Another year done and over with. Iraq war, torture scandal, slow abolishment of key rights, Bush’s reelection, and most recently a nasty floodwave that left 140,000+ dead… when you think back, nothing really unusual happened in 2004 and yet the year seemed somewhat worse than many others.

Let’s hope that 2005 brings some improvements over its predecessor.

Happy New Year.

194This past weekend, I had a unique opportunity to travel to [Toulouse]( http://wikitravel.org/en/Toulouse). Unique because the voyage included an organized tour of the Airbus company yards, with a special something thrown in for us at the end. Everybody can get a tour of Airbus, but as a bonus feature we got a sneak preview of the new Airbus 380. We weren’t allowed inside the hall where the beast was assembled; instead we were looking down from a visitor platform. And of course photography was not allowed.

Seeing the A380 for the first time in such a huge hangar fools you completely. You look down and you see, well, an aircraft. It takes a little while until you notice that those small crawly things on the wing are two technicians brooding over some schematics. Really impressive – and I cannot wait until the plane is finished and I will have my first flight on one.

Other than the A380, an Airbus tour is also highly recommended for any serious geek. It’s way too short, but interesting. I just wish they’d allow you to walk among the aircraft more.

198Tolouse itself is pretty nice, clean, with several interesting buildings and the Canal du Midi is good for an extended walk. I doubt you could spend more than at most an extended weekend without being bored out of your mind however.

One final word of warning: Do not go to the Cité de l’Espace, unless you want to interest your young children in space flight. There is little to see and even less to do – it’s a waste of both time and money. And this comes from a guy who really loves spaceflight, too.

“Das Grundgesetz geht vom Schutz des Bürgers vor dem Staat aus, nicht vom Schutz des Staates vor seinen Bürgern. Und deren Freiheitsinteressen dürfen nicht auf dem Altar vorgeblicher Terrorismusbekämpfung geopfert werden.” <br/> – Ulla Burchardt via Heise Online

We do not need software patents. Wir brauchen keine Software Patente!

“Read more.”:http://nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/intro/index.html

Tuesday November 23rd: Düsseldorf Köln.

Friday November 26th – Sunday November 28th: Tolouse

Monday November 29th – Thursday December 3rd: Budapest

The Budapest thing has not been finally decided. Some people at work want me to go, but I really don’t think I should as I will be quite overloaded as it is.

We’ll see.

Anybody who wishes to hook up is of course welcome to let me know, although I won’t have time in -Düsseldorf-Köln for any meetups. TLS and BUD would be much easier.

Update, November 20th: No Budapest for me, phew! By the way, is it “Toulouse” or “Tolouse” en Anglais?

Let’s see….

Friday: Get up at 6:30, go to work at 7:30, arrive at 8:35. Work until 17:30. Be on call until 19:00.

Saturday: 0:00-1:00 check into Fliegenpreise going live for the day. 1:00-11:00 Be on call for that server. 11:00-13:00 lunch with Philipp. Hand over chores to him. 14:00 return home. Sleep until sunday.

Update, November 13th 2004: Wow, that was exciting. It went pretty well. I even got about 2.5 hours of sleep between 20:30 and 23:00. I am pleased with us, if I may be so boastful :-) Now, to hope for a quiet rest of the weekend.

Just woke up from 5h sleep (yeah it’s now 1:30am, seriously inconvenient times. Guess I am training for Friday…) and outside it’s snowing. The stuff is melting again as it hits the ground. Guess the winter’s really here now. (D’oh.)

I had big trouble sleeping the last week, and thus completed another (unabridged) audiobook. The beauty of audiobooks, as compared to the normal paper ones, is that I can listen to them while I do other things. Sometimes, this is too distracting. But when you are in bed, waiting for sleep to come, it’s at least a very comfortable way to “read” a book: You can pull the cover up to your ears and above all you don’t have to turn on the light.

Ender’s Game was written by Orson Scott Card. It was originally a short story, until Card wanted to write Speaker for the Dead. As he put it, he was having problems with that novel until he decided that Ender Wiggin, the protagonist of Ender’s Game, should be the main character of Speaker for the Dead. He rewrote Ender’s Game into a full novel, which then became a big hit and a cult classic in some circles of the geek crowd.

In the future, on an overcrowded Earth, mankind is looking at its children to find a brilliant leader, a strategist and tactician who would save it from the feared “Third Invasion” by a vicious alien species called the “Buggers”. These children, monitored from early childhood, are recruited into the space-based “Battle School” at the age of six. Here they learn all about military tactic through a series of games. The adult teachers control all facets of their environment, as Ender soon learns, but otherwise have a very “hands off” approach to teaching. And as they believe Ender is their “best hope”, they put an extra effort into pushing him to the limit.

I am not really sure what to make of the book. It’s pretty useless as a war story; we don’t see much of it, nor of the military, their tactics, and so on. It’s equally useless as a science fiction story; the Buggers and the interstellar war are just trappings and the future history and society of mankind are never explored in any real detail. It’s almost as useless as a “coming of age” story. It’s not so useless as a character story, one that describes Ender Wiggin (and to a lesser extent his siblings). They are good, believable characters; unfortunately they’re not really fun. Especially Valentine and Peter; Peter manages to be a good character in the early part of the book, a nice threat and motivation to Ender, but he becomes boring quickly. Valentine, well, she’s just redundant. But I guess every book must have a love interest for the hero; and if it’s not a girlfriend to love, you gotta have a sister he can love.

The other characters are just one dimensional, boring, names without substance. This holds true for good guys, bad guys, and neutrals. Everybody pales in comparison to Hero Ender, and thus are given only the most basic of motivations or personalities.

Still, the book makes you continue on. Card’s style is pretty good, and he makes up for what he lacks in creating an interesting setting that way. You’ll also want to see what Colonel Graff, Endre’s hidden “mentor” (and tormentor) will come up with and how Ender will cope. Finally, at least for me, I also wanted to see if the book got any better.

Only it didn’t; it remained insubstantial and predictable to the very end.

If you want to read good Sci Fi, read any number of other books. If you want to read a good war story, read any number of other books. For the military SF subgenre, I heartily recommend Starship Troopers instead (the book, not the “terrible movie”:/Review/195/starship-troopers-dvd!), especially since it includes a lot of moral/philosophical/political debate. Or read “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”:/Review/586/the-moon-is-a-harsh-mistress by Heinlein. I cannot even recommend Ender’s Game as the “leadership textbook” I have heard it being described as. I have serious doubts the little bits and peaces Ender learns about leading other soldiers would help anybody but maybe the absolute neophytes.

So, hummm, this comes across as a pretty negative opionion of Ender’s Game. Is it a horrible book? No, not really, as in “I have read worse”. But in my humble opinion it is not in any way remarkable. It doesn’t excite, it doesn’t educate, it doesn’t thrill, it doesn’t surprise, but neither does it really bore (except maybe the Peter-and-Valentine bits). If you are stuck on a rainy afternoon, this book is better than nothing. But on your list of books-to-read, it should appear very low in the ranking. Ender’s Game was an afterthought, a novel thrown in when the author was stuck for ideas, and it shows.

Here in Germany there’s a debate right now (again – it seems to pop up about every 3 months or so) about whether workers should lose a holiday, or whether they should work more; the later either in the form of additional workhours per week, or with reduced vacations. The argument brought forth for such plans is usually that this would “create more jobs”. In this debate a new argument was added this time; namely the ruling social democrats claimed that working a day more would result in more social insurance and tax income.

Of course these arguments are both fundamentally flawed; so flawed, in fact, that I fail to see how anybody could buy into them. Unless they are paid off in a big way, which probably is the state of affairs in Berlin anyway. But let us take a closer look at why the idea of people working more is a bad one.

more…

I just realized I have been in Frankfurt for exactly three years now.

Oh, well.