Time to think - 3

I'm wondering about the dynamics of journalism once again. Last week a German high-speed train drove into a herd of sheep and derailed. No one was killed fortunately, but still it was worth major news, because of the terrible things that could have happened. And just like always when one such thing happens, suddenly you notice similar news - like the one that yesterday a train in Thuringia collided with cattle walking on the tracks.

The thing that makes me think about that is: Why do such things coincidentally happen nearly at the same time while no one has heard of such accidents for years before? Thesis A: people like I just don't notice these kind of news until a major incident like the one last week occurs. Thesis B: journalists think they can make a good story out of anything that is likely to be similar to some recent news topic and suddenly start to care.

Regarding the fact that the guys writing those news are the same that tend to attend football matches after major acts of hooliganism occur, but do not put the same attention to news that might help improve the situation (How often do you see PR for fan project work? Did you notice any reports about Saxonian Federal Government being the only one in Germany not funding those projects?) makes me favor version B.

St. George, The Dragon, and some old buildings

The trip to Sutton Hoo in fact had been a makeshift, because British car rental companies are closed on Sundays and we needed to rent the car for the whole weekend. The real purpose of all this had been a visit to St. George's Festival in Wrest Park. The first problem when getting up early Sunday morning: it had rained all night and still did not seem to stop and we were set up for a whole day out in the countryside. That's why we spent the first hour after meeting at the Microsoft building just drinking coffee and discussing what else we could do. Finally, we decided to go to the festival anyway - in England, you can't just stay at home because it's raining.
After an hour of driving on the left side - in the meantime I had gotten quite used to it - we arrived at the park and ran into the arms of a guy who tried to convince us of becomming members of the English Heritage Foundation. This trust runs around 400 historic sites around England (some of the most famous ones being Dover Castle and Stonehenge) and for only GBP 32 I became a one-year member of the trust, which gets me free admission to all of these sites. It already saved me around 13 pounds of entrance fees on my first day. Additionally, the guy believed me being a student without having an international student ID and a week later I could use my English Heritage Student Member ID even for getting lower admission fees at Westminster Abbey (although lower had a complete new dimension in this respect, but more on London later).

The festival was the typical medieval spectaculum you can also get at thousands of places in the rest of the world. However, as we were in England, it was enriched by demonstrations of British warfare history. Quote of the day: "Chivalry is a concept that was invented by the French. We wanted to win our battles, so we didn't ever use this. Kick the guys while they are lying on the ground!"
Twice a day, they also ran the final showdown between the handsome and powerful English St. George on his white horse, an evil arab with Scottish accent and the dragon. Making the crowds of children happy, St. George beat them all and secured the lifes of poor English villagers. After eating horrible English food (in fact the first time I got real bad food here), trying out fudge (extreeeemely sweet) and getting bored, we decided to spend the afternoon visiting some other places and went to Rushton Triangular Lodge and then onwards to Kirby Hall (both of them of course run by English Heritage, so I didn't need to pay admission fees...)
The Triangular Lodge was built by a rich English Roman-Catholic (yes, those guys existed) who had been thrown into prison for his beliefs. After getting out of jail, he wanted to show the world that he was still a believer and built a house symbolising the Holy Trinity. The house has three corners, three floors with 3 rooms each, triangular windows and icons, but is empty otherwise, so there is not that much to see inside. (And by the way: someone on the Wikipedia page took my picture and switched the sun on...)
Kirby Hall was a mansion used by varying English nobles until the mid 19th century and wasn't used afterwards. Today, people are trying to reconstruct the building and keep the interesting French-style park in good shape. Another remarkable quote relates to exactly this park. The Hall's museum explained everything about its creation and as young European intellectuals we were of course aware that it had a strong resemblence to parks all over France. (Or maybe our intellect did not help us as much as Malo, the French guy in our rows, telling us that all the time.) Interesting though, that the Kirby Hall Museum did not acknowledge the park being French but rather as having been "inspired by Continental influences". I guess, there must be some tensions between the French and the English. ;)

Sutton Hoo

Last Saturday, Dave, Malo, and I went to Sutton Hoo, which is an ancient Anglo-Saxon Burial Site near Ipswich. Unfortunately this first sentence already contains more confirmed information than the guide at Sutton Hoo was willing to give us. Let's rephrase it: Sutton Hoo is an area where, based on the findings of three independent excavations during the 20th century, some archeologists may think, that it was used to bury the high-society of ancient East Anglia until around the late 6th century A.D., when Britain finally became more and more christianized.The most important thing we discovered that day was that wind and rain brought from the nearby North Sea had about 1.400 years time to wash the ancient burial mounds to the ground and they did succeed overwhelmingly. As a result, visitors basically see a large area of green grass with tiny ripples that you would not recognize as being graves if the guide didn't tell you so. The only thing that really looks like a mound and where one may be able to believe in the stories of ancient kings buried with their boats, armory and other belongings is the one on the photo (which is the most spectacular landscape photo I took that day). And guess what: it has been rebuilt by the last team of archeologists digging around in Sutton Hoo after they finished their work in the 1990s.

The three us of had decided to spend 3 pounds in addition to the entrance fee in order to take the guided tour around the site, which definitely was the right thing to do. Otherwise we had probably just given the site a short look, decided that we must have got lost and spent 3 more hours searching for the right place before realizing that this was really all we could see. ;) With the tour we only spent one hour outside on the cold and windy field close to the sea. However the guide could give us a lot of interesting information about the Anglo-Saxons (descendants of the Vikings, often visiting their relatives in Denmark and the Netherlands for a short boat tour), their lifes (short, hard, battlesome) and about how they buried their death (along with all their belongings and real boats which got carried up to the site by hoards of servants).

To warm up after being in the cold wind all the time (can't mention that too often!), we afterwards visited the Sutton Hoo Museum where some replicas of the ancient findings were on display. Next interesting thing to learn: the real cool stuff of course is on permanent loan to the British Museum in London. Since the BM does not charge admittance fees, we might as well have travelled to London and visit these things there.

Teaser...

From the comments in my blog and personal communication I know that there are really people reading my blog and I feel a bit bad because I did not post anything about last weekend's trip through East Anglia up to now. Unfortunately, my mobile broadband is extremely slow uploading pics (took me 2 minutes to upload this one), but I think I can upload some of last week's photos from work.

So stay tuned for news about Anglo-Saxon History, St. George fighting the evil dragon and what is so spectacular about crossing farm vehicles.

Always look on the left side of life...

I just picked up the rental car for this weekend. Fellow interns and I plan to go the St. George's Festival on Sunday and since English rental companies are closed on this day, we needed to rent the car for the whole weekend (which for the four of us is still cheaper than taking a bus). So what we are going to do today is to visit Sutton Hoo and maybe Bury St. Edmunds - expect some pics in the next posts. :)

Of course renting a car in England isn't without its bureaucratic problems. The company was only 2 miles away from home, so I walked there this morning. Again, I needed two forms of identification, now with the additional requirement that at least one of them stated my UK address of residence. ID #1 of course is my passport, but how can I prove my residency since there is no such thing as the requirement to register yourself locally? In the end I had to go back to my house and get a letter from Barclays I got last week. As there was my address on it, this counted as a proof. But the rental guys were very nice and understanding and instead of letting me walk the 4 miles back and forth, they even drove me home to get the letter. Anyway, in the future I will have it with me all the time, just in case.

The next hurdle was that those guys also would like to have two telephone numbers and they were not willing to accept my German mobile number as one of them. :( Fortunately, I had received an email from a fellow intern yesterday stating his mobile number and in the end the guys were happy with only this one as well. So now I was finally able to hit the road and experience the wonders of driving a car on the wrong (sic!) side of the road.

After driving about 10 miles from the car company to my Microsoft office (in between only getting lost once), I come to the conclusion that the problem is not to keep the car on the left side. At least inside the city this is very easy, because you just need to stay behind the car in front of you. Also, the problem is not to shift gears with your left hand because even this is quite natural, because gears have the same position as on the continent and I got used to the left-hand thing within minutes. The real problem driving a car is that as a continental European you have the natural expectation that there is the rest of the car to your right and the window to the left. Now in the UK it's vice versa and I felt extremely narrowed on my right side, because I just don't have enough space for my arm. Still after having left the car for 30 minutes now, I feel this unnatural feeling of having a door to my right. Veeery strange...

Benchmarks...

Running benchmarks can be quite boring - just sitting in front of the computer for minutes or hours. If you don't care about your browser influencing the measurements (don't do this for the final benchmarks of your paper...), you might try out this little flash game a fellow intern just showed me.

Pictures - 1

Just some pictures I took last weekend, when Christiane and I stumbled our way through the city (I don't know whether people from outside Cambridge would find the word "city" appropriate...).King's College Chapel is a really impressing cathedral belonging to (who could have guessed?) King's College. I also tried to take some pictures inside, however it was too dark and my hand was too shaky. I'll try again, if I'm in the mood to spend another 5 pounds for the entrance fee.

This photo was taken inside King's College. Of course no one is allowed to walk on the beautiful English Green - except senior staff members of the college and their guests.







Nice little bridge over river Cam. If you look sharply, you also see a punting boat.


Another view on river Cam.

Yellows are coming!

Yesterday I took a day off, doing the laundry, cleaning the house and being a tourist. And where else should a football-loving tourist go on a mostly sunny Saturday afternoon in England than to watch a football match?

In 5 miles radius around my house in Cambridge, there are two clubs playing in the "Blue Square Football Conference", England's 5th league - Histon F.C. and Cambridge United. Histon played away yesterday and so I went to see Cambridge United, currently ranking third in their league, against Stafford Rangers, who are far the last and already had no more chance of preventing their relegation. Obviously, everyone expected the U's, playing in black and yellow (although the more intellectual people of Cambridge tend to call it black and amber) to win.

The match started with Cambridge soon scoring their first goal after 7 minutes and from the technical abilities it looked like there would be many more goals to come. However, with more luck than skill, Stafford scored the 1-1 three minutes later and still people around me were convinced that this wouldn't stay tied the whole match. However, the match slowed down a bit with Cambridge players obviously enjoying to outwit their opponents one after the other. Unfortunately though, they forgot to shoot on Stafford's goal and so we saw halftime at 1-1.

In the second half, Stafford started to realize they still had their chances because of Cambridge's unability to score another goal. They started to attack Cambridge earlier and had some good chances before they finally got 1-2 ahead around the 65th minute. Afterwards, Stafford obviously was only out to defend and thanks to their amazing goalkeeper they held out the last 25 minutes against Cambridge's ongoing, aggressive but more and more desparate attacks.

Finally, this was kind of a deja-vu for me. The guys in black and yellow were obviously the better team, all odds spoke against the other side and in the end the highly inferior team left the pitch winning. Seems like I know this from my home team, too.

Work and stuff ...

So now my third day working for MS Research as an intern is over. The week started with the introductory part on Monday. Alltogether we were 5 interns starting this week. Our HR woman picked us up and we got the usual introductory session about what we are going to do, how everything works and stuff like that. Numbers are impressing, too. MSR Cambridge has 130 staff members and they expect to have 100 interns during the year, too. However, the big season of interns is yet to come in summer, when they expect to have 50 interns in parallel. The current number must be around 15 (spread over the building, so I cannot count them exactly).

After Monday lunch we got the opportunity to talk to our mentors separately and Eno gave me a list of things to read in order to get me started on my project. So I spent the last two and a half days reading stuff, getting acquainted with my work environment and my new colleagues. I also rent a bike so I can get to work easier, because MSR lives quite some way outside the city center (but still near enough to my home).

Real fun started, when I tried to open a bank account with Barclay's. They require you to have 2 identifications here. Usually, an ID card and a passport will suit. However, my German ID card expired last year and so I only had my passport with me... After trying many other things (MS contract - not accepted, room rental contract - not accepted, driver's license - no address on it, printing something from my German bank account - no address on it), the (really helpful) bank guy figured out that I could print a copy of one of my last German telephone bills (of course a landline telephone is needed, mobile does not count...) and this would suit as an ID, because my German address was finally printed on it. So now I'm now eventually set up with nearly everything.

The only thing missing is an internet connection in my house. British Telecom was too slow to react to my landlady's requests - at least that's what she tells me and I have no reason for disbelief. However, English mobile companies are providing UMTS connections for reasonable prices and there are even some with monthly runtimes, so I'll try to get one tomorrow.

Arrival in Cambridge

Last Friday, Christiane and I went to Cambridge since I was about to start my internship with Microsoft Research today. We flew from Dresden to Dusseldorf and then to Stansted, from where we caught a bus to Cambridge.

I rented a room in a house already some months ago and after arriving at the house with my landlord, we realized that this would be a place good enough to sleep - no more and no less. :) The good thing about the room is that I am currently the only tenant, which means I get the whole house for me alone. The bad thing about the house is that I am currently the only tenant and there has been no one living in the house for some months now. This way, Christiane and I spent the first few hours cleaning the house and making room to live.

On Saturday and Sunday we discovered the old city center of Cambridge by just walking around a lot. We visited the really amazing King's College Chapel and I was about to have my first (and second...) fully English breakfast. As you read this, I am obviously still alive. ;)

My weekend was made by discovering the Cambridge outlet of Borders bookstores. This should be definitely enough to read, if I'm tired of work later this week.

Maintaining a large-scale software project

This story on the Windows 2003 bugfixing process is quite old, but still pretty interesting.