much happening in my little life
Thursday, September 13th, 2007electricity-mishaps:
Here is a little picture-story documenting what happened at my place yesterday.
The city decided to replace water-pipes. Streets were ripped open all over the place. New pipes were installed. Finally the last few meters of pipes leading to each house needed to be replaced. So the city’s construction-workers decided to use something called “Horizontalramme” (no idea what such a device is called in english) in order to avoid tearing up trenches on people’s private property. A little schematic drawing of the idea behind it…
So they started with digging little hole (similar to “Startgrube” in the schematic drawing)…
While this “Horizontalramme”-thing progressed through the the soil it cut the main electricity-cable…
This in turn caused short-circuiting several power-lines leading to (for some yet unknown reason) fuses not protecting in-house circuits and temprarily putting 400 volts on some power-cables. Enjoyed the fun and smell of burning plastic…
More casulties…
No warm water, net-access, telephone, light, heating or cooking for hours. That unsparingly pointed out how much we depend on electricity day in and day out. What a horror it was to be without it… even if it was just for a few hours. Thank god the fire did not spread out and could easily be extinguished.
In the end they had to rip open a whole trench after all…
What a day!
Ubuntu/Canonical:
While being a proper Ubuntu-memeber for some time now, I totally forgot to mention, that I recently joined forces with Canonical. Strike! That’s the most thrilling thing to date… this probably even beats me doing my first solo glider-flight 
aLANantje:
As I mentioned earlier - about some weeks ago - I was asked to become jury-memeber for aLANtejo ‘07 (their site sometimes has availability-issues). The organisers also asked me, if I could give a talk. I keep wondering why people want to hear me talk… honestly. But I will try my best by talking about “Attention to detail - make OpenGL and gtk+ look good” at the 20th of october during the event.
GNOME:
Just very recently I got notice that I was accepted as a member of the GNOME-foundation. Yay²!
So all in all, I’ll be in London next week for a compiz-sprint (hopefully I’ll be able to find some time to visit uraeus and mallum and more of the ohand-bunch). Next month I’m in Evora (Portugal) for the aLANtejo ‘07. And between october/november I’ll be in Boston for the Ubuntu Developer Summit and even more.
You know my favourite saying goes: “Die of exhaustion, not of boredom!”