On Academics

As in people in academia:

Most academics, however, are only academics. In the course of their careers, they have been paid a salary only by a university; they are one-dimensional people. They therefore have not had the breadth of experience to give them a sense of the reality of international relations; nor have they had the depth of experience to give them a sense of its tragedy. These are the hollow men, and the shallow men, too. For such people, there are only a few kinds of achievements possible in regard to international relations. One of them is to sit down and spin out theories that fellow academics will praise as being rigorous and original. (Merely being realistic and responsible, in contrast, will not evoke their praise.) In truth, most academics are only concerned about the good opinion of about a dozen other academic specialists in their particular sub-sub-field

Kurth, James. “Inside the Cave: The Banality of I.R. Studies"

The man speaks the truth, bitches!...

The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), who's been in the news lately about his "last lecture". He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and told he had about six months to live. This was a couple of months ago, and sadly, this brilliant man has passed away. I had heard about this last lecture before, thinking it was a cool thing, but I hadn't actually watched it. Then I was having dinner the other night with a friend of mine who goes to CMU and he mentioned Randy in passing. Then earlier today, talking to a friend of mine, he also mentioned Randy's lecture and told me that I might find it interesting. "Might find it interesting" was the understatement of the century. Watching it just now, I was completely blown away by not only this man's genius and insight into life, but also his incredible humility. It was truly a treat. While this man is a computer scientist, and many of you may not be, watching this 76 minute talk will fill you with such awe and wonderment, while at the same time filling you with such clarity and wisdom that missing this should almost be criminal.
I really had no idea what this talk would be about, and I certainly did not know that it would be this good. It is an absolute jewel, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have just seen it, even though it was a webcast. The talk is available on YouTube here. This man is absolutely brilliant, and the world is a worse place without him. Watch this talk! I don't care if you do anything else in your life, but you watch this talk. It is that good. Such wisdom, such insight, such delivery. I really cannot say enough good things about this man!

Worldwide Employment Market

I'm currently looking in to finding a job in a nice country. In most of these countries, they speak a language that I am unfamiliar with. They also have different cultural differences, and ways of doing business. What they also have, are different ways of finding work. Most countries have some websites with listings, and this is where the problem begins. I'm very happy that these websites exist, but the problem is that there are so many of them! Why not consolidate? Why not just make one or a few incredibly large sites that have everything in them? The government does, and it seems to be working for them.

I would especially like a worldwide site for this, or at the very least a continent-wide site. something like europejobs.com that would list ALL available jobs in Europe. It's not difficult technically, and it would be easier for both employers and (prospective) employees, since it would all be gathered in one place. Especially since we're supposed to be in the EU now, with free movement of people, services and capital. It should be a breeze to hire someone from a different country in the EU. It would certainly make life easier for expats like myself. It's not that I don't want to do the work hunting for jobs, I'm just saying that it would be easier if everyone pooled their resources.

Sadly, I know that this will never happen, because there are issues of bikeshedding and "not written here" syndrome evident throughout the world. The inability of people to get along and reach a solution that is beneficial to all parties involved is, on a larger scale, the reason for most of the troubles in the world. I suppose this is painfully obvious, if you think about it. If there is no disagreement, there would be no problems. Disagreement is inherent in humans, but I wish people could set some of it aside for the greater good, in some cases. Especially when it comes to helping people. People who are in the business of helping other people should be able to get along and work together instead of against each other. It would cut down on overhead, and would increase the amount of help they can dish out, regardless of what this help could be.

Make my life easier, please. Make everybody's life easier. You can you it, you have the technology!

Bullshit Technicalities

As some of you know, my girlfriend is currently doing an internship for the European Commission in Brussels. As a result, I travel down there about every other weekend, and she travels back the remaining weekends. This seemed like a good deal, because the EC had promised to pay for our trips, since I'm her "significant other", and she was actually leaving "home" to do this internship.

It now turns out, however, that definitions matter a great deal to the EC. Because we were not officially living together, and that she didn't return to her registered address (that she moved out of when she left for Brussels) when the came back here (but rather to me), it doesn't count, so we don't get out money back. None of it, not a cent.

Not that I hadn't gone down to see her as often as I could even if they hadn't promised to pay, but you just feel fucked over by the government, once again, when this kind of stuff happens. When we were first told about the reimbursements, I thought to myself "hey, maybe there is at least some good in government circles", but I was wrong. The government keeps screwing you over at every chance they get. They get by on doing the bare minimum required, and often not even that. In the immortal words of Leo Getz, "They fuck you at the drive-thru!"

I feel properly and fully rogered. Thanks EU, this is just what I needed. A good ass-fucking to show me who's boss!

Lack Of Sunlight Kills

I knew it! Finally I am vindicated! Living in countries like my own (Sweden) is detrimental to your health! You heard it from the horse's mouth.

The second comment mentions this:

This is EASY, people. It's not like they don't sell UVB 2% up to 10% daylight CPF screw in light bulbs at any decent pet store that carries reptiles.

Perhaps I shall look in to it...

Fragility

Why the hell am I so fragile? Why isn't 24 hours enough to recuperate from 30 minutes of running? I've been running 2-4 times each week now for little over two months, I have proper shoes fitted by a specialist, I run on a soft surface (track), and I still end up with sore muscles after each run. I need 1-2 days of recovery in between sessions to not break down completely, and it's pissing me off!
You would have thought that my body would have adjusted by now, but noooooooooo. I'm doing everything by the book, yet I still break my body each time I lace up. I's incredibly frustrating, especially since there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to get better. While my stamina has increased (5km in 30 minutes, with some walking inter-spaced), I can't seem to get fit enough for mu muscles to handle this simple thing of a run a day. I'm not asking much. I'm not asking for hours each day, or a triathlon each weekend, just grant me 30 leisurely minutes of running each day, is that too much to ask?
Here I am with an ice pack on my shins, having to cut my run short after 20 hellish minutes before admitting defeat in the face of having to spend 1-2 weeks not running at all should I continue and completely trash my legs. Today it even got to the point where my thighs started hurting. My thighs! My thighs never hurt, normally. It's always my calves (less so lately, however), and my shins (always a fucking pain). I stretch and I do toe-raises as my desk daily, but that doesn't seem to help the fact that my shins never get with the program. I guess I could spend 2-3 weeks completely off running and physical exercise to let them heal, but then I'm back to square one again. I will have lost my stamina, my remaining muscles will have weakened, and I have to start building them up again, which inevitably will kill my shins.
It's a vicious cycle, and I don't know how to break it.
Help me Obi-wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!

I'm Ready

I'm ready for my life to go on.
I'm ready for the life I'm living now to be complete so that I can move on to the next phase of my life (whatever that turns out to be). Right now it only feels like I'm going through the motions. There's no real joy in what I do (even though it is fun), and I feel like it's all just a means to an end. It's a very annoying state to be in. Motivation is low, and the sense of accomplishment when something actually happens is met with, at most, a "meh"...
I don't know what life holds for me on the other side of my M.Sc. degree, but I feel like I need to get there. I've been in school since 2001, and it's about fucking time I got out. I need to start living the real life, making money, having freedoms, rather than just waiting to be judged by people who can choose to hold up my life at their whim.
There's no doubt in my mind that I'll make my deadline (more or less, anyway), and that I will actually get out, but it feels like if that day could come sooner rather than later, I would be a happy Markus.
Here in Holland, more than anywhere else, I get the feeling that one day is just exactly like the other. Nothing ever changes. The hamster wheel is ever present, and nothing I do or say will make the view from inside the mental cage that is my reality change. Having been on the other fence, having had a job and things to do, I know that all life isn't like this. I know that it is actually possible for it to be different. In fact it is possible for it to be very different, but "different" isn't a word that is very common here in the Netherlands. I think people here are afraid to stand out. They think that if they do, they will be rejected by society, and their life will turn to utter shit. In a way, I think they are right. When you live in a society where you are afraid that people will judge you for a certain thing, then you are bound to judge people for that very same thing yourself. As a result, there is very little spice and color in everyday life in my current world, and I think it is dragging me down with it. It makes me sad, but most of all it makes me apathetic.

Edumacation

I ran in to this quote today by Albert Einsten:

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Albert Einstein

It ties in really well with something I wrote down in one of my books as I was studying it last week:

The smarter I become
The dumber I feel

There's nothing better for letting you know how infinitely little you know about everything than learning about other things. The more you learn about one thing, the more you realize that there is so much more information out there about which you don't have a fucking clue.

Now, the reason why I think these two quotes tie in well together (which might not have otherwise been obvious), is that going to grad school really makes your knowledge seem insignificant, because you are exposed to so much other knowledge that you know you can't possibly learn it all. What grad school also does is expose you to a lot of useless knowledge, which in turn keeps you from learning about things that you are really interested in.

Marriage

I know why people get married.
I figured it out in the shower today.
It's vendor lock in. Think about it. It's another hurdle that you must overcome to switch providers.
Marriage provides everything a normal relationship does, except that it is harder to switch out of. If you're on a normal relationship and you find some reason to leave, you can just break up.
If you are married, however, breaking up becomes a process.

In a relationship, there's generally one person who has more to loose from breaking up than the other. This could be because of many things. For instance, he or she has a harder time getting dates. They might be affraid of being alone. They can't cook. The list can be long.
We will call this person the weaker person. In the pecking order of the real world, this person would be eaten first of the two, if we followed the laws of the animal kingdom.
Because this person has the most to loose, this person will probably be the one who proposes. The roles might change over time, but I believe that the person who wants it to end the least does the most he or she can to get it to last. One convenient thing to make it last longer, that the parents will like too, is to get married.

I think that couples who survive without marriage, without kids, and quite possibly without anything else material holding them together, are the strongest couples. If they don't need ways of tying the other person down into the relationship, they have a pretty good relationship to start with.

If you have different values, I challenge you to prove me wrong!

Jeans

I have a couple of jeans that I like. These jeans look great. I think so, others think so.
The fashionistas of the world have decided that in fall you wear darker colors and in spring you wear lighter colors. This makes sense from a cleaning things perspective, but what doesn't make sense is that they just up and stop selling all the other stuff just because the seasons change.
I like pale washed jeans. In fact I like all the colors I wear to be pale, but especially so with jeans.
Since no brick-and-mortar store sells my jeans anymore, I decided to go online and find them.
Shouldn't be too hard I though, and said and done, I found a handful of sites selling them.
After a good 30 minutes of trying to figure out what color was which, I had finally come to some unsure conclusion about which color best matched the ones I am currently wearing.
I go to the checkout stage, and on ALL the sites, the field where you're supposed to fill in "country" is either non-existent, or it is preset to "United Kingdom", and is unchangeable.

Wasn't one of the big things with the European Union that there was supposed to be free movement of goods and money? Why won't these ass-goblins sell me my precious jeans, just because I'm in a different country from them? Even play.com sells me stuff anywhere in Europe with free shipping, but not these fuckers.

I am truly and utterly disappointed. I believe I don't even want to visit a site with a .co.uk TLD.
To quote Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore: "I will not hurt or harm you. Just give me back the board, Lance. It was a good board - and I like it. You know how hard it is to find a board you like."

Apparently good boards aren't the only things that are hard to find...

Base jumping

A friend just sent me a link to this video, it's just about the coolest thing I've ever seen a human do.
Granted, it's dangerous, but it's not stupid.
I believe that if I wasn't so keen on keeping my head squarely on my shoulders, this is the kind of stuff I would absolutely love to do.
And in the alps too, what a fucking rush this must have been.
Regular skydiving is for pansies, that's all I have to say...

The things these people get out of life, I am pretty sure cannot be canned or put in a pill and sold. This, to me, looks pretty close to the ultimate rush!
Doing summersaults while sniffing 50cm out from the cliff wall... There are no words to describe this!

Burning the candle

You know what's really good about living in a foreign country?
Birthdays! I absolutely hate birthdays. Mine as well as others, but mostly mine.
When you live in a different country, you not only rid your family members of the terrible task of buying you some nonsense thing that you don't need, but you also get rid of that task yourself.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love giving things to the people I like, it's not that, it's just the eternal problem of what do you give to the man who has everything?
I'm not saying that I do, but I know that if there's anything out there that I want (and that is reasonably priced), I buy it. I know that the rest of my family and my friends are the exact same way. Things that fall outside my range of reasonably priced wouldn't fit in that range for your family members anyway, so it comes down to trying to find something that is both acceptably expensive and that will also be liked by the recipient.
When I was 7 years old, this posed absolutely no problem what so ever. Now that I'm 28 going on 29 (I shiver at the very thought), this has become an insurmountably complex problem. It's even worse when it comes to parents.
Also, when your family members aren't around, you can conveniently forget your birthday. That way you don't have to acknowledge the fact that you're not getting any younger, and the years only get shorter and shorter.
All in all it's a win-win situation for everybody.

I'll make you all a deal right here. If you promise to conveniently forget about my birthday, I'll promise to forget about yours, and we'll all live happily ever after in blissful ignorance...

Now the UK is also off-limits for me.

For the longest time (basically since the introduction of the PATRIOT act) the US has been off-limits for me. Not because I've committed any crime punishable under it, but rather because it gives law enforcement the legal right to do whatever the fuck the want to people without having to prove anything.
Now, after a long line of similar atrocities, the UK is also on my no-fly list. Almost once a week I read about new legal development in the UK (usually on Slashdot and on Bruce Schneier's Blog) that gives the police similar freedoms there. You'd think that people in an EU country would be more resilient to big brother-ness like this, but apparently law makers don't listen to the people anymore (when have they ever, right...).
One could argue that the big grey mass of people would like to give up liberty to gain security, which doesn't actually work, but the reality is that the big grey mass of people probably don't vote anyway, should something like this actually be voted on via referendum.
The US and UK are now right up there with North Korea and China on the list of countries that don't give a flying fuck about the liberties of their citizens, and will do anything to bring about a police state much in the same way that Germany worked back in the day (can someone say Gestapo?). Bush seems intent on finding a final solution to the liberty problem, but other than the problem statement, there are a lot of similarities between him and some other guys in history I can think of.

This could be the end of the world... of warcraft.

Maybe I was just in a bad mood today (as per my previous post), but I logged on to WoW for about 45 minutes and it struck me how little I actually like playing the game. The penalty for virtually everything is time, and as an impatient man, that is unacceptable to me.
I checked the account management page, and the next time they were going to deduct my monthly fee was on October 2nd. Perfect, that's just a couple of days from now, it'll make my quitting much easier. Said and done, my subscription is cancelled.

I have a theory about quitting any online game. In the beginning, it's all nice, and you spend a lot of time in the world. After a while (6 months to a year) you begin to grow tired of the game, so you quit. This lasts for about 4 months, then you reactivate your account for various reasons. This time you play for a shorter period of time, say 4-5 months. After that you think that the game sucks again, and you quit. This time you wait even longer to start again, and when you do start again, you play for a shorter time. As time progresses the time between reactivating your account grows longer, and the time your account stays activated grows even shorter. After some time you reach a point where, after over a years absence, you think "hey, wouldn't it be fun to reactivate my account?". You reactivate your account, and within days or even hours, everything starts coming back to you, and the reasons you quit in the first place are as clear as day. You give it one more day to be sure, but after that deactivation, you will probably never ever play the game again.
I can't say I have this experience from that many games, but from the two online games that I have played and subsequently quit (Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft), the pattern has been identical. The fact that there's an expansion pack coming out for WoW doesn't bother me in the least. The game will still be the same, just more content. I might take a look, I might not, but I think that by that time, they will have launched Diablo 3 (on can only hope), and when that happens it'll be bye-bye all other games for a long time.

What I Should Have Done

Before I went to college for computer science, I wanted to become a psychologist. Every year from graduating from high-school I would apply to the psychology program. Of course, since this was a very popular program I could never get in because my grades were so low. Finally I went in to computer science, something I've been doing since I was a young child. In the second semester of my first year, we did a couple of months of Human Computer Interaction. Basically applying psychological concepts to the user experience and the interaction between man and machine.
Considering my burning lust for psychology, I thought that I had found the perfect combination; behavioral psychology together with computer science. I was thinking to myself "this is what I want to do with my life".
The problem was that most of the HCI we did was focused on usability studies and user interfaces, which I find incredibly boring (albeit incredibly important). When I graduated and it came time to choose a minor, this turn of events made me chose database technology as my minor, as opposed to HCI.

Now, in my 6th year of university, I'm looking for a thesis topic for my Master's Thesis, and as such, I was roaming the halls in our faculty, reading posters and generally seeing what my school was up to with regards to research. I have to start my thesis in January, so I'm going to try to be prepared.
I started at the 5th (and topmost) floor, reading posters and successively working my way down to the 2nd floor, where the HMI (Human Media Interaction) people are. In the top 3 floors I found what amounts to maybe 1.5 interesting topics to write about. When I got down to the 2nd floor, I got a certain feeling about it. People had open wine bottles in their offices, they were roaming around in more of a hippie kind-of style. It made me think of what the early computer labs in the 60ies and 70ies must have looked like. Reading the posters on the 2nd floor gave me tons of ideas, but since I haven't been specializing in HMI, I doubt that I could go down that road with my thesis.
All in all, the courses I have been taking over the last 2 years have been dull. Some of them have had some interesting parts, but I can say that there haven't been more than maybe 2-3 courses that I have actually enjoyed.
Now, hindsight being what it is, it would be easy for me to conclude that I should have chosen HMI when coming to this university, but since hindsight is just that, there's little I can do about that now.
I chose software engineering hoping that I would do what I love most, write software. However, the amount of software written during this education has been little to none. It's all about the meta level. How to develop methods to develop software, and quite frankly, it bores the hell out of me. I certainly cannot imagine myself as a researcher on the topic.

I just hope that I can actually find a topic for my thesis, and find and advisor willing to help me, because if I don't, and I get stuck with a topic that I'm not interested in, this is going to be a horrible school year.

From Thin Client to PC and Back Again

Back in the day, normal people couldn't afford computers. Computers were lumbering behemoths the size of apartments, and if you wanted on one, you had to either be at some university, or in the employ of a wealthy technology company. Even when you were in a position to get to use computers, you did it in a time-share basis, from what was then known as a terminal, and what is now known as a thin client. Multiple users per computer, and the computer was rarely, if ever, in the same room (or even building, city or state) that you were in.
As technology progresses, computers became smaller and less expensive, until the point where they started moving in to people's living rooms, and started fulfilling the dream of a computer in each home. People wanted their own computers because of the speed they provided, and the simplicity, and for a myriad of other reasons. Now however, with the advent of broadband in (almost) every house and things like Google Docs (Office replacement usable in your browser), we are moving away from the powerful home computer, and putting all our information and computing power needs in large servers. If this trend progresses, the only home "computers" we will need will be thin shells of systems whose only functionality will be to connect us to the big mainframes to fulfill all our computing needs.
This is the next step in evolution, and it is considered by the hype mongers as the next big thing. For whatever reasons, this is seen mostly as a good thing, however not everyone agrees.
While doing some computation on a remote basis can be a good idea, me and others believe that it might not be the end-all-be-all solution to computing for the next century.

The thing is that people who advocate this has lost sight of why people wanted home computers in the first place. The problem is that when everybody has invested in solutions like this, they will come to their senses and scream for their home computers back. Slowly, a new home computer market will emerge, and in a while we will be back to using powerful workstations sitting under our desks, or in our laps. Until someone claims that thin clients and working against a central computer is the way to go, and the circle repeats once more.

This might not necessarily be an evil thing, but for the sake of economy and progress, I would really like for us to strike a balance between home computers and mainframes sooner rather than later. Seeing as how technology companies are only interested in selling you new stuff, they would be delighted if we go from one end to the spectrum to the other every 25 years, but I think that it would be detrimental to the speed of development and to the wallets of the computer users in the world if we did.
If we could find a balance quicker, and then put all effort into making the technology that exists in that balanced state better, if we can get everybody putting money and effort into a common goal, we can become more technologically advanced (or as the marketers would say, get more for less, or better performance for less money, call now!) in a shorter time span, and I think that everyone who isn't a Luddite or Amish can agree that that is mostly a good thing™.

Ownership

Someone once said The things you own will end up owning you. I seem to have heard it in connection with Buddhism and Fight Club. The thing is that it is utterly true.
I don't claim to have that much stuff. I'm not a particularly rich person, and I live in a tiny hole-in-the-wall. What I do have, however, seems to be all over the place, even when I put my things where they belong. I have so many thing that I keep for the sole reason of "ohh, I'm sure I'll use this again some day". For some things it is good, like bank papers and receipts and stuff of that nature. For other things like clothes or electronics, it is quite the opposite. I, for instance, have a sandwich maker in a bag that I haven't used for years, but I can't bring myself to throw it away, because it's a 50 euro sandwich maker, and I'm a poor student.

I would absolutely love to be able to live out of a bag, with just my computer, my music, some clothes and some other knickknacks, but it seems to be impossible. If nothing else, all the books I amass take up a shitload of space, and that's not counting the 3 boxes of books I have stashed in my dad's garage. All in all, I have too much shit. I've gotten it down to as small a core as I can, and I still have too much stuff that never sees the light of day. No matter how hard I try, I can't get rid of it. The fact that I have no storage room to put it in, and that I have to have it in boxes and bags on my floor further exacerbates the problem.

The things I own have truly ended up owning me. What I need is a proper fire to forcibly make me part with all my shit (and give me some insurance money to buy half of it back with).

My University Experience

In 6 panels.

(Ohh and btw, the machall archives are back up, yay!)

Truth

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson