René Rebe

Again the German Railway took off without us, and it was literally just seconds missing this time! We had like 9 minutes to change the train, and our train was about 5 minutes late. Normally not a problem to still catch the next train; one would think, … But when the DB parks the first train at the second half of the platform behind another, and let you jog it done with all your luggage, to arrive at the net train “just in time”, touch the door sensor, but the ICE just accelerates away, … well, you know that there is something wrong at that public transportation company’s management.

Actually this is not the first time - stuff like this happened to us so often that we rarely used DB railway the last years anyway. Usually flying or rented cars are cheaper anyway. Once we had playing kids on the track, another time environmental activist cut off the electricity line, and worse was a concrete block of said environmental groups. The worst situations ever, however, where when some train had frost damages, the listed replacement went later, but did went into a slightly different direction, and thus did not stop at our destination station and another time when all ticket automats where defect, we where instructed to go down the hall to buy the tickets (not possible in short distance trains, no exceptions, not even when all ticket machines are out of order), and when we arrived back, the next train was already in place, which we mistakenly even entered in all the haste!!!

And this is not even counting in the mess that is the Berliner S-Bahn, nor recent strikes!

We just gave the “Bahn” a chance, because the departure time was more suitable, and we had the luck to get one of those highly discounted tickets.

Guess how often we will use the railway the coming years.

(Posted via 3G, O2 Germany, in before-mentioned ICE.)

Berlin is not only breaking international visitors records year after year, with the Berlinale and similar events it is also attracting movie business and fans.

In time for this year’s Berlinale moviemaker Ralf Schmerberg installed the letters “Holywood” in Berlin Tiergarten, just between Brandenburger Gate and Potsdamer Platz. The installation mimicks the legendary skyline in Los Angeles meassuring 14 meter in height and 53 meter wide.

The creator wants to point out the shrinking number of tree’s in the otherwise green city, apparently due to missing funding in the city’s budgets.

Enjoy even more in my Berlin 2011 gallery.

For some time our office’s Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430dl kept feeding paper worse every week. Sometime one had to multiple clear a virtual “Paper jam in tray 1″ to get a single sheet printer out, … with just 7563 total faces printed on the printer’s internal counters.

It got annoying enough to finally take a look, and apparently it is a known problem! And cleaning the paper pickup rubber roller really helped, for us!

Let’s print on, … :-)

Those who know me, or other fellow readers, may have noticed: I am a little in this low-level computer science stuff, like OS kernel, assembly, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, and such, …

So my latest pet project, for the weekend education was resurrecting the T2 MIPS port. And as such I had some fun porting dietlibc to MIPS64.

And what a fun ride that was, looking forward to see how MIPS develops on the smart-things side of life!