Every now and then, I see somebody who -just as Russell did today- talks about the advantages of water heating systems not being tank-based, but tankless! Sounds kewl, hah? Shiny, new?
Well... I live at a house that is slowly but steadily started to show its age. Built in 1955 and owned for almost two decades by the very renowned phycisist (of course, my father's mentor and teacher) Marcos Moshinsky, my parents bought it in 1974, and it has been my home since 1976. And, at least since 1980 (I cannot be sure about earlier events for reasons that might be obvious to the casual reader), we have always had an Calentador Ascot de paso. Ascot (and further companies that have bought their name) have manufacutred this kind of water heaters for at least 60 years in Mexico. Yes, they are gas-based and not electricals like the ones Rusell links to, but that might just be because in Mexico gas has always been incredibly cheaper than electricity. And yes, the heater is godsent for ecolocigally conscious people - No more storing 20 to 40 lt (the sizes of the usual storage-based tanks around here) of hot water all day around just because you might want to take a shower, no more waiting for 20 minutes after you turn it on until you start having your morning shower (and more important, no more taking your morning shower ice-cold just because you overslept!)
Yes, it seems like life is perfect with our tankless (de paso) system... Almost.
As I said, our house was built over 50 years ago. It was built on what intended by then to be a middle-upper class suburb, on a very modern house with fancy stuff and all. And of course, the heater was not planned for the most visible or hearable areas of the house - specifically, nowhere close the living room - or the bedrooms. Silly details, the bathrooms are close to those areas. So, what's the answer? Want to take a shower? Ok, open the water...
And wait.
For around 3-5 minutes, until the hot water finishes the looong ride from the opposite corner of the house.
Of course, it takes a path that's not easy to intercept in order to move the heater to a saner place: The hot water pipe goes right under the middle of the living room, yay.
So we use our fancy de paso system whenever we are too lazy. Nadezhda and I prefer to fill one hot water bucket (~20lt) for each in the washing room, just by the kitchen (and the heater, of course!) and throw hot water over us to get a nice bath. Or, in case we are too lazy for that, collect as much as possible from the otherwise-wasted hot water in another bucket (we usually get ~10lt - but I fear another such amount just falls around it) and use it later for our various household duties.

• Please skip this item if the f-word offends you... LugRadio season 4 episode 16 minute 45ish:

  "I mean, it's... It's... I think, it's... You know... If you look away from... I think, in my mind... Going back to the discussion about Wiis, I mean... For me personally, I like sitting on a couch and playing a game with a joypad, y'know? I'm not really into standing up and f... Getting some exercise? ...hitting an invisible fucking tennis ball. If I... If I thought about doing that, I... I think it would put me off. That's why I'd suggest that the Wii for some people is a novelty. For me it would be a novelty. I think a lot of people enjoy playing it. They are very cool. For traditional games players, absolutely. But I'm more of a traditional games player and I like playing on Playstation and I feel a bit shitty that I've bought a Sony machine and I don't like the fact that it's got BluRay in it and all the rest of it but uh... Better than MJ Ray! Harsh! Fucking the witmeister strikes fuck. He isn't listening to the fucking show anyway. No, he said we jumped the shark. Did he? What the fuck does that mean? Really? I don't know, but he er... Is that on the foot? Fucked the pooch? Right. So the PS3. Good one. Or not. (muttering) If you hate freedom, go out and buy one!"

  Yes, that show has jumped the shark at some point in season 2, when they stopped editing properly and let it become a 90-minute or 2-hour show instead of a 1-hour one. The above is typical of recent non-interview clips that I've heard: little to do with Linux or LUGs, gratuitously offensive and personal, everyone talking across each other with lots of incoherent waffle. It's almost like they're scared to shut up and let another presenter speak while they work out what they're trying to say. Are they spraying their territory with their voices or something? If there's an interview you're interested in, it's still worth the download for that, but don't bother otherwise. If they had the guts to publish it under a free software licence, I expect there'd be more user-friendly cuts, tightly-edited short versions (like alterslash does for slashdot) and probably other stuff I wouldn't guess. Maybe the competition would bring a bit of freshness back, instead of the show slowly getting longer and longer, padded out with rambles that make John Prescott seem like a master of tact and eloquence. I doubt they'll free LugRadio - they don't seem to rate freedom highly, with the exception of one presenter - and that's their choice, just like it's my choice not to listen to most of it any more. As you can tell from the above, I did tell them when I stopped and why. That in-show comment was their first response. I guess they feel too famous to reply to emails directly any more. (Thanks to Aaron for the tip about the above. Now, I wonder if they'll use any of this in a promo, like I did when the Tories said "I'd rather join a group of tree-hugging lesbian hippies from Ipswich"? Did wonders for my recruitment drive, that did.)
• Seen on URC: "A bicycle is stolen every 71 seconds in England... - I guess the owner is getting pretty fed up by now :-)" -- Paul Boyd

How often in life does one find a traffic light lying at the side of the road? And how many of those times does it concern a buslight? Well, it happened to me: I found the buslight shown here at the Archimedeslaan. It is the type of traffic light that only applies to busses, trams and their public transport friends. I believe this is specific to The Netherlands, so here's a diagram of the possible layouts (top row). It runs on 40V power, but as I had a maximum of 19V available (not counting the 230V from the wall) it looks a bit faint. The bulbs look like the same ones used in car lights, and everything you can do with the unit (open, replace lights, reconfigure light positions) can be done without tools. Nice design. I called the contractor that maintains the city's traffic lights, Dynamicon, and the guy on the phone said he'd pass my information on but didn't believe they needed it anymore. Now only to find a good use for it...

The other day I had an incident involving my vision. It has nothing to do with the vision problems many people had the other day, when someone posted some pr0n on various Planets. For some time already, maybe two or three years, I've had this weird vision problem at times, when I'd start seeing some black stains with some flashing lights , even with my eyes closed. These symptoms would go away after a few minutes, and washing my eyes with a good amount of water also helped. It happened a lot during mornings, and I somehow connected it to showering with too hot water, using a certain brand of shampoo (Say no to Revlon!) and shower vapour. When I described the symptoms to my mother, the reaction was the expected in a house of doctors and nurses: indiference. En casa del herrero, cuchillo de palo, for those who understand it. On Sunday I stayed up helping Bel n with her DEA paper until 5AM. I woke up at 7:30AM, and stayed at work like a zombie, until I had a chance to have a needed nap at 6PM. The problem was my nap was a bit longer than I wanted, and woke up at 9:15PM, still tired but no longer sleepy. I wasn't sleepy until 4AM, and next morning I accidentally overslept, and rushed out of the bed to get to work as soon as possible. While preparing, I suddenly noticed my vision went a bit blurry and strange. I thought it just was one of those stains , until I closed my right eye to rub it and all I saw was darkness. I totally freaked out. OMFG, I'm fucking BLIND . I wanted to phone someone, but wireless had broken down and I didn't have my mobile phone with me, so I tried looking at a text file I have in the laptop with some numbers on, when it ran out of battery. I grabbed my old mobile and failed to introduce the correct PIN three times. I went to the bathroom, covered my right eye, and yeah, there was darkness. If I waved my hand over my blind eye, I would barely notice some movement on the left side, but that was all. Still very frightened, I washed my eye thoroughly and to my relief, I was able to see the upper part of my field of vision. After some more, I had recovered all my sight. Whew. I managed to speak to Ra l on the phone, who told me this probably wasn't too bad, just the optic nerve being tired due to stress and so on. My mother also asked an opthalmologist at her hospital the day after, who confirmed this. It's probably caused by my recent whacky sleeping habits (basically non-existing), general stress, and long exposures to computer monitors. The doctor asked her if I had a headache, which I didn't the day before, but I had one the day after, when she asked. How do you know? , I replied. Last night I went to bed at 00:05 and managed to sleep eight hours for the first time in many months. I'm really going to make an effort to fix my sleeping habits, because they were quite fucked up lately, not catching up sleep even during weekends. On Monday I'll visit the doctor anyway, just to confirm all of this. Coincidentally, Russel Coker also had similar symptoms this week, and also blogged about it.

I awoke to a very early alarum clock, which I shut off quickly. I dragged myself out of bed to see ze_dinosaur off, but he was far more prepared than I was. I waved goodbye and then collapsed back into bed. Sunday morning was pretty difficult for me. In fact, I only got up in the afternoon. I ate some bananas and showed up to the HackLab where I socialized for a good while. Then we realized that lunch would be smart, so we went to the market. Instead of tortilla based food, we managed to get some stewed meat and deep-fried vegetables. That was rather tasty and I had to waddle back. I spent the rest of the day touching up photographs instead of going on the waterslides. I'm now wondering if that was wise. But at the time, it seemed like a lot of fun. What wasn't so wise was trying an iced treat when I didn't want one. I got some money out of an automated teller and saw a shop across the street that sold iced things. Well, I crossed into the shop and ordered one. They scooped out some ground ice, topped it with mango syrup, splashed it with lime juice, and topped it with salt and chili powder. Now that I think of it, it would be tasty and refreshing if you drank lots of water all day. Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that our last meal in town should be wonderful. So I rounded up a rather large group of people who wanted to go out for dinner, expressed that we'd be going all fancy, and generally herded them into the fanciest restaurant in town. Some people initially complained about the potential cost, but the convival atmosphere and cloth napkins overruled this. So did the tasty platters of beef. We were all quite happily stuffed. Afterwards, a few of us strolled through a park attached to a local historic site. There were plenty of benches to sit upon and we contemplated the night air. I'll have to say that Mexico's nights are a lot less chilly than Montr al's. But the resort had all the lights on, so you couldn't see any stars at all. By the time we had strolled back to the HackLab, people were disassembling the network. I lugged a big server into a van and brought a few more boxes of things there. After the heavy lifting, I took a few more photographs of people, wonderful people, before deciding to retire. But the camera never does capture the fleeting moments.

I have quit LinuxTag. In April I already left the legal association LinuxTag e.V. but continued my work in order to support and not to hurt the community, projects and supporters. On December 1st I finally declared that I'm not going to organise LinuxTag 2006. This step was not easy for me since I was a member of LinuxTag since 1999 and have formed the event from the time when it had to leave the University of Kaiserslautern. However, I don't see a basis for proper co-operation anymore. Too many issues and people went bezerk in the past and didn't refrain from that. 2005 was already a disaster looking at the organisation. Instead of trying to keep a team together, it was demoralised. During the event it was more important to talk about problems instead of finding solutions. Phrases like "there is no community" were heard, and the work of supporters wasn't honoured. For the first time I anticipated that I'll be forced to throw the towel during the event and registered for the keysigning party. This was prevented only by me not being able to attend core meetings. A lot of the problems I have result from the current chairman of the association. When they don't honour us, they'll have to run the event without us. So it's time to close the windows and spend ones precious time elsewhere. At the end of October I decided to give LinuxTag a last chance and defined conditions that have to be fulfilled when I should continue working on the event. Instead of discussing them or even acknowledging them they depended on a phone call that didn't have any useful result. So after more than one month I announced that I won't be available anymore. However, it has been a lot of fun for me to work on the past events, with you, the projects and supporters. For me the event itself in 2005 was the best since the issues in which I was involved simply worked when they were started, without the need of me to interfere all the time, and I wasn't able to attend the core meetings. Even though I have never had this little sleep for one week I had a lot of time to meet people and talk to them, since the event worked so well. It is sad that this has come to an end.

In 1999 I went to LinuxTag as a Debian representative after the project has received an offer to staff a booth there. I took over the maintenance and organised the first Debian meeting in Germany. I also gave two talks during this event, one of them was even repeated on the second day. We've had a lot of fun and since this was the first meeting of Debian affiliated people in Germany, it was very interesting to connect faces to mail addresses and to learn more about the people behind a name. This LinuxTag was the last such event that took place at the University Kaiserslautern. Free projects such as KDE and Debian have been offered a booth in one building from which one could reach the lecture rooms, while company booths were located in the Mensa building with their own professional booths. It was a warm weekend and the Jolt people have supported us with cool and caffeined drinks. We had the opportunity to use a lecture room for sleeping with other project members. Klaus Knopper was supporting the network and supervised the security team, and hence, had the unfortunate job to move away all project members from their booths, out of the building or into the lecture room. I've heard, that he had a hard time, and still believes that Debian people don't need sleep. I guess we should have moved him into the lecture room for a sleep instead. This '99 LinuxTag was quite a real success. It took place at the rise of the dot com era and all people were happy about the event. There were about 7,000 visitors in total on both days. The city of Kaiserslautern has called the university several times since there were no free hotel rooms anymore. Former events happened more or less unnoticed by locals, but not anymore in 1999. After the show was over, we dismantled the booth, moved away our own equipment and left the place. However, I made the "mistake" to notice that the LinuxTag people, who have provided us such a great opportunity, still had work to do since they had to dismantle the booth system and clean the ground floor. My biggest "mistake" was that I didn't run away and have a nice evening but decided to help and ask other booth members who were still around to do the same. Having cleaned up the location quite fast was not the only result. Oliver Zendel, who was in charge of talking to the community and who offered Debian the booth, spoke to me afterwards and wondered whether I would be interested to join the team. Well, I knew how to organise stuff, can talk to people, know quite some people in the community, the LinuxTag people were a cool team, so why not. So for the event in 2000 I was in charge of the projects exhibition. In 2000 we also had to move out of the university of Kaiserslautern since 7,000 visitors were already too much for that small university and city. That's why we eventually moved to the Stuttgart fair. That was an interesting experience. It was also interesting to see how such an event can be organised by a team of friends and how the acceptance in the business world was. In Stuttgart we were able to use a small office (max. 15m ) for the entire team as working space. Two computers were installed which we were allowed to touch but not to install a real system on. Hence, Klaus brought Knoppix CDs. This was the first time that I learned about the Knoppix Live CD. Together with my notebook we've had three desks and could work. However, today I really wonder how this could have worked with so many people, but apparently it really did. Due to the need and my experience in both talking to the press and being the press I joined the LinuxTag press team and even held the final press conference, while my colleague held the opening press conference. So after all projects were happy, the show went fine and most of the office jobs were done, I prepared a press release together with others and maintained the final conference. This was also the first time LinuxTag has organised a business congress as a special extra program for business representatives. It was also the time I experienced the need for several supporters for various tasks. In that year, a dozen supporters were paid as "security" who also drove the shopping for us. Hence, I already acquired some people who supported us as volunteers. That was also the time when Benny joined the team. In 2000 the exhibition boomed and there were a lot of large dot com company booths, which was very nice because LinuxTag arose from a students association and became more and more professional, a platform for both companies and projects. It was organised just like a Free Software project and worked non-commercially. Despite several flame wars and disputes, which seem to be normal, it was organised by friends who believed of a higher goal. It was very nice and gave me a warm feeling when looking at what we have achieved. However, I had nothing to do with commercial interests, income, acquisition, invoices etc., so I may have missed a lot. This year, LinuxTag was planned to take place in one exhibition hall, but there were so many companies interested in running a booth that a second exhibition hall was later rented as well. That's why there were two adjacent halls instead of one large location. In 2001 we were using a different exhibition hall, a larger one due to the strong demand in 2000, but still at the Stuttgart fair. This time I was also in charge of the supporters and already dispatched jobs during the event. From time to time I also maintained the shuttle service to the airport to pick up speakers or take back speakers, which I've also done in 2000. This time we've had a larger office in which all of use fit and which was a nice working atmosphere. We were also able to provide more booth space to Free Software projects. In that year I've automatically taken over the office and communication with the outside world, collecting and distribution information. I don't think this was planned, but it just happened since I was able to do the job besides my other obligations. I also gave a talk about Debian, even though others in the team considered me insane for doing that as well. With a lot of help by the local user group, we were able to offer project members a cheap sleeping opportunity. The LUG acquired a gym hall during the night an cooked in the student's office "Hellblaues Nilpferd". After I've picked up Hans Reiser I went there for a snack with him before dumping him at the hotel. It was a nice atmosphere. One of the lead people for this effort, Hubert Kai er, was suddenly overtaken by death two weeks ago. In 2002 LinuxTag moved to Karlsruhe and thus to a new fair where everything had to start again from zero. We had to get acquainted with the local company and their representatives and learn how the new fairground works. The fairground was more interesting since there was a large open area between the conference site and the exhibition hall. Looking at past years, it was used by visitors. Thanks a lot to Jochen Topf from GUUG and members of the local user group KaLUG a lot of community events happened during LinuxTag. They maintained an Internet caf in the conference building and organised the legendary KaLUG party which has become a regular LinuxTag event. In addition to that I've also worked more and more and took over more areas where I noticed help was needed and that I could manage it. So it happened that I took over more work at and before LinuxTag which finally resulted in two months of work were I don't remember a day on which I've worked less than 8 hours for LinuxTag in 2005. In 2002 I worked on the coding marathon and delegated the tasks and support during LinuxTag to two other people, so it will run independent of me. Since I was the first of the team to arrive in Karlsruhe, I also built up the office and the storage. Due to the large distance I had to leave Oldenburg the day before I want to arrive in Karlsruhe, so that I was at the fairground at last at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning. Before the event a lot of issues had to be negotiated with various parties, which required quite a lot of work. Until 2004 the entire team was working in their spare time without getting paid for their LinuxTag work. The higher goal was the impulse and all of us had neglected one issue or another that wasn't important for LinuxTag. We've had some external service providers at least since 2002. The acquisition became a difficult task for students who liked to work until the morning and get up at lunch time, since many companies expect a partner that is available for them from 9 to 5. That's why Charter was eventually hired and this year ergomedia. For press work newthinking was hired. This year the social event was also organised by them. However, having two people from the board of directors being paid by the association for their LinuxTag work from April, and external service providers that were also paid, was something I considered problematic if not unfair, looking at how other people commit to LinuxTag and don't get a monetary compensation. Several people still worked a lot on LinuxTag in their spare time and had to live from something as well. It caused resentment in the team.