It’s with a smile on my face and a tear in my eye that I conclude my 2-years term as the IEEE Region 8 Secretary.
The Region 8 Committee Meeting last weekend in Porto, Portugal was the last big R8 meeting that I was responsible for. It marks the end of a journey that started over 4 years ago. What’s left is a deep feeling of thankfulness, many new friendships and an experience is mine to keep for the years to come!
Finally I figured out which curriculum applies – they have changed it 5 times since I’ve started my PhD. Lucky as I am, the classes and ECTS that I have collected so far can still be used today. Some bureaucratic hurdles later, the university online system now says that I have completed all my ECTS duties. Yay!
We may now actually buy the champagne. I’ll keep you posted.
The road to my PhD is a bumpy one. But finally I think I am at the point where it becomes realistic for me to close this nasty open loop within the next 3 months.
The first step (that I am willing to blog about) was the informal submission of my thesis today. I submitted it both to my supervisor and the second, external examiner from the University of Ulm.
We may want to think about shopping for champagne. I’ll keep you posted.
You have to watch this youtube video:
To me Fred Hersch’s version of “Both Sides Now” is profoundly beautiful and touching. It clearly stands out compared to the millions of stimuli that I get on a day to day basis. When I say stimuli I mean everything ranging from music, photography, writing, management presentations, engineering solutions, mathematical equations to coffee table discussions. In my quest to understanding “Life, the Universe & Everything” I can’t resist to ask: “Why?”.
To tell you the truth, I don’t think I have a way to test my answers (hypotheses) in a “true-or-false” manner. However my intuition at the moment tells me this:
For lack of scientific methods, I can’t be sure that this list is correct or exhaustive. But what I can say is that I find all of these qualities in Fred Hersch’s “Both Sides Now” and that I should certainly make sure they are in the random coffee table discussion to make it just as beautiful and touching.
I am still there, just saying. Did some hiking today. Hope to become more active again in the future.
A New Year! Humbly reflecting about the past year and looking forward with high hopes. I wish all of you the best for 2016, let’s continue the journey – together.
jdotxt is an open source, cross-platform Desktop tool for managing your todo list. It’s geared towards Gina Trapani’s todo.txt file format and stores all of your stuff in two human readable text files. Having these files on your owncloud, dropbox or any other cloud storage makes it easy as pie to keep your todos in sync across multiple devices.
Download installer. When you launch jdotxt, you may be asked to download and install Java, which you should do in that case.
Open a terminal and execute the following three commands (line by line):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chms/jdotxt sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install jdotxt
First you must get JRE >= 7 by executing the following two commands (line by line):
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre sudo update-alternatives --config java
After executing the second line you will be asked, which version of Java you would like to use by default. Select the one that has version number 7 or higher in its path name.
Now continue with the instructions for Ubuntu >= 12.10 (see above)
Download and install the jdotxt Debian file. Of course this works on Ubuntu too, but it is highly recommended to use the repository, for automatic updates.
Download the jar file and execute it using Java JRE >= 7 (http://www.java.com)
You are more than welcome to drop me a line via one of the online platforms I use, or to contribute by reporting bug reports or feature requests via github. The source code is also hosted on github.com so feel free to contribute!
Christian M. Schmid
Mikhail Kalkov
jdotxt is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Another 30 day-project: I bought a new gadget while I was in the US 4 weeks ago, a Misfit Flash activity tracker. The idea: It costs only 30 USD and if it would motivate me to stay active for 30 days in a row, this would mean a cost of 1 USD per day. In other words way less than your average gym membership. And I did it – I achieved my activity goal for 30 days in a row.
Misfit measures activities in points and I set my target to 1200 points (roughly 12000 steps) per day. While achieving this goal was never physically demanding, I had to schedule additional walks regularly. Especially on days with no other workouts (I run and swim about 1-3 times a week), and on days that were filled with meetings or travel.
I think I’ll move back to using Polar Flow as my primary activity tracker, because in addition to activity in general it can also track running, swimming, cycling, hiking and more using GPS and heart rate sensors. However the idea of tracking my activity and trying to avoid days without activity should stick.
Since blogging apparently doesn’t work for me lately I’ll try microblogging for 30 days. Here’s my twitter feed.
Another 30 day-project: I don’t drink any alcohol for 30 days. For me alcohol = beer. I don’t usually drink anything other than beer. But beer, I drink a lot. Not as in large quantities at a time, but being Austrian a beer here and there just seems natural. Once you are conscious about it, you realize how many opportunities there are for that one beer.
I am into this project for 16 days now. Honestly I would not have felt comfortable letting everybody know about it on day one – chances were I would not be able to stick to my plan. But now I am certain that it will work.
If that makes me sound like an addict on detox, it’s not what I wanted to suggest. It’s just that during the first week my resolution was tested 5 out of 7 days: You know, friends and colleagues asking about an after work beer. The obligatory beer after the jazz gig. The waiter at that Italian restaurant asking me if I would fancy a Peroni. “No” became an important word. Some people around me keep teasing be, but it only makes me stronger now, because it reminds me about my decision of not drinking beer for 30 days.