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?

Urfahraner Jahrmarkt with Friends

Christian M. Schmid,
,

Way to much to do and too little time for blogging during the last week. So here’s just a quick update on Thursday night, which I spent at the Urfahraner Jahrmarkt with some college mates. For those of you who don’t know the Urfahraner Jahrmarkt, think of it as a small Oktoberfest, a fair with lots of amusement rides, foods, drinks …


After some rides, including the obligatory ghost train

we ended up in one of the beer halls.

It was great to see my college mates again and to hear their stories about what they have done since graduation. Hannes for instance told me about the 8000 Liter/Minute water pump that he just finished designing, which is going to be used by fire fighters. After a final location switch to the Herza’l Alm, which if you translate it literally means “alp of hearts”,

I went home, partly using the same way that I had to use on a daily basis to get from the dorm to the university during my time as an undergraduate student. Good to see that all the graffiti on the way are still subject to change!

Back to School

Christian M. Schmid,

Hordes of students swamping the campus. Loooong lines in the cafeteria. The anxiety and excitement of freshmen. People asking me where they would find the building which we are standing right in front of. Yep – school has started again and it’s the very first day.

As a PhD student doing research with no teaching obligations this should not affect me in any other way than the ones already mentioned, but with everybody else feeling it I just can not deny the sensation a fresh start. Or more like a caesura for those of us who have been here before. Similar to the new years eve it makes you reflect on what there is to come. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve given up on the concept of resolutions long ago. I rather make plans and my plan is to finish my PhD during the next year.

And here’s an almost nightly shot of the Science Park, the building where this is going to happen!

Hello from CERN

Christian M. Schmid,
,

We’ve made it and it is actually our second day at CERN. I am sitting at a table in the CERN cafeteria, a sunny spot right next to one of their magnets they have on display. More than 1000 of these are somewhere below me, in a 27 km long ring. That’s where they accelerate junks of protons to have them finally collide.

As I am sitting here sipping my coffee I enjoy the spirit and the excitement of all of the researchers and “science tourists” around me who have come from all over the world to participate in and witness R&D at the forefront of science and technology!

Yesterday we had the chance to talk to one of the scientists from the core team of the Neutrino experiment, where in short they send Muon Neutrinos from CERN to some place in Italy (roughly 730 km from here) to see if some of the Muon Neutrinos change into Tau Neutrinos, as predicted by some theory that is not confirmed yet. I am sure you’ve heard about that experiment, which was in the media excessively because of some measurement setup error which lead to the suggestion that neutrinos may be faster than light. It’s just so much more exciting to really talk to the people who actually do the experiments as opposed to just following some copy-and-paste flawed media coverage by some journalist who might not even care. I’m getting goose bumps again as I think about those interesting discussion!

ATLAS experiment control room

LHC computing grid

CERN, here we come!

Christian M. Schmid,
,

We’re on our way! As I am writing this we are on the bus already!

The IEEE student branch JKU Linz is going to CERN. There are 14 more hours of bus driving ahead of us. But I have a feeling that this is absolutely doable given the amount of beer that people brought on the bus ;) — Not to forget everybody’s excitement that is even more energizing and rewarding. I am really looking forward to this once-in-a-lifetime trip!

Spotlight: Keepass

Christian M. Schmid,
,

F*** you IEEE admins! http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/09/25/1356211/data-breach-reveals-100k-ieeeorg-members-plaintext-passwords

I really don’t get it how something like this can happen in an organization that prides itself on being the scientific home to some of the most respected researchers in the field of computer and data security.

Anyway, this incident triggers me to start this new thing that I am going to call “Spotlight”, where I’d like to present nice tools, must-haves, must-does and other stuff. In the shadow of recent events I’d like to point out a little program to you called Keepass.

The problem for many people with a password leak like the one IEEE committed is, that they use just one password for all the services they use. Just one password for twitter, facebook, mail, skype, maybe even credit cards, bank accounts, you-name-it. When one institution leaks your password you are really screwed! On the other hand users often use trivial passwords such as password, 12345, … , just because they would have to remember so many passwords otherwise. But there is just no way around: You have to use a strong, unique password (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength) for every service you use – and you may NOT write it down or store it in plain text!

This is where Keepass comes into play. It’s a password safe, where you can store all your unique and strong passwords in an encrypted file. Trust me the encryption that they use is really good, waaaay more unlikely to be broken than IEEE, your local cable company or any other entity leaking your password. Of course if someone gets your master password, which you use to unlock this file, you are screwed again. But if its a good password and if you don’t write it down or give it to anyone, you should be good.

My password safe has 70 passwords stored in it. The IEEE leaking my password means that whoever has my password may now log on to my IEEE account. This is still horrible enough, they could eaves drop in on all my IEEE emails, order IEEE goodies and membership subscriptions, but that’s nothing compared to the damage that could have been done if I had used the same password for all of the 70 services I use.

Give it a try, it’s one of the most powerful tools that I use! http://keepass.info/

What’s Your Favorite Font?

Christian M. Schmid,

Yay! New fonts for my blog. Here’s a photo of the before and after effect (click to enlarge)

Do you notice the fonts that are used now? For quite some time I’ve actually been using mainly the three typefaces that are now also used on my blog, which are:

  • Futura – it’s one of the greatest San Serif fonts I know. I love it for its simplistic geometrical shapes, as well as for its elegent lower case ascenders.
  • Palatino Linotype Regular – actually I am using URW Palladio Regular, which is an Open Source Version of Palatino Linotype. I love it for its beauty and more importantly for its high legibility. By the way I am also going to use this one as main font for my thesis, which is going to be based on André Miede classicthesis LaTeX package.
  • Palatino Linotype Italic – This is probably the most beautiful typeface – ever. It’s bad that it is not as legible as its regular version, but hey its soooo beautiful! Just zoom in on this ampersand and you’ll know what I am talking about:

 

&

 

Of course fonts meeting web involves some technical stuff too, actually quite a lot of it. Just for the sake of completeness I’d like to refer you to Wikipedia and the site that helped me with the font conversion: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/.

If you want to learn more about about fonts I’d like to recommend  “Just my type” by Simon Garfield, which has paid my bedside table a visit just recently. By the way: What’s your most favorite font and why?

Last Call to Passenger Sinnesrausch

Christian M. Schmid,
,

The last three days were marked by the visit of my good friend Christoph Bauer. I know him trough “Pro Scientia” (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_Scientia) and we’ve stayed in contact since we first met at the Pro Scientia summer convention about a year ago.

I really enjoyed his visit. Even tough I can not come up with any reasonable explanation, of how anybody his age can have such a broad and mature cultural, political, scientific, you name-it, knowledge, I can say that having conversations with him is one of the greatest delights one can get!

Apart from talking, listening to Bach, Mozart, Wagner, tasting great spirits we also explored some of the cultural highlights Linz has to offer. We managed to get hold of some of the last tickets to the exhibition “Sinnesrausch”, which hosts a couple of installations centered around the common theme “Sensory Sensation” and leads over the rooftops of Linz. Most of the installations are interactive, here’s a photo of Christoph trying the “super-lense-chair”.

If you think that exploring Linz and its wonders is for you too, just drop me a line. I am always happy to welcome my friends to Linz!