You may or may not have heard of it, but Ber­lin (well, Europe, let’s not be too selfish) has been hit by a pretty bad storm. The storm was called “Kyrill” (don’t know its last name though).

Any­way, it was that bad that I crashed for the night at the friends place I was vis­it­ing that night — as, when I was about to leave, the radio said that it would be sui­cide to leave the house right now.

I took a few nice pho­tos that night, but — as my Mac­Book Pro is still in repair — I can’t post­pro­cess them the way I would like to and hence don’t want to upload them yet. Besides, there are soooo many other pic­tures on my cam­era that are groun­ded too… Come on Gravis, fix my damn laptop! Actu­ally, come on Apple, deliver the bloody screen panel that’s hold­ing them up! AAaaaarrrrrrrr!

If you pin your hopes on someone, you often wind up full of holes… [wind, get it? ;-) ]

Oh boy, so many papers to shift through… Not only that, but two more books, a sem­inar to pre­pare and a paper I would like to con­trib­ute to the 2007 Rob­oCup…

Plus there is so many things to do every day in Ber­lin. The city never sleeps, the oppor­tun­it­ies for some cool night time under­tak­ing never cease to be pop up… So many people to meet, so many con­certs to go to, so many pubs to stop by. Oh, how I love that city.

If only I didn’t have to get up half past seven the next morn­ing. But that’s part of grow­ing up I guess. More things to do, less time for it, more responsab­ilites, less room for trivial stuff. But why not, I like it. That’s what we’ve all been work­ing towards, right?

It’s always hum­bling to remem­ber that any­time you think you’ve got­ten away with some­thing, you really haven’t.

As I told you, I got myself a new, decent cam­era. It’s a Sony Alpha 100, Sony’s first DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) cam­era. Well, “first” is not entirely true, as at some stage Sony bought Min­olta of course includ­ing all the intel­lec­tual prop­erty…

Any­way, I’m super-​happy with it, it’s just so much fun to use and the pic­tures are great. I know that’s rather super­fi­cial and sub­ject­ive, but who of you really cares about more details ;-) Along with the cam­era I got the stand­ard Sony 18 – 70mm lens, a 70 – 300mm Tam­ron zoom/​macro lens and an old Min­olta sys­tem flash, besides a bag and some memory.

What I like most about the cam­era is the built in anti shake sys­tem. It phys­ic­ally moves the sensor in oppos­ite dir­ec­tions of your shak­ing and allows you to take pic­tures (depend­ing of course on the focal length and how well you can hold still) of up to 0.5s of expos­ure without a tri­pod, i.e. from bare hands! That way I could take some nice, crisp shots in low light con­di­tions, such as the rose on the left (1/​6s expos­ure at 70mm focal lenght, bare handed!).

As you can see, I would recom­mand that cam­era to almost every­one right away, and it’s not that expens­ive either!

It’s easy to get mar­ried; it’s hard to be selective.

And again it’s been yonks since I last pub­lished a new epis­ode of Pod­pourri…

And, even worse, all I do in todays epis­ode is ask for some more patience, mercy, or whatever you want to call it.

In fair­ness, I don’t think there will be a new epis­ode before Feb­ru­ary, as right now my Mac­Book Pro goes to the “doc­tor” (Apple tech­ni­cian that is) to fix a num­ber of issues, and also I will be super busy get­ting an annoy­ingly large num­ber of things sor­ted con­cern­ing my semi – per­man­ent move to Ire­land (which will hap­pen on 1 Feb.). All will be good… I hope…

How to make a cat drink: Put it in a blender, strain off the fur.