The weekly reports have been dead for a while. Reason? The blog has been
dead for a while.
Hardware woes
The old computer running this website had some problem all of a sudden
about 3 weeks ago. These problems appeared as a complete lockdown of the
system - no response to anything. So my brother - with me on the other
side of a telephone, tried to reboot the box; but couldn't get it back
up online again. He was headed out to a LARP anyway within hours - and
so couldn't really do much more about it.
Right.
End result? I joined forces with a good friend of mine; we split
hardware costs for a slick new box - an Asus barebone box with a 64bit
processor and a gig of RAM. It received the harddrive and network
interface from the old box, and was with that good to go - only ..
processor architecture changed; and so for optimal performance, it'd be
a nice idea to actually use a new system install that took advantage of
the extra available bitwidth.
A completely failed OpenBSD installation later, we settled for Gentoo -
which now is humming along nicely. It even turned out to be surprisingly
easy to restore the old data on the new box.
There. I won't blather more about my hardware woes - but instead poke
about other themes for a while.
Party party party
My students here for the course rock. The REALLY rock. We had the course
evaluations a couple of weeks ago - and apparently my exercise sessions
has been gooooood. At least the students thought so. I average in the
upper fifth of possible ratings in every single evaluation area. All of
them. I kick ass, yo!
Compared - both to the faculty mean, and to the workgroup results - I
outperform in all evaluated areas.
And, in addition to this cause for celebration, the end of the school
term (last week) comes with all manners of parties, celebrations, meets,
and activities. I think I had my first non-planned evening in about 2-3
weeks yesterday.
Summer in the city
The Jena climate, though, leaves a bit to wish for. I sincerely long to
get back to Sweden during the hottest summer weeks we have up there, in
order for me to cool down a bit. We have had 25°+ since beginning of
June (i.e. about 2 months of active time with weekly lectures, seminars
and exercise classes - in tropical bloody heat); and the last about 2
weeks or so, the temperatures have been in the upper 30°ies.
Horrible. Horrible, I tell you.
And of course, this heatwave has coincided with the World Cup, the Th