Okay, now my adventure with trains. A week or so ago, I was at a Wohnheim party in Mannheim (point A on the map). A Wohnheim party is a bit like a block party, except the apartment block is full of students. This one was held in the basement of one apartment block, which lent it a fantastic closed in atmosphere, and in hindsight was probably a pretty big fire hazard.

So Aaron (a Newfoundlander), his buddies and I rock up to this party, at about 11:00. The whole fashionably late thing works a treat here, where parties only really get started towards the late part of the evening. Being Australian is a huge asset for me at these parties, because everyone has heard of Australia, and ask the same questions about it, which allows me to rattle off some canned remarks, and then try out my dodgy German on the natives. It's fun to talk complete rubbish to people. That was all fun and games for a while, but we get a bit bored and decide to head off to a club. I go to get my stuff, but somehow manage to leave my umbrella and beanie (A nice one too!) at the party somewhere. A pain, for sure, but not too terrible a loss (Running total for the evening so far, about €10).

We get to the club, party for a bit more, and then decide to head home at about 5ish. A quick stop to get a bite to eat, and we run off down to the train station. A quick glance at the indicator board tells us where we need to jump on platform 9, on the train arriving in a minute. We run up the stairs, and jump on the train just pulling into the platform. By this stage we're pretty tired, but we try to keep awake by having a discussion about the allegedly missing platform at this train station. Every time we count platform numbers, we still end up on platform 10, so it's probably just a myth. The train is taking it's time to leave, so we start nodding off to sleep. Heidelberg (point B on the map) is only 15 minutes away from Mannheim, so I figured I would wake up in time to see the train station.

I keep an eye on each station we're passing, just to make sure we get off at the right place. An hour passes on the train - it's starting to get a bit lighter, and a ticket inspector comes up to check my ticket. He looks at it, and says it's not valid. That's odd. I ask if the ticket isn't valid to Heidelberg. He looks a little confused - and then says the train is going to Karlsruhe (point C on the map), not Heidelberg. At this point, the assorted collection of pennies rattling around in my skull decide to evacuate the hollow cavity and drop. I thought it was a little odd that it was taking so long to get to Heidelberg, but I just put it down to late-running trains. Aaron and I try explaining that we're on the wrong train, and start asking how to get back to Heidelberg. He doesn't believe we've caught the wrong train though. We start arguing. He calls the police to meet us at Karlsruhe. Goddamnit.

I learnt a new word that day - "das Arschloch". It accurately describes this ticket inspector, who insisted on fining us €40 for being on the wrong train. I can understand it if we were trying to game the system, but for an honest mistake, you'd think they'd be able to use a bit of discretion. I'm actually glad the police were there, since they were a bit more reasonable than the Ticket arschloch. So we were stuck in Karlsruhe at about 8 in the morning. Given that we'd just technically paid €40 for the privilege of being in the town (Running total - €50), we decided to just make the most of the situation, and went sightseeing in the town. It's not that interesting. It's especially not that interesting at 8 in the morning. So we catch some trams around, and grab a coffee (Running total - €55)

By the time I got back to Heidelberg (after catching a train back - total cost €65), it was 11am, and I had not had any sleep at all. Since I was in town, I did a bit of shopping (replacing my beanie and umbrella - bringing up the total to €80 - about AU$120!), grabbed the next bus home, and slept all afternoon. Consider this a cautionary tale about how the ticket inspectors in Germany are Arschlochen, and you should avoid interaction with them at all costs if you come here next year. I'm going to fight the fine, since I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a crime I didn't commit. If Michelle Leslie can get off drugs charges lightly (and she's guilty as sin), I reckon I should be able to beat a poxy train fine.

There's something about me and public transport that just don't gel well at all. I'm all in favour for it, but I somehow always seem to end up living in a place which just isn't that well serviced by the transportation. This isn't really too much of a problem during summer, because I can handle waiting around an hour for a bus to take me home in the dead of night. Now that it is Really Fucking Cold™, I'm not quite enjoying standing near the river so much. I've also been quite surprised to learn the way in which late-running buses catch up time, which is to simply not pick up passengers. Pure genius - but it doesn't really help those people waiting for the bus.

It's actually so cold here that it snowed on Thursday. We had about 10cm of snow overnight, and I awoke to a very different looking Heidelberg. There's something about snow which gives you a bit of an emotional boost just before the dark depression of winter kicks in. It was funny watching the reactions of people to the snow when it first started falling, with otherwise normal people acting like big kids. I'm still waiting for a slightly larger snowfall, so I can try my hand at making snow-men or snow-chickens. Since I'm talking about the weather, I should mention this recently released report on some apparently conclusive evidence that humans have had a significant impact on global warming. I'm not a climatologist, and I don't know one, so does anyone have any ideas whether this report is about right?

Bruce Lee is a bit of a revered figure. I'd read about this a few months ago, but the Serbians have erected a statue of the man himself in their town, as a symbol of unity (or something). Apart from the fact that it's largely incongruous having this bronze statue of a Chinese martial arts god who made his big break in the United States in a town that's predominantly Ethnic Serbian, they probably couldn't have picked a better role-model. I watched a documentary ages ago on Bruce Lee's life and I was impressed by his dedication to his work, the amount of energy and thought he put into it, and the holistic approach he took. It wasn't just about insane fitness, but also a psychological and philosophical approach to his life. It's like he decided to be the best person he could be, and systematically went about achieving it. His death was a bit weird though. I'm not sure if this is all particularly relevant to this one town (I think all towns need statues of Bruce Lee), but what I'm trying to get at here is - Happy Birthday Bruce.

Something else which is a source of reverence, which I only found out on Friday night, is Heartbreak High. It's a childrens TV series based in a high school in Sydney, originally broadcast on TEN and Aunty. It's like an Australian Degrassi. I was talking to some Dutch people, and I mentioned that I was from Australia, which then set them off about Heartbreak High. They absolutely love it, it's like some kind of instituion in Holland, where they strap children to chairs, prop their eyes open with matchsticks, and then get them to watch the series over and over to indoctrinate them into the cult of Con. From what I remember, it wasn't too bad a series, but I don't know if it really deserves such a degree of fanaticism. It's not like it's Buffy or anything.

I was going to write about trains here, but I think you've heard enough from me already. Maybe something more later this week..

This one's going out to Di. Google has been pretty busy recently. Actually, it seems like Google is always pretty busy. Every couple of months yields a new application which works pretty much straight out of the box. At the same time, they're working on improving existing projects, or putting the pieces in place for their new initiatives. By way of example, the mapping feature of Google maps is a bit bare for Germany - you can't see very much on their satellite maps around this region, and they have no road maps to speak of. Someone had been doing some digging around on the mobile version of Google maps, and found that the local maps actually have road information. I'm looking forward to that data eventually making its way out onto the main maps page, so that I can stop using the somewhat slow Map24.

A product which has just recently gone into beta is Google Base. As far as I can see, it is a hosting program which indexes the content that is posted there. It doesn't exactly sound all that revolutionary. There are numerous existing services such as Craigslist, a squillion recipe sites, job advertisement sites, or pretty much any other web page. So what exactly does Google Base do better than all these other places? Well, first of all, it's Google, so people will just use it because they know how to make good software. Secondly, I think it's an attempt to deliver on the Semantic web. The big problem with all the existing sites which are aggregating information is that there is no way to get access to the meta-data as a search engine, beyond crawling their pages, and attempting to extract it yourself. If you want to search all recipes on the web for recipes who have a base ingredient of Kangaroo, you just wouldn't be able to do that. It would be easy to find all recipes with the word "kangaroo" in it, but you wouldn't know where it is used in the context of the recipe. This is where Google Base comes in. On one hand, it is a place where you just collect any piece of information you have. It gives you all the tools you need to add meta-data to this piece of information. I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing it would have a suggest-like feature for the field data to help manage the dictionary of words used in each entry. Now, instead of a wealth of pages which don't have their meta-data easily accessible, Google has direct access to the informational content of each of these pages. Google also provides a way for a site maintainer to have their data indexed by Google. Every time you have an update of your data, you can just FTP your data files across to Google, and they will update their information (this is at least how Froogle works). So that's their brilliant plan - instead of spending money on developing technology to add meta-information to existing pages, they just get the content makers to do what they always should have been doing. In fact, it's quite often a lot easier just to get people to do the work for you (see Amazon's Mechanical turk). If you're interested in these types of approaches to computing, you'll want to visit Lui von Ahn's page. One neat trick he talks about there is to use games to get people to solve some problems which computers cannot do trivially. I really need to think of a game where people collect data for me to work on for my thesis.

Google Base came out as a beta product, which is standard fare for Google. Surprisingly, Google Analytics didn't come out in beta. The thing is - it probably should have been released in beta. For the past week, the service has been getting absolutely hammered by users signing up and using it to track the usage of their sites. It's running at the moment on this site. Performance has improved over the past few days, and the statistics only lag by about 24 hours now, and the stats which I do have already are quite interesting. My main readership seems to be based around the Ryde/Eastwood area (discounting the hits from Heidelberg), and I've even had visitors from China, Japan and the west coast of the United States. I was really surprised to see a hit on my web page from Cupertino. Digging a bit deeper, it seems like the Jobsinator himself visited here (ok - I'm not sure if it was him, but it was someone from Apple). I've also received some strange hits from search engines. It turns out that my page is the third result when you search for "how to twirl pens", third hit for "roflburgers", and also somehow manages to be a search result for this post from 2004. It's all very fascinating stuff. You guys spend about 3:40 reading the main page each time you visit, and there was one poor sod who spent 23 minutes reading the archives from July 2004. Which is really a pretty sad indictment on people who read this (which totals 19 unique people for the past half week).

I still don't have DSL. You might remember that I started going on about it back in July. I don't think that I am actually going to get it now. The phone line is actually hostile to getting DSL. Just this morning, the phone line blew up the second splitter I had ordered. I'm hoping now that I can get some contract-free DSL, or sign up for wireless internet access from someone. Now that it is getting really cold here, I don't really feel like jumping on a bus to get my broadband fix, and dialup is expensive and slow.

Bubbles. They're really cool.

Start booking those tickets now kids. It's world cup time! Give me a bit of notice (like soonish) and I'll start trying to figure out how to accomodate everyone who will be coming across.

For those not in the know - Australia got through to the world cup!

Update now that I've calmed down a bit: I couldn't find a place to watch this game live, but chanelling my obsessive page reloading from new Apple announcements, I sat at work reloading the OCAU forums, getting updates every couple of seconds. It was a bit of a race between the game being over, and me having to head into a meeting. Luckily, Australia won before my meeting.

As another bonus, the world cup starts on about the 9th of June. My birthday is in mid-June, so consider flying across for the World cup - if Australia have a game on the 15th (that's a Thursday), it will be guaranteed to be a massive party. Apparently this region (Baden-Württemberg) is gearing itself up to be a hub, as it's only a few hours train ride from a number of stadiums. Lots of open air viewing location goodness. It'll be like the Olympics all over again, albeit a bigger, and more hooliganised one.

This south-western part of Germany has been in the midst of an Indian summer over the past week. The daytime temperatures have been nothing short of amazing, even though we're rapidly running out of Autumn. I blame the good weather on the lack of pirates (and so global warming). I'm not going to get all environmental, or pro-fossil fuel here, but the global warming coverage hasn't let up in the past few weeks, so I figure it needs some additional comments. I recently listened (thanks Nature podcast!) to a brief story on how the activity of volcanoes have an effect on climate, and how the Earth might be naturally warming up as part of long term cycles. All very interesting, and really confuses the issue as to the whole picture surrounding climate change. It's all very hard, and to be honest, I don't really care very much why it is happening. As long as it keeps warming up Europe for me I will be a happy camper.

Even though the days seem quite warm, I'm still feeling really cold in the evenings. It is a bit of (un)conventional wisdom that there is no connection between feeling cold, and actually catching the influenza virus. I never really subscribed to that school of thought, and I always assumed it was kind of logical that being cold would result in a restriction in circulation to your extremities, and so to a slower reaction of your immune system, and more of a chance for the influenza virus to get a foothold (or nose-hold). I eventually stopped telling people that, as I had a complete lack of evidence to back me up. Imagine my surprise when I saw this article, which actually sort of confirms my hypothesis. I was close in my guess about constriction of blood flow in the extremeties (albeit only the nose). The home page for the research group from Cardiff, has a wealth of information on how to deal with the common cold. I'm glad that at least someone is working on the common cold, and not concentrating on that other flu.

I think it's a fair indication about how things are going here that I haven't posted anything up here for the past month or so. I think I'm getting so used to living here in Germany, that I don't really see all the very strange things as a source for various anecdotes any more. So, I'm still alive and stuff - which is more than can be said for zombies.

Yeah, I realise that I keep harping on about zombies, but it was halloween a week ago, and I'm still reeling over the fact that it is actually properly celebrated over here (and I was listening to the Shaun of the Dead soundtrack). I didn't get any annoying kids knocking at my door and then eggin n' leggin it, but lots of people went around buying pumpkins. You'd think they would have carved up the pumpkins or something, but for some strange reason, the pumpkins seemed to be purchased, and the strategically placed on walls, window sils or ledges, where the pumpkins do little more than rot away. It got me thinking about how exactly I'd decorate my apartment for Halloween. There are lots of little things you can do - but my centerpiece will have to be one of these. I'm starting to believe that no apartment is complete without a life-sized zombie. It's a bit like in Scrubs, with Rowdy.

I think my grasp of the English language is quickly slipping away, as German takes over my brain. I'm starting to forget how to put a sentence together properly, and I'm using more and more Germanisms in my regular speech. One of the really annoying ones is my tendency to stick the word "yet" onto the end of lots of sentences, where it really doesn't belong, yet. My German does seem to be improving, which is due in no small part to going out to the pub and attempting to talk to people in broken German. I think it gets easier the more you drink - well either that, or you just don't realise you're making no sense any more.

Another reason for my lack of posting has been the complete lack of creativity that I've shown in the past month or so. My mind must be going into hibernation for the winter or something, but I just haven't done anything new. I haven't even done a cut and paste photoshop - it's that bad! In an attempt to kick-start the whole creative thing, I've been listening to a whole bunch of recurring time-shifted shows (otherwise known as podcasts). You can see the OPML of what I'm listening to here. iTunes is not a bad little system for managing the subscriptions, however I have a few gripes about the fact that it doesn't have any kind of dock notification that there are new items, and that it doesn't seamlessly integrate with the shuffle. I somehow feel infinitely more educated after listening to the Nature podcast (I sure ain't learning anything doing my PhD).