It's been almost a week since I last posted something to this blog (I post updates to my Research log daily - it's been lots of Read Slashdot and Debian's Best Friend is hilarious. and I never realised how good the Quannum collective are and far too little Cured cancer today).

I am now living alone after my flatmate for the past month finally upped and left me, only taking off with some of my underwear as keepsakes. He's off to Boston to do a post-doc at that other university. The fear of running into Matt Damon screaming How do you like them apples? is enough to keep me away from Boston for the moment, although it would be good to catch up with Mihir once he arrives there. After my flatmate left, I managed to blow up the kitchen within a few hours (Don't ask), although I did manage to make a fantastic peanut stir-fry for my efforts. The rice almost worked, but the exploding kitchen threw the cooking times off. I'm still finding glass in the apartment.

I spent a large part of Saturday walking between three supermarkets deciding which supermarkets were best for saving money over a long period of time. If I had been bothered to do a budget analysis, I would have realised that I could just go for a cheapish supermarket such as the Aldi-like Lidl supermarket. Instead I walked between them trying to remember prices for goods. Due to both the amount of time I spent walking around the supermarkets, and my decidedly bad grasp of the German language, I had to perfect the "I know what I'm doing" intent gaze, to try and fool people into not realising that I did not in fact know what I was doing. One of the things on my list of things to buy is toilet paper, and it's quite a decision to make because, analogous with the hamburger pattie inflation theory, the toilet paper ply inflation was fully in evidence. Arrayed in front of me on the shelves were the dazzling choices of single to quadruple ply toilet paper. I was going for the cheapest toilet paper possible, but I had to carry it home. I settled on the three-ply, giving the impression that I am not decadent, but I am a man who values the finer things in life. It probably doesn't help that it was in a Lidl bag.

My ADSL is ordered, and I'm going with FreeNet, who offered a whole bunch of free things along with no installation fees. When it actually gets installed is anyone's guess. John (No linkage, sorry!) is in Taiwan now, and he quite smartly got his ADSL installed so that it was working when he arrived. Not that he's got long to use it, as he might be heading down to this part of the planet (Stuttgart) by the end of the week. I may have my first visitor here!

Mmm.. I'm truly living the student life now. I just polished off my evening meal - a tasty treat of a bowl and a half of rice. Yes, it's not exactly the most extravagant meal, but I assure you that I have lots of reasons for being so bland with my cooking. How about: I ran out of food? I finished up at the institute today expecting to get some shopping done - picking up spices and vegetables and stuff, and possibly some quick food for me to cook up as dinner. A variety of circumstances (mostly taking the form of trams) meant that I only had about 10 minutes to do my shopping before the supermarket closed. Luckily I had time to pick up a loaf of Mannheim bread, and a packet of cheese. People who knew me when I used to bring my own lunch to uni/work would remember that I was the master of the simple sandwich, so a slice of bread with cheese on it would count as a meal. The Germans seem to really like both their breads and their cheeses. I'm not so much a connoiseur of the fine breads and cheeses, and can't tell the difference between the varieties, so I just go with the cheapest one. I don't know if I can handle the terrible looks from other shoppers and checkout-people for much longer.

Armed with my bread (delicately topped with a fine sliver of pre-sliced generic cheese), I attempt to satiate my hunger, but have to leave some bread for breakfast. This results in me failing miserable, as by the time I'm done, I'm still feeling hungry. I check in the cupboards, and crack open the emergency rice ration. I'll be the first to admit I've been a bit spoilt when it comes to rice. When I wasn't getting a hold of rice cooked to perfection by someone else, I usually relied on the magic rice-cooker to make perfect rice. The whole cooking rice in a pot thing is a new thing for me, and to be honest, a bit of a pain in the arse. This is doubly true when you suck at making rice like I do. To avoid any potential embarrasment when I make boasts about my mad wicked cooking skills, I decided to practice up the cooking of rice. Last time I tried, a whole lot of rice ended up adhesing to the bottom of the pan much the way burnt sushi does. I think I've got the rice/water proportions right now, and I've of course scoured the internet for tips on getting the rice perfect. There was only minor deposits of sticky rice-stuff on the bottom of the pan today, so I'm counting that as a success. The actual rice was pretty damn soggy though, and some of it had melted, so I might have to re-think my timing for the rice to avoid any sub-atomic breakdown of the rice again.

So why the hell don't I just buy some meals? There are a whole bunch of restaurants in Heidelberg (yes - I checked, there are at least two Indian restaurants, there goes my business plan). I'm lacking the money to go out and eat at those places. At least I think I don't have the money. I haven't managed to log in to my internet banking site because I haven't picked up a TAN list for authorising transactions. It's a pretty neat system, and I feel (or would feel if I could log in) very safe banking over the internet. Another reason I don't know if I have enough money is that I'm also getting taxed really nastily here. I didn't feel bad about the tax until I realised the money that was being taken out of my scholarship payments for a pension weren't being funneled into a fund for me, but were being used to pay other old people for their pensions! Damn these Europeans and their silly socialistic leanings.

I do actually eat out though - you can find me most weekdays and Saturdays at the local student food-halls called the MENSA. The food ranges from poor to edible there. The poor food is the €2,05 meal, which is usually a set meal. Today they had tortellini pasta in some kind of cheesy sauce, a bowl of salad, and this orange stuff which tasted a bit like unset jelly. The buffet manages to stray into the edible part of the food spectrum, and for about €2,50 you get a plate full of food and a (free!) slice of bread.

This is the point where I start begging for money. You can donate to any cancer research charity, and I'm sure the money will eventually get to me. Donations are tax-deductible. Thanks for your support!

A bit of history for what I've been up to for the past week. I went to see some fireworks at the local castle. I say local, because it seems like every town has it's own castle, each looking uniquely old in the way that castles can only look old. To elaborate, this look is I achieved (I assume) by having bits of the castle fall off. I may be wrong with this assertion, especially since it seems that lepers fit into that description too. I don't think tourists are shipped in by the busload to gawk at lepers, and I'm pretty sure they are not charged many Euros to do the aforementioned gawking at the lepers. Heidelberg is a town without leprosy (as far as I know). On your right, you can see the view of the castle (local) overlooking a good section of the old town. There is a church in the foreground. Travellers to Europe may note that there are many churches in the region, and they are quite the tourist attraction. I do not think they are very interesting past the fourth or fifth one that you visit, but their ability to provide shelter from freezing rain certainly warrants their place on any freezing person's itinerary of touristy attractions in the city. I much prefer the student prisons, which apparently were more pseudo-pubs as people would actively try to be thrown into this prison, even if they weren't students. It's a bit like the convicts being sent to Australia. I haven't actually been to this church, but I believe that this church has a special attraction, and you can climb up to the top of it's tower. You'll need to make your way past the Japanese tourists taking shelter from the American tourists though.

Ah yes, the Americans. I present to you Exhibit B, which is the castle again, without a church in the foreground. It has, instead, been replaced with a bridge. This bridge is the old bridge in Heidelberg, and is not to be confused with the other bridges, which are far from showing symptoms of leprosy. This bridge, although it is old, is quite functional in it's ability to convey people from one side of the Neckar (the river running through the town) to the other. I quite like it, especially since there's a strange statue on one end of the bridge, with a monkey that has haemorrhoids. This picture was taken at about 8 pm. Summer here is quite nice, when it's not raining, overcast, cold or just plain miserable. When it's overcast or raining or miserable, and roughly two hours have passed since someone took a picture to illustrate how nice the summer is, the castle often gets angry and starts trembling in a fit of fury. This is exacerbated if a bit of it has just fallen off. I can tell the castle is angry because it is red. It is trembling because I keep on attempting to take pictures when it is dark, by setting the shutter speed to slow, and then swearing profusely (unfortunately not in German yet) to myself as I realise that I actually need a tripod, as that stable railing which I was planning to use has now become an unstable swinging railing with a small Spanish child sitting on it. Not being one to ruin tradition (or push children off railings), I have continued this habit of shooting blurry night photos here. I am quite the expert at taking pictures of fireworks, and my hand-to-eye-to-predicting-where-the-next-explosion-will-be co-ordination is second to all.

We can see this in this exemplary piece of photography where I expertly framed a round-looking explosion with purple and green wiggly bits in the viewfinder. You'll have to use your imagination, because I only took the picture once it had disappeared. This picture is similar to what it should look like, but I could have pulled this picture from anywhere, since there is no way you'd know this was taken in Heidelberg with an increasingly angry castle in the background.

Back to the old bridge. As I mentioned, I really quite liked the bridge, it was quite comical with a monkey on the end. If the Sydney harbour bridge had a monkey on it, it would be the best bridge in the world (and it's not even old!). With my unqualified admiration for this bridge, the last thing I expected to happen was for someone to blow it up. As it turns out - the Americans, facing an enemy hogging all the good shelter in a church, decided to bomb the hell out of the nearest functioning bridge. On a related note, every now and again I walk out of work, and there's a fighter jet flying overhead. If you were flying around all day not shooting at things, you'd get a little bored too. That'd have to be in the job description - "You will be required to fly around, belittle Tom Cruise, and blow bridges up into tiny little pieces".

Just to clarify things - the Americans didn't bomb the bridge and the castle doesn't have leprosy, but there are Japanese tourists in the church. I must not go around spreading faleshoods about the place I live. Speaking of which, the place I live looks a lot like the picture on the right. It was originally a town just outside of Heidelberg, but Heidelberg got bigger, and Ziegelhausen couldn't really go anywhere. If it were a tortoise, then it could just get up and walk off somewhere else very slowly, but although town and turtle start with the letter t, they're quite different concepts. In the picture, I've just walked up the road a bit after getting off the bus, which was on-time and had plenty of seats (You listening Carr? On time. And don't give me any rubbish about the population density of Sydney not being high enough. Fix it. You have 3 years). I had also used a tram to get part of the way home too, with a total waiting time at various bus and tram-stops of 5 minutes. Not that I'm rubbing it in or anything. This is part of the hill which I walk up to get home. The important thing you want to take home from this picture is that the speed limit is 30km/hr. Everywhere. I don't believe this is the same country as the Autobahns and the 300km/hr trains. It takes about 25 minutes to get to work by car. I reckon I could do it in less than 10 (including parking) if I were to be flexible with speed limits (which I consider more like guidelines, than hard limits). The hill is quite funny to watch people drive up and down, as often you have one car coming up, and one coming down, and there's not quite enough room for both cars to go past. You end up with one car backing up, driving all over the pavement, and knocking old men off the side of the hill. The hill keeps going and going, until you hit my apartment block. It's currently being repainted, using white paint I hope, since that green grey colour looks a bit depressing. You know you're settled in to a place when you write your name into the mailbox. Just to contrast with Ben, this is my place in it's natural light, and this is where I've been sleeping for the past three weeks. So that's Heidelberg. Just for completeness, here is the monkey.

Since I'm now meant to be doing some real sciencey work, I've added a Research section to the main page. It's actually more of a CV, but it was a good day of avoiding doing some actual work. It doesn't work in Safari (Damn you and your lack of support for named entities WebKit!) and it may not work in IE, I haven't tried it. It works nicely in Gecko based browsers however.

I used to get in arguments at work about the proper method to make tea. I'd chuck a teabag into some water, then heat it up, add some milk and then heat it up again. I did this to make Indian tea, which tastes superior to regular tea in every possible way. It doesn't taste wishy-washy, and certainly doesn't taste like water with a bit of milk added to it. I used to call this process of cooking the tea a fusion process, whereby I fused the milk and tea together. No-one believed in my method for cooking the tea, and would often mock my efforts in producing the perfect cup of tea. It turns out that I am not alone in my quest for the perfect cuppa. I told you I was right.

One enduring impression I receive from the whole London bombing situation is that the people haven't exactly been scared into submission. It seems like a vast majority of the people are a little miffed that the tube system has gone from bad to worse, and now they have someone they can really vent their anger at.

I was hoping to go to London soonish, and I don't think these attacks are going to change my travel plans very much. I've been trying to figure out how to find cheap flights and to organise my weekend getaways. The whole process of trawling the web, attempting to make a booking with each discount airline is a pain to say the least. I was overjoyed then to find SkyScanner, an airline aggregator of sorts. You can choose flights from city to city, which is useful for those cities with numerous smaller satellite airports around it. Even better, you can have an RSS feed for a particular city (Frankfurt in my case) which will list all the cheap flights flying out from that city. It works really well, and now means that all I have to look for are those special one-off deals which will make travelling even cheaper. A return flight to London in mid-August costs about €55 or AU$88 (which includes taxes!). Door to door, I'm thinking it will cost about €100 or AU$160ish. Does anyone else know of how to search for dirt cheap travel?

In response to Yun's question about what the bandwidth is like here - It's pretty good. I'm currently sitting on an academic research backbone around Germany, and apart from the loss of a significant part of the internet this morning (due to something dying around Frankfurt), it's all pretty snappy. If you're after some bandwidth you can use at home however - that's a completely different story. I once thought that Australians were alone in being shafted by a once government run monopoly, and in getting very poor value broadband options. The Germans didn't want to be beaten it seems, and got themselves their own little home-grown monopoly.

To actually get broadband access here, you've got one of two options (pretty much): Cable and DSL. Much like cable in Australia, if you're living in an apartment block (like me), you have no chance of actually getting the cable running from the street to you. The DSL requires you to have a phone line ( €15ish / month ) from the local monopoly. On top of that, you then have to pay €16ish / month for the privilege of having a DSL connection enabled on it. Once you have these two established, you can then go about thinking about actually having internet access on the line. There are a number of providers you can choose from - 1 and 1, Freenet, T-Online (part of the monopoly), and Arcor (which do DSL over ISDN, so the price structure is a bit different). All of these guys charge about €6-9 / month for the internet access at a flat rate, with speeds ranging from 1Mbit to 6 Mbit. So really, the prices paid by Australians for broadband access doesn't seem to exorbitant, and if anything, the plans produced are better since they cater for varying levels of usage - not just low usage or insane usage.

For those of you that have been speculating about my premature internet death, I hope to put your fears to rest. I am alive and well, and I now have a connection to the internet. It has been a very strange few days that I've had here, largely due to how amazingly foreign this place is. On a superficial level, Heidelberg looks exactly like any other university town, I could almost be in Cambridge or Oxford. It's only when people start speaking and driving on the wrong side of the road, do you realise just how far from Kansas you really are. I'm picking up the occasional word here and there, but most often, my eyes glaze over and I lose all track of the conversation. I should be taking classes soon, so that will alleviate those problems at least.

After tearful good-byes in Sydney on Sunday, I boarded my Austrian airlines flight to Frankfurt via Vienna, fully expecting that I would be opening myself up to a whole world of pain for the next 24 odd hours. I could almost imagine them making a TV series much like 24 (with Kiefer "I hate you" Sutherland), covering every minute of pain that I would go through on my journey. Watch as Jack Bauer fights pushy stewards and sneaks past disgruntled immigration staff only to suffocate and die under extremely large people who are taking up far too much of your personal space (Don't worry - he comes back to life in the next episode). They would have to pick a different flight for my series, because my flight was exceptionally hassle free. I managed to sleep for a good amount of time, and I'm pretty sure I'm not suffering from DVT. It sort of ruins my fun as I was hoping to complain about my flight. On the upside, I am suffering from jet-lag, since I can't seem to stay awake past 10pm. This may be a problem tomorrow night as LTJ Bukem is playing nearby, and I wouldn't mind going to go see him on the recommendation of Simo. The last thing I want to do is fall asleep at a gig again.

Administrivia is not my favourite game to play by any stretch of the imagination. I really don't like filling out forms, and I am not a big fan at all of inflated procedures. I'd kill for a PA who would take care of all that stuff for me. It's not that I'm lazy (which I am), it's just that my mind really can't get around the process of filling forms out and chasing them up when they get lost in the machine. It grates against my very existence in some fundamental way. This whole week has been hell for me in that way. The number of things that need to be sorted out are ludicrous, and not speaking the language is yet another level of difficulty applied to the whole process. You've got to register yourself in the town once you move in, you've got to apply for a bank account (fair enough I guess), health insurance and - I love this one - personal liability insurance. It seems that there are an inordinate amount of people in Germany who are going around breaking things, so much so that personal liability is the most prevalent insurance around. I'm a bit afraid to walk out of the door now, since I could potentially be facing financial ruin every time I cross the road without insurance to pay for that BMW I managed to run off the road. I've still got to register myself with the university, so that I become an official student again (and bask in the glory of subsidised bus and train tickets).

I live about 30 minutes out from the city centre in a suburb called Ziegelhausen (roughly). The suburb is quite quaint and quiet, and I share the apartment with a chap called Thomas. It's apparently quite a nice bike ride from there to the DKFZ, but I don't think I'm ever going to do it since there is a massive hill going from the main road to the apartment. I'm not exaggerating - it's ludicrously massive, and certainly not the type of hill you want to ride your bike up after a long day working on the PhD. I'm considering downgrading my accommodation to save a bit of cash, but I've got to scope out the rental market first to see what it's like. That's it for this mammoth update. Say hi to the koalas for me if you're in Sydney!