Der Bioinformatiker

Well, that didn’t quite go as planned.

We started our diving course with the deep dive (22 meters) in the Attersee. Boy, it’s freezing down there. 4° Celsius is really cold, especially if you’re not in a drysuit. We only hat wetsuits with ice-jackets, so we were quite happy when we were out of the water again. On our second dive (high altitude diver; diving more than 300m above sealevel; the Attersee is at about 400m or so) we hat some problems, because our ice jackets were too tight and we did breathe too shallow. We emerged from the water with a blinding headache (slight CO2 overdose) and decided that we didn’t want to make our third dive (night dive) that day. The visibility was also rather bad, so I didn’t take any photos.
The next day, we went diving at the Pleschingersee, to do our underwater navigation and search and recovey course. The visibility in this mudhole is next to zero, so it was really funny to try to navigate or to find some 0.5l bottles on the ground. But it was better because the water wasn’t that cold and we went diving without the ice-jackets. We had no problems then.

So now we are nearly fully certified Advanced divers. We will take our night dive sometine next week.

Tomorrow we will start our two day diving course for the Advanced Open Water Diver certificate. I got (myself) a digicam with underwater case for my birthday, so hopefully I will be able to take some nice photos.

Work today is extremely taxing. I don’t seem to be able to concentrate. Even coffee isn’t helping. Well, I will try to get as much work done as possible. Monday or tuesday the vba project should be finished, then I’ll continue on another small project. I had a talk with Prof. Colinge yesterday, and he seems to want to persuade everyone in the Blutzentrale that they will need a LIMS (lab information system) in the (medium-near) future and that they should plan the develpoment now so that software written now does not create problems in 2 years. He even wants to persuade the sysadmins to put a linux server somewhere, for data storage and cheap software development (open source bioinforamtics is ~90% linux-based). We will see if we’re successful in persuading them.

Elke and I went to the “Krone Stadtfest” today. It just started to rain, so we headed home and are now drinking tea (later some red wine, perhaps) and having a nice relaxed evening…

Above you can see the Hauptplatz during the Waterloo & Robinson concert. I think it is Mr. Waterloo on the big videowall, mere seconds before he stripped off his shirt and jumped across the stage while singing “Heya-Haya” or some crap like that. We fled to the stage in the Kunstuni and listened to Gerold Rudle talking about diving (he is a diver himself!) and tandem-jumping out of small airplanes.

I don’t think we will go to the city again for Village People.

If you’re interested you can see some pics of yesterday’s housewarming party here.

If anyone is thinking about using Gizmo als Sykpe-replacement: they just released version 1.0 (until now, the version was 0.80 beta). It seems the biggest bugs are gone. If you sign up, you even get 25 cent to make Call-out calls, just to try it. Make sure you read about the arguments why gizmo is better than skype!

I’ve just seen that the current defcon status at the SANS – Internet Storm Center is at yellow. So, if you’re a sysadmin, you should perhaps check it out and read about the security issues and fixes. I also found a small widget for Konfabulator (which is now freeware, by the way – so grab it if you like it) – the ISC widget can be downloaded here.

I also got Linux working on my X30. Well, it works 90%, I still got to fix that stupid DSDT, but I found someone who is willing to take a look at it and help me. I had some display resolution issues, but they are now fixed. I even can listen to Last.fm in Linux

Work is dull. I hate VBA for Excel. I think it is a very strange programming “language” full of inconsitensies. But I bought a book, so now I can at least look it up in dead tree form if I don’t find it in the unhelpful online help.

Later today, I am invited to a housewarming party by the sister of my fiancée. I think I will take my cam with me and take some nice pixx to fill the gallery.

Ja- und sogar auf deutsch. Irgendwie ist mir grad nicht nach englisch. Jedenfalls habe ich mein erstes Projekt abgeschlossen (ein paar Sachen sind noch offen, z.B. ob das jetzt öffentlich verfügbar wird oder nicht…) und arbeite gerade an einem neuen kleinen Projekt. Es geht dabei um Excel-VBA, ich soll ein paar Vorlagen erarbeiten, um statistische Auswertung und auch die Datenerfassung so einfach wie möglich zu machen.

Ich habe auch das “lazy-gallery” Plugin installiert. Der Link befindet sich im sidebar rechts. Zu sehen gibt es derzeit nur die Fotos vom Tauchurlaub (dafür aber in besserer Qualität). Ich werde aber laufend neue Bilder raufladen, z.B. hab ich Fotos von unserer “Hütte” in Tragwein gemacht, vielleicht verstehn die Leute dann, warums mich da öfter hinzieht.

So I finally found some time to get the photos together and put them together in a nice gallery for you to see. The second gallery contains the photos of my digicam. So now to the report on the holidays:

We only got a flight from Graz, and because the plane tool off at 0600 hours, we decided to drive there by car (train would have meant staying in a hotel in Graz for one night). So we packed our things together and into the car and started our voyage at approximately 0015 and cruised towards Graz. Well, after a boring time on the highway we arrived at the Airport Graz at approximately 0300, only to discover that it was closed. This airport is even smaller than the Blue Danube Airport Linz! Well, we had to wait for one hour, then we checked in, got us a coffee and waited. Finally we were allowed to get on the plane and started towards Sharm el Sheikh. After a rather uneventful flight (”This is the captain speaking. If you now look out on the left side [of course we were sitting on the right side] you would be able to see Mount Olymp, if it wasn’t hidden by clouds”) we landed at Sharm and were greeted by a gust of REALLY hot air. The temperatures in Sharm were always between 34° and 40° Celsius, so I think you can imagine our condition after some hours in an airconditioned plane.
After fetching our luggage, we were greeted by our travelagent’s representative with the words “Welcome to Sharm. Your hotel is overbooked.” To keep things short: we were put in another hotel for some days (Thursday till Sunday), and then we got a room in our booked hotel. The alternative one was o.k., although a bit bigger and with more children.
On Tuesday, we started our diving lessons together with 2 others, whom we had met there.

We chose a small divecenter in Naama Bay, which was a newly opened center belonging to Orca, because they were friendly and offered a good package for the PADI Open Water Diver course. We spent the next days watching videos, reading the book, answering quick tests and doing excercises on our confined and open water dives. It was great, except for some excercises, e.g. removing the mask under water and putting it back on or walking in the wetsuit with all the gear on the hot beach to get to the water. Although we were only at the Naama Bay beach, life underwater was fascinating. The most special thing we saw there was a small anemone with a family of clownfish (one big, one smaller, and two young) which startled Elke a bit, because the father shot out to defend the anemone when she dived down to take a closer look . After wo took the final exam (I scored 100%! woot!) we took a day off and wanted to relax a bit and perhaps go snorkeling at the reef beach near our hotel.
The next morning we were greeted by our dive-colleague Peter: “Did you hear? There were bombings in Sharm.” We didn’t believe him until he showed us a SMS and we had turned on the TV in our room and heard that on Friday night, at about 0300 hours (wait, that would make it Saturday… well, whatever) some bombs hat hit various spots in Sharm. The bombings had taken place in Naama Bay and near the Old Market area, and our hotel was right in between these two spots. Both were 10-15 minutes by car away. This day was a strange one, because nearly all guests stayed at the hotel. After lunch, after we had talked to the boss of the dive center, we went to the beach (which was also nearly empty). On Sunday we went to the dive center and then by boat to the street of Tiran. There were reporters all over the dock, trying to get interviews with those tourists seemingly uninpressed by the attacks. Fortunately we had our peace under water, where we saw our first turtle. Then, we had another day off and finally our third boating trip (the first one was on the last day of our course), this time to the underwater national park of Ras Mohammed. There we had the luck to dive at our first wreck, the Yolanda. It was really funny to see all those bathtubs, washbasins and toilets scattered there, which had been the cargo of this ship.
So that was it. The remaining day was just some relaxing, and packing the luggage back together; nothing interesting happened. The last morning we checked out of the hotel, got on the bus, arrived at the airport, checked in, got on the plane and took off… to Hurghada. There we had to get off of the plane, wait for half an hour or so on the airport, then get onto the plane again and finally we were headed for Graz.

Well, I just moved the version number of my tool to 0.1.2, and it seems to be sufficiently bug free. I have been told that the rights will remain with me (yay!), so I am thinking about putting up a small page about the tool and offering it for download. I am really curious if someone else than the Blutzentrale can and will use this thingy.
And now for something completely different: Tomorrow at approximately 1500 Dr. Gabriel will show up, tell me which work contract I’ll have to sign and how much money I’ll get and what my asignments will be during the internship. That’s one thing I’m curious about too.

Elke and I decided to continue our divers training by attending the AOWD training. We chose the diving school scubaboard, mainly because it is located in Linz and offered a reasonable price. The course will take place on August 27th – 28th, perhaps I can take some photos again…

I just wanted to announce that I am not only available on Skype but also on Gizmo (for those who don’t know it – check it out, it’s a nice (and open source) alternative to Skype). Anyone interested in phoning me can do so by calling “hannesmueller” on either network.