German Museum

Posted by on November 19, 2008 2 comments

On Sunday, Andreas, Stefan and me decided to visit the German Museum. It’s been a loooong time since I’ve been there for the last time and it’s really cheap for students, actually. We were wandering around for several hours and had a look at the departments for aviation, marine, chemistry, optical technology, physics and – of course – electrical engineering. Phew. It was a funny day but I’ve been freakin’ tired because I only had about 1.5 hours of sleep from Saturday 😉

Anyways, here are some pictures 😀

Starnberger See

Posted by on November 11, 2008 2 comments

Even though it was a quite tough day yesterday, I stopped at the Starnberger See (where I was doing some business for my little big sister) for a second to breathe in the nice air and enjoy the sunlight for a few seconds:

MacBook Dead? Nope, not anymore!

Posted by on November 8, 2008 7 comments

Yaaaay! With the great support from my local Gravis store I figured out that it was just the hard disk that failed and not the whole system. They did some trixx to reset the EFI (this is what a BIOS is called nowadays, nerd!) and finally, I was able to boot from the install DVD again. For just 70,- Euros I bought a new hard disk (which has, by the way, more than double the capacity of my old one) and went home cheerfully.

First, I prepared everything: MacBook, screwdrivers, Leopard installation DVD, the new hard disk:

Turned around the MacBook:

Removed the battery:


Unscrewed and removed the battery and RAM door:



Pulled out the old hard disk:


Exchanged it with the new one:

Pushed it back into the system (Damn I love S-ATA connectors! Don’t want to remember how tricky it used to be exchanging the hard disk in the old PowerBook G3 that utilized IDE disks…):

We need more POWER:

Starting up:


Using the insanely easy-to-use and smart Time Machine restoration tool:

… awesome. I just spent 70 Euros, did around 8 clicks or so and my whole system re-installed itself in less than 2.5 hours – without me doing anything else but watching the progress bar grow and playing some CounterStrike 1.6 meanwhile (hehe, there they are, the good old times). Do I need to mention that all my files, all my settings, EVERYTHING is just like it used to be before my old disk drive died? No time-consuming new installation, finding drivers, downloading and installing, every single program I need, configuring Windows or any other task I used to hate so much when I was a Windows-Warrior in the good old times I alluded before? Don’t think I need to mention it now because I already did 😉

This is SO cool. Now I can continue working on my thesis again! 😀 Ah, and the new hard disk is so silent I even kind of miss the sound! Now I never know if my system’s busy or not 😉

Anyways, there’s one thing that’s been bugging me beside the assumed death of my computer: I think I’ve lost my Pentax camera! DAMN! That’s the reason why I shot those pictures with the crappy iPhone built-in camera, by the way. Or does anyone seem to have found it by coincidence?

New Apple model: MacBook Dead

Posted by on November 6, 2008 4 comments

Damn. Just as I was starting to write my thesis, my MacBook broke. DAMN! It seems to be a major hardware issue because I can’t even boot it from the DVD anymore. Of course, it’s way out of warranty so I might have no other choice but buying a new one… If they just weren’t SO expensive! 🙁

Well… Maybe if the repair does not make sense, I’ll exchange my MacBook dead for a new MacBook Pro. We’ll see. 🙂

Wendelstein – Bavarian hiking pt. 2

Posted by on October 22, 2008 2 comments

Hey again! Last Saturday, we went hiking again! Okay, Andrea was being laaaazy and used the “I’ve got to look after the baby” excuse but the rest of us did it. The highest mountain in the area, the Wendelstein! Having had perfect weather with a lot of sunshine, it was just beautiful! Less than 140 minutes for almost 1000 meters of height distance is quite okay, too 😉 The view was magnificent and we already found some snow at the peak. But enough talk, here are the pictures!

Offline for a while

Posted by on October 19, 2008 1 comment

Sorry for being offline for a while… But I’m back and there’s nothing you can do against it 😛

Just a small test…

Posted by on October 16, 2008 1 comment

This is just a little test of the WordPress application for the iPhone. It works! 😀

More “normal life” before university starts again

Posted by on October 1, 2008 3 comments

Weee, I’ve been so lazy lately. Sorry ’bout that! Will be more up-to-date, promised 🙂

So what’s been up these days? Not too much actually. Well, I became even older on the 23rd… To celebrate this, Andrea & Patrick invited me to a very good (but expensive) Japanese restaurant. That was soooo good!

The day after that, I saw Ela & Flo off at the Munich Airport. They returned to Barcelona safely and I still hope that they’re finally able to access the Internet and add content in their blog 🙂

Ah yes! Ayumi-chan has been here in Munich to visit Marcus and (of course) see some nice spots of the city. I met them and had some drinks with them – to prepare for the Oktoberfest-weekend ^^

Oktoberfest… Oh! My! God! They dragged me into the Augustiner tent where we spent almost the whole day (approx 9 hours). But even though I did not drink any alcohol, it was great fun. Many people who’ve been to Japan have been there, too so I was able to share a lot of my “wanna go back!” feeling with them 😀

And now? Now, university has started again… So in the end, my life finally returns to being really normal. And boring. And without the great food I enjoyed so much in Tokyo. 🙁 But Schweinebraten is fine, too! 😀

Getting used to my “normal” life in Germany again

Posted by on September 21, 2008 1 comment

Well… A lot of stuff is going on lately! As you might have noticed, my niece Chiara has been born and I can just say that she’s a little sunshine 😀

Anyways – I completely missed to tell that Tanaka Mamiko-san from Siemens visited Marcus and me in Munich and together with her father, we were doing the Tourist-thing: Having dinner in the “Hofbräuhaus”, climbing up the “Alter Peter”, visiting the “Frauenkirche” and many other famous spots and finally ending up in the “Englischer Garten” in the beer garden next to the “Chinesischer Turm”. It was great fun and I have to admit that I’ve never seen so much cultural and touristic stuff of Munich ever in my life – and I’m living in this city for more than five years now… -_-‘

During the last few days, I spent most of the time visiting Andrea and Patrick, the proud parents of Chiara and just hanging around with them. On Friday,my sister Manuela and her boyfriend Florian came to visit from Barcelona. We had a nice and funny weekend – of course including party, a lot of food and drinking 😉 Just by the way: I have to show off what a cool and sporty mom I’ve got! She participated in a half-marathon (about 21 kilometers) without any big preparation or training and ran a GREAT time of 2 hours, 2 minutes and 10 seconds!!!! WOW! Please applaud!

Here are some fresh pictures by the way 🙂

Pingbacks and other difficulties in my life

Posted by on September 17, 2008 2 comments

Hey hey, here I am again. Uncle Roland 🙂

Unfortunately, my WordPress installation seems to be bugging around a bit. Pingbacks and Trackbacks still don’t work so I’ve been playing around with my permalink structure and stuff like that for a while. It still does not seem to work so I’ve given up now…

But there have been several changes I would like to let my readers to know about: URL of this blog is http://defaude.info without the /blog2 appendix anymore. The old (German) blog can still be found under http://defaude.info/blog but as I mentioned, I will not continue writing in this one. I also changed the permalink structure a little bit so it does only contain the year and the month but not the day anymore. Please update your bookmarks if neccesary. 😉

And also the URL of my RSS feeds has changed! Entries can be found under http://defaude.info/feed and comments have their own RSS feed under http://defaude.info/comments/feed. If you have no idea of what I’m talking about here, feel free to ask me any time 😉

PS: Since the stupid trackback feature also does not seem to work at nordblog.core, I try to kick it right here.