Category Archives: Life and stuff …

IEEE – 4 months later

Christian M. Schmid,

I have been volunteering as IEEE Region 8 Student Representative for almost 4 months (or 118 days to be exact) now. While there are even more than 4 months to go, I guess this is the perfect time to reflect on the experience I’ve had so far.

What’s my reflection based on? Basically it comes down to about 20 online meetings or conference calls, 2335 received e-mails, 509 sent e-mails, and two face-to-face meetings. Wow, it has never occurred to me before: This makes an impressive 20 e-mails received per day and 4.3 outgoing e-mails per day.

Whatever way you look at these numbers: at the end of the day it does not come down to numbers but the people I’ve interacted with and the things we have achieved. And this is where the my experience ranges from “Well, hello???” to “Wow!!!”.

When thinking about some of the support we have received from staff (fighting for database access for over two month, ect.), about the way some volunteers seem to understand committee work being about going to nice places + eating and drinking, … it’s more like “Well, hello???”

But then again, socializing is a part of working in such an international and intercultural group. Especially in Region 8 it is an inevitable means for learning to understand each other.

When thinking about the great activities that IEEE volunteers have organized all over the world since the beginning of this year, all I can come up with is: “Wow”. From congresses, job fairs, to field trips, soft skill training, competitions, humanitarian projects … The list could go on almost endlessly. And then there is also the scientific progress made in some of IEEE’s societies – simply awesome.

I am not the “everything is perfect” kind of guy. Neither am I the “everything is bad” kind of person. And for all that is great and all that is bad about IEEE there is one, maybe the most important essence that I’d like to share with you:

I do believe in IEEE Student Activities

… maybe even more so than before I started my term.

IEEE is all about the volunteers and the people behind it, so thanks to all of you who help enriching the experience for our members! I won’t start listing names, because this would only bring the danger of missing anyone. But still: Thank you all!

I am IEEE (Region 8 Student Representative)

Christian M. Schmid,

You know how so many of us are asking who or what they are? Answering this question isn’t really easy, but if there’s one aspect about myself that I am absolutely sure about, it’s this: I am an engineer. I like building stuff and I like using mathematics, physics and technology.

Whatever hobby or job you have: There are probably associations for your very field. One of these associations for technology believers like myself is IEEE. You can google it, it’s basically a platform for technology-related people and companies. Never heard of IEEE before? Well, chances are you are using IEEE technologies like wifi in this very moment!

So I am an IEEE member (as are 400000 others on this planet) and I’ve tried to push IEEE forward in our local university student community and our “local” Austrian IEEE community for the last couple of years. The whole thing got even bigger for me now. Starting 1st of January 2013 I’ve been appointed as the IEEE Region 8 Student Representative, which means my job now is to represent 17000 students from Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

I don’t know how the whole thing is going to work out, but trust me, I’ll give my very best! – And of course I am not alone, we’re a great team. Starting with Pablo from Spain who’s the chair and Elias Nassar from Lebanon as past chair to David Dias (Portugal), Famia (Greece) and Piotr (Poland) – they are all great and motivated team members! – I’ll keep you posted about the great ideas they have, for now I’ll leave you with a video about why others have joined IEEE

Welcome to 2013

Christian M. Schmid,

Looks like the world has not come to an end on December 21st 2012. With all of the end-of-the-world attitude gone we can not totally focus on 2013! So welcome to all of you who’ve survived New Year’s Eve.

I guess my party was much like yours, eating, drinking, celebrating with friends, watching fireworks. What was a little special for me this year was that the organist of our church invited me to play some trombone / organ tunes that he had composed for me back in 2008. Here’s one of the songs

It’s part of a collection of tunes which he calls “Kleine Partita” – Little Suite. While most of the songs are quite sad, I hope that your new year 2013 will be a happy one! I wish you, your family and friends all the best and I hope we’ll meet again to share some happy hours together!

Getting Ready for Christmas

Christian M. Schmid,

Advent season has picked up full momentum already. The advent wreath and my new melodica + some christmas tunes did get me into the right mood.

And here’s one of the tunes that I played. I recorded it with my cellphone mic:

What do you do to get yourself into Christmas gear?

My Problem With Tablets

Christian M. Schmid,
,

I’ve really been struggling with the question of whether I should get myself a tablet or not. Everybody is talking about them and many people want one. iPads, Surfaces, Ice Cream Sandwiches, Jelly Beans, you-name-them. Having earned a hundred bucks by publishing my own Android app, I finally decided to give it a try. It’s funny how I do understand now, why I was struggling so hard in the first place. But more on that later.

So what did I get: That one’s obvious – a 32GB Nexus 7. It’s got enough horsepower, it’s reasonably priced and software updates are to be expected at least for the next 18 months + I know how to write programs for Android, so I can come up with my own software (Maybe I’ll even write tablet optimized apps someday).

But – you might have guessed that there is going to be a big BUT somewhere – I have one really essential problem with this tablet, which I guess applies to a lot if not to most of the tablets out there. – It even took me to get one to understand this fundamental problem. And here it goes: Tablets and the software they come with right now are designed for content consumption rather than for content creation.

They are perfect for watching movies on the go, for listening to music, for surfing the web, gaming and a lot of other things that involve consuming content. – I did not add reading e-books to the list, because from my own experience I find e-ink e-book readers much more suitable for this purpose. Tablets are also great tools for small tasks, like managing your calendar, reading emails, giving a short reply to e-mails, WiFi calls, as metronome, tuner or for getting public transport information. But truth be told, so are most of today’s smartphones.

However when it comes to me wanting to actively create content, like designing a new T-shirt, writing an article, recording some music, writing sheet music, creating software, designing websites, managing my music and e-book libraries, creating presentations or even just printing stuff, they become pretty much useless or badly broken crutches at most. They suck horribly when compared to the fully featured Linux PC that I am sitting in front of right now.

This realization inevitably brings new questions. Why are these things not possible on a tablet? Would it be possible to implement such software for tablets, given the UI constraints? Would we use these kinds of software? You could say: “Well that’s just not what it was made for” But then: Do the tablet companies see them as sole consumption devices that we should not use for more? And ultimately: Do tablets have a negative impact on society, as they get more and more of us into consumption rather than into creation mode?

What do you think?

Maintenance and Repairs

Christian M. Schmid,
,

Today was all about maintenance and repair. It started with me mounting the winter tires. Austrian laws require your car to be equipped with winter tires from November 1st in case of ice or snow, which starting with November is to be expected any time.

And lo and behold, we saw our first snow just hours after I had mounted the winter tires! – The perfect weather to go swimming and do some body maintenance.

That’s just one of the good things about visiting my parents on weekends: They have this great but underrated resort nearby: The Welldorado. Well it’s not as big or luxurious as the huge ones, but on Saturdays there is always enough space in the sports pool for doing some lanes. An hour later or so, I was heading back to Linz. At first I wanted to practice piano, but then I decided to stick to the day’s main theme.

My electric piano is a Yamaha S90 ES, which I really like for it’s great piano voices and all the other things that you can do with it. However it is 7 years old now and some keys started to get sticky and the key response began to become uneven. So I decided to open it up and do some cleaning.

You can actually take out every single key to clean or replace it. What is interesting is that the keys did not get sticky because of me or anybody else pouring something over the keyboard (although not aware of me doing so, I had thought that this was the reason). The real source was exuberant grease that Yamaha had used and that had started to creep between the keys. Anyway now the piano plays as smooth as on the very first day!

All in all not much revolutionary happened today. I mainly spent with maintaining and repairing some of my tools. – But this is important, because they are the things that might help me do more exciting stuff someday!

48

Christian M. Schmid,

The very first 48 hours of this week. Congratulations to all of us who’ve made it that far.

Just a quick update from my side (all times are CET military time)

Monday 10/22/2012

7:00 – 9:00: Preparation of the presentation for our lab meeting

9:00 – 12:00: Lab meeting. Due to the NDA we are all bound to, just a quick, innocent photo of the new EM simulation setup that we think of buying

12:00 – 12:30 Lunch

12:30 – 18:00 CST simulations

18:00 – 19:00 Quick run + shower. You can see my track here http://www.sports-tracker.com/#/workout/chschmid/3o0ipvuvhlftmuql

19:00 – 20:00 Driving to Wels

20:00 – 22:00 Musikverein Thalheim Big Band Rehearsal: People have often asked me why they don’t read about negative things in my blog. So here’s one: I simply hate this Musikverein Thalheim Big Band Project. If you want my honest opinion about it: there’s no musical value in it and for me it is just a pure waste of time. Why do I not just quit it: Because it is also a social obligation. Here a photo shot from my perspective behind the piano

22:20 – 23:00 Driving back to Linz

Tuesday 10/23/2012

8:00 – 17:00 Work as usual (CST, reading papers, discussing problems, lunch … )

17:00 – 18:00 Going home, showering, commuting.

18:00 – 19:30 Dancing lessons. Please don’t tell her, but I am really grateful that Andrea insisted on taking this dancing class that we go to once a week! – It is really precious quality time that we spend together!

20:00 – 20:30 Reviewing some IEEE public relations articles + sending some e-mails.

20:30 – 22:30 Mechatroniker Stammtisch @ KHG Kellerbar. This is where you meet all the Mechatronics undergrads and a great place for recruiting new members for our research group as well as for the IEEE Student Branch. It is really good to see that there are so many motivated engineering students at JKU! Thank you guys, you’ve made my day.

23:00 – ? Blogging

I’ll log off now, time to go to bed, let’s build a new radar system tomorrow!

Update on the 30 Escapes Project

Christian M. Schmid,

I recently blogged about me wanting to escape the office for one hour every day. So here’s an update of my progress.

Tuesday, 10/9/2012: That’s when I wrote the original blog article about my 30-day-escape project, in some strange but nice niche at the university library.

Wednesday, 10/10/2012: Coffee with my sister! She’s also a university assistant and PhD student here at JKU. Her office is within walking distance

Thursday, 10/11/2012: I spent with with preparations for the beer tasting experiment.

Friday, 10/12/2012: Lunch with Manuela, a friend from Leoben who is also a Pro Scientia scholarship holder. – By the way Pro Scientia applications for 2012/2013 are still open!

Monday, 10/15/2012: IEEE Student Branch Presentation with Andreas, Ernst and Robert for all first-year mechatronics and information electronics students. As always we showed John Cohn’s great engineering paradise video and our own “I am IEEE” video.

Tuesday, 10/16/2012: IEEE Student Branch Presentation again, now for all second-year mechatronics and information electronics students.

Wednesday, 10/17/2012: Today I went for a run (Click to see my track on Sports Trakcer). I run regularly, but I don’t even remember the last time when I ran before sunset. – Also the first time I’ve used the Science park showers that we are not supposed to use officially. Here’s a nice autumn photo that I shot during my run.

Beer Tasting, A Scientific Approach

Christian M. Schmid,
,

It all started with a simple question “Is des Zipfa wirklich so a Foazgeschwoabat?” – “Is Zipfer beer really so bad after all”. Having a scientific background there was just no way around setting up an experiment: 8 experts, 12 different kinds of Austrian beer and a blind taste test. Here are some photos before and after I had removed the beer bottle labels

And here’s the panel of internationally acclaimed beer and microwave engineering experts ;)

I had prepared booklets where they could rate the different kinds of beers (#1-#12) by using points and words. It blew me away how many suitable adjectives they found for describing the smell, looks and taste of beer.

 

The results were similarly astonishing. I don’t want to bore you with statistics (that’s what we had LibreOffice Calc for), so here just some major findings:

  1. Zipfer scored the highest number of points from 2/8 testers -> “Zipfer is do koa so a Foazgschwoabat” – Zipfer beer is not so bad after all.
  2. Only one tester (out of 8!!) successfully identified the non-alcoholic beer Schlossgold
  3. The logical conclusion: Marketing really seems to have a huge influence on our favorite beer choices – more than the obvious parameters looks, smell and taste.

I don’t know when, but it was so much fun, I am sure I will do something like this again!!!

Escape for 30 Days

Christian M. Schmid,
,

You know how they say that if you do something for too long, you will get yourself gridlocked? The way you should re-orientate your professional career at least every 7 years because staying in the same position for too long will make you become useless leading to a situation that is unwholesome for you, your profession and the company? So here’s the only logical conclusion: Try to escape everyday routines – at least in some ways. So that’s one part of the idea.

The other part comes from my lack to resist the temptation of trying this new idea, which I got from a TED talk that a friend of mine recommended. Feel free to watch it, it’s really short!

So here’s my resolution plan: Whenever possible I am going to try to escape the office for an hour every day for the next 30 days. Me and my laptop are going to explore the campus and I am going to use this time

  • to work on my thesis,
  • to write for my blog,
  • to just relax,
  • to do whatever comes my way.

What will your next 30-day-project look like?