Jaz's journal

In our quest to escape the desert of dull New Year's parties this December, I'll be jetting to Berlin with Ettena tomorrow afternoon. I'm planning to give my mailbox and this site an occasional visit, but hope to be pretty busy enjoying the capital for a week.

Enjoy what's left of 2003, and take care.

I'm finding it terribly difficult to score real snapshots with digital cameras which often take a long time from pushing the trigger to actually taking the picture. But this photo is just priceless.

What unearthed dance music from their early high school days can do to people will never cease to amaze me.

I have just spent the better part of the day kicking serious butt at 3D programming. Imagine me sitting in this PC pool, hacking away with a broad grin on my face and mumbling incomprehensible things like "this is the shit."

Yes, this is the stuff I'm attending university for. Expanding my skills. Doing things I've never dared to attempt. Reaching for and grabbing every single one of my holy grails in computer science.

I understand that some people love to study computer science for its theoretical and academical challenges. If that is your thing, that's perfectly cool and more power to you. It's just that this kind of learning is not fulfilling for me personally.

I think I've proven over the last year that I'm by all means able to solve mathematical puzzles of considerable difficulty given enough effort from my side. I understand that there's still a lot to master for me in this field. But I really don't want to walk down this path any further than I already did. Been there, done that, move on.

You see, our lives are very short and the time I'm given to conduct my studies full time is even shorter. Computer science is a wide field and an unlimited number of challenges can be found on every level of abstraction.

Please allow me to make something out of the time that is given to me. Allow me to seek my own challenges.

I really like kicking ass.

Last night some people appearantly turned our university into a big sign of protest. Every tenth chair, door or computer was blocked by white-red tape and a banner saying Ten Percent Less. All this is part of a movement against the state's plans to cut down spending for universities by an average of ten percent.

This Thursday a demonstration is scheduled in my city and a friend asked me to join. I was somewhat indetermined as attending demonstrations is not something I do very often. That's mostly because pretty much all of them are against rather than for something, has to be for a just cause and should honestly mean something to me personally.

Of course the term "just cause" is a semantic minefield in itself. In this case I, as a student, am affected myself by the plans the demonstration is rallying against, but this alone can't encompass my whole reasoning. Universities might get less money, universities are pissed and tell the state to cut someone else's budget. I mean, what a surprising chain of events!

But how foolish, unfair or evitable are these cuts in the big picture? This is hard to say because, frankly, I can't see the big picture as clearly as I would like. My intuition says that the cuts are wrong even under the present economic circumstances. Also I had the fortune to recently spend one year in a position where I was able to witness bizarre bonfires of state money, which also makes me question whether it's right budgets that are about to be cut.

So, as much as I will hate looking like marching for my own ass, I guess I might attend the demonstration after all.

In the last days of August, my uncle fell victim to a heart attack at the age of 47. He left behind a wife and two children. I love them very much.

I did not attend the funeral. I was touring through Italy when the message reached me a few days late. We contemplated doing a 1300 km trip up to my uncle's place until my aunt let us know that it would have been my uncle's wish that we continue our holidays.

So we continued our trip. Two weeks later we returned to Germany. My uncle lived quite a distance away from my apartment and my parents' house, and crashing into their home with nothing else to say than how fucking sad and sorry I am didn't seem appropriate at that time. So I decided to write a letter to my aunt.

It's been two months now, and I'm still working on this letter. Yes, this is how much of an asshole I really am, not being able to get my shit together in ten weeks and tell my aunt and cousins who just had their whole lives messed up that I'm sorry.

In defense of myself, it's not like I didn't try. I'm thinking about this every day. Tonight I tried to work on the letter again. Now it's past four ó clock in the morning and I'm still left with virtually nothing.

My whole point is that writing this letter is just *so* *fucking* *hard*. I mean, it's not like anyone ever taught me how to deal with such a situation. My uncle, this incredibly good, non-drinking, non-smoking, healthy person abruptly dies thirty or fourty years ahead of his due time, the lives of at least three people have been turned into a horrible mess, so Einstein, what do you say about that? That you're "sorry"? In that case better write nothing at all.

I'm trying to come up with a single sentence that doesn't sound canned and cheesy confronted with the horrible misfortune of this situation. I can't find one. Even the greeting sounds cheesy when you read it.

I have no idea what I am supposed to do in order to finish this letter. All I know is that I am way late with it, and with every new idea I am more of an asshole for not being able to get done with it, stick it into an envelope and send it all the way up to my aunt.

Remember that scene in Revolutions when Neo jacked into the Matrix for final fight with Smith:

Somehow the words escaped from my mouth and we couldn't stop giggling until halfway into the fight:

"Now that's bandwidth."

If you think this is funny, you might be a geek.