put in my living room now.

But the highlight of the day was when my princess spotted a sparrow drowning in a public fountain. I was all for rescuing it, too, but I wanted to document the process as well. Alas, before I could say "Wait for me to take a couple of pictures of it while it drowns, love" the light of my life had snatched my subject out of the water. Not only did she thus destroy the authenticity of my photos, she flatly refused to pitch it back in for a minute or so!

How am I supposed to take dramatic pictures of atrociously asphyxiating avians if they are readily rescued by resolute, yet radiant girlfriends?

Then, deploring my dastardly deeds, said girlfriend did debase my demonic deposition. Forced to fight for friendly feelings, I ferociously caught flies for the feebly flapping nestling.

Not that I got any, those bastards are fast.

I have posted pictures of Morges before, so I will leave you with just one I took from the tower of the Chateau. (Which has a nice collection of halberds, [no wonder, since this was the main weapon of the Swiss in medieval times], swords and whatnot)

Oh, and the young sparrow recovered inside of an hour. Last I heard of it, it was studying martial arts with aforementioned master, no doubt to be able to defend himself against photographers in the future...

more plasma and picasa

Here is a couple more plasma photos from my experiments this morning. Nothing special, the main reason for posting this is that I have been playing around with Picasa since last week.

I am quite impressed by it, it's fast, powerful, and easy to use. It will probably replace Irfanview for quick photo-manipulation for me (Not as main viewer though, because Irfanview starts faster). And I just had to try the BlogThis!-button in Picasa, hence this post.

All the colors in the rainbow...

Voilà, a couple of plasma pictures, as promised. All of them are in Argon at 1 mBar of pressure, except the closeup of the stainless steel electrode.

Meanwhile I can even tell you where the colours come from:

The bright blue ones have a brass electrode, and the blue light consists of copper and zinc lines. Pink means the power is not enough to excite metal, so all you can see is the Argon 2p - 3s lines. The bright green pictures are steel electrodes, in the one on the left you can also see the steel glowing white-hot. And finally, the yellow plasma is said to be (according to Fraga et al. 2003) the excitation of a Rydberg state of CF₄ which dissociates into an emitting CF₃* fragment. The CF₄ comes from the Teflon used in this particular electrode. Teflon is (CF₂)_n, and seems to outgas CF₄, leaving behind a Carbon deposition on the electrode.

There you go, all mysteries revealed!

Thunderstorm... again

I am currently sitting at my new desk and waiting for a thunderstorm to pass so I can get to the EPFL without drowning. We've had thunderstorms here in Lausanne almost daily for the last four weeks or so, but generally the have been in the evening. Not today, though.

There was a hint of sunshine around 0700h, but minutes later the view form my balcony (have I mentioned what a great balcony I have?) was like the photo on the left: Ominous.




A couple of minutes later, it was raining cats and dogs, in liquid form. See photo on the right. It is grainy, because I had to use ISO 1600 to get enough shutter speed to capture the water sheeting off the roof on the left, you can see it if you squint a little.

Now it's 0750h, and it will be GoreTex for me I guess. Maybe I should also take my snorkel...