wanderingstan

Just a good night.

Great night, completely unexpected. Fabian, Kristin, Sebastian, Cliona, Basti, Carla, Mayumi, Nico came for dinner tonight. I made some sort of spagetti with parmeson-chicken 'n peas. It turned out good, but the company was better. These are the nights when I know I'm in the right place, the nights that are to be treasured.

UltraCorps and EverNight ride again

Big news!! For some nostalgic reason I was Googling old projects and did a search for my first real project out of college: UltraCorps. "The Ultimate Online Intergalactic Strategy Game." There were of few of the old reviews, but then a new link from Steve Jackson games. "What's this?" I ask. Here's what I read:

October 22, 2004: Hacking Away
Three of us are putting in a late Friday right now, working with the Ultracorps server. It runs, but not completely. In particular, we can't yet set up new accounts, and we can't get it to tick. Best guess right now is that it has to do with a whole lot of hard-coded net addresses which we'll have to find and correct, one at a time.

WTF? That's 2004! That's just a week ago! Yes, Steve Jackson Games has purchased UltraCorps and it will soon be back to life. For those that don't know, SJ Games is a sort of a gamer's game company. I am very honored for my little creation to find a home there.

And of course, this meant I had to look into my second VR-1 project, EverNight. Sure enough, it is back to life and already running at www.evernightgame.com. Turns out that some fans of the game got together to buy it. That's just about the best compliment I can think of. I will go to sleep a happy man tonight.

15 minutes of stardom

So I got an email on Thursday from FFN, a radiostation for Niedersachsen. They wanted to interview a "young American" about the upcoming election.

Hallo!
Mein Name ist Philipp Wedelich von radio ffn, wir haben ihre email-Adresse durch das Akademische Auslandsamt erhalten. Wir suchen junge US-Amerikaner, die derzeit in Osnabrück sind, damit wir mit ihnen ein Interview zur US-Wahl führen können. Haben sie Lust dazu?

I warned them that my German was really bad, but they gave me an invitation to the studio anyway.

It was a lot of fun to be in the station and feel--in just the smallest degree--like a celebrity, even if my only claim to fame was my choice of parents. Anyways, I think interview was a disaster. In my "normal" German conversations, I have lots of tricks to avoid using words I don't know. Hand gestures and body language, facial expressions... And German is nice in that the verb comes at the end of the sentance, so when I don't know the verb people usually have enough context to guess it and they'll fill it in for me. Of course, none of these tricks translate well to a microphone. They might be able to extract a sentence or two...we'll see!

Crazy neighbor strikes again

Yes, the time is right. It's very very late. It's early.

Egon and Judith got the beamer from the institute and Mario and I rigged up a movie screen in their flat. We watched Dr. Strangelove and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So that's why I'm in bed so late.

But I had to write, cause some wierd stuff has been going down. Fedder. That's our neighbor. Mrs. Fedder and then just Fedder. She's his mom, quite old. He's 40ish, and a little crazy. Usually not to much. He followed me around town once. He makes faces through the glass door as we pass his flat on the way up to ours. When the old residents moved out, he asked them if they were taking the radar dish with them--the one they'd been using to microwave his brain. In May he woke up Maike and I when he yelled "Macht das licht aus!" over and over in the middle of the night. (All our lights were out, by the way.) And then a month ago he got in the habit of ringing our bell and, when we'd answer, say he just wanted to see who was there and then turn around and leave.

Last night, however, was different. 3am. The door rings. Footsteps. I think it's some drunk folks, maybe from a party upstairs. Worry about my bike in the hallway, get up, open the door just to check. (It's there.) Doorbell rings again, with lots of voices. No, wait, it's just one voice, but there's a conversation. It's in German, I don't catch much, but I do hear "Bastian Bügler and Stan-lay James!"and then the voice gets really high and he says "Hello-ooooooo. I'm heeeere, babyface. I'm here to f*ck you!" I did not open the door.

Restless sleep, and then the doorbell rings again. It's 5:30. I wake up Basti and he open's the door. Fedder says (in German, of course) "Mr. Bügler, you know you are a murderer!" - "Actually, I wasn't aware of it." replies Basti. And then Fedder rushes forward and pushes him back and says "I'm going to kill you!" and at this point I spring out from behind the door. Fedder's startled, and backs down the stairs.

So later that morning Basti made some calls. The landlord, helpful as ever, said that Fedder is usually not like that and that we should "be careful." Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot. The police made a report, and the pychiatric people came later in the day but only Frauke was home when they were here.

That's the word.

Blogging and Bluegrass

So here we go...
Starting small.

Had a new experience today. After Frisbee practice some of us headed over to the Schlossgarten (the lawn behind the castle) to play some more. We had two of these frisbee's with embedden LED's that light them up like flying saucers, and everyone was wearing flashing red blinkers. And Micheal, the local crazy frisbee man, had his ghetto blaster going loud with some funk. What a surreal scene... shadows with blinking red dots flitting around in the dark, and these shots of red and blue drawing lines on the sky.

Oh, and yesterday was the big international music night. Most of the other folks were doing Kareoke to Chinese songs, or playing Bach on a violin. I think I scared everyone with my rendition of Fred Eaglesmith's "Wilder than Her," sung in the thickest southern accent that could muster and at the top of my lungs. Mario was also there and did a great Alice in Chains song. Afterward we went back to his place and had a little dinner with Egon and Judith and then did a little jamming. It felt good to make music again.

Good news! I [finally] did a big audit of the classes I've taken and what I'm taking and what I need to graduate, and I am on track to finish all my coursework this semester. Yipee! So then it's just a thesis and then .. and then .. and then .. uhm, yes, that's the question. Das ist die große Frage!

There was a glove lying on the street this morning. The middle finger was extended and pointed toward my car. Strange.

Goals. Talking with Matt last night they came up again. Jason had brought them up as well when we discussing the house purchase. I've accomplished most of last set of goals, so it's time for some new ones.

"All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe… Observer participancy gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics."
John A. Wheeler
Interview

"As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."
John A. Wheeler

From here, searching for info on Fisher Information (R.A. Fisher).

Wheeler became even more deeply convinced of the importance of information after concocting a thought experiment that exposed the strangeness of the quantum world for all to see. Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment is a variation on the classic (but not classical) two-slit experiment, which demonstrates the schizophrenic nature of quantum phenomena. When electrons are aimed at a barrier containing two slits, the electrons act like waves; they go through both slits at once and form what is called an interference pattern, created by the overlapping of the waves, when they strike a detector on the far side of the barrier. If the physicist closes off one slit at a time, however, the electrons pass through the open slit like simple particles and the interference pattern disappears. In the delayed-choice experiment, the experimenter decides whether to leave both slits open or to close one off _after the electrons have already passed through the barrier_--with the same results. The electrons seem to know in advance how the physicist will choose to observe them. This experiment was carried out in the early 1990s and confirmed Wheeler's prediction. From http://suif.stanford.edu/~jeffop/WWW/wheeler.txt