• i’m living near olten (egerkingen)
• normally i work in aarau, so i have a subscription for egerkingen – aarau
• sometimes i have to visit clients around zurich

now you think: “easy, you’ll just have to buy a ticket from aarau to zurich”… but that isnt the case:
if the train stops in aarau (and its enough if it just stops, no need to change the train or something), you may buy a ticket aarau – zurich and won’t have any problem. but if the train goes directly from olten to zurich, without stop in aarau, you have to buy a ticket olten – zurich, or you’ll have to pay a monetary fine (CHF 80.-)…as if you would not have any ticket at all!

but…. what is the difference for sbb?

it would be too much to write about it, so i thought i’d just post my pictures, you can find them here: Pictures taken during my military service

i know i haven’t been blogging for some time, this was mainly because the past time i was really busy… however, it was quite worth it.

i finished my apprenticeship with really great grades (can be seen here, look for Pascal Schwarz) and got some gifts. one of them, which made me most happy, is an Asus EEE-PC 900. it works really nice

i won’t cover the things i did to install ubuntu on it, as there are a lot of docs in the net.

click on the pictures to get them in full size

about computer energy consumption
like a lot of technical equipment, computers need way more energy nowadays than they did let’s say 5 years ago. why has this to be this way? cpu’s today need around twice the power they did then. you can see this on this power dissipation page on wikipedia. let’s compare an intel core 2 duo e6600 (which is the cpu i’m using in my pc right now) and a pentium III with 1.266ghz. the energy-consumption raised by factor 2.
“but a core 2 duo is way faster than a pentium III” you may think. that’s true of course, but when we compare a pentium 4 with a core 2 duo, we can see that more performance can be done and still power can be saved.
what is way more extreme than the raising power-hunger of CPUs is the consumption of graphics cards. while graphics cards which were high-end 3 years ago did only need the power they got via agp they now have two extra pci-express-power-connectors and they dissipate around 100 watts in idle because the chip has a huge amount of transistors built into it. this xbit-article lists the consumption of of geforce 7 and radeon x1900 chips. here’s a newer article by tomshardware about this topic. as we can see, the newest cards need way more power than the ones in the xbit-article.
the question is: do we really need the newest hardcore gaming hardware, and maybe if we do, can’t we use another machine for the easier jobs like web browsing, receiving e-mail and so on?
I do it like that, my gaming machine (core 2 duo e6600, geforce 8800gts) is only used for gaming and video transcoding and so on. chatting, surfing and things like this are done on my notebook, which uses around 24 watts when I do the usual stuff.

about cars and public transport
with cars it’s not much different than with computers, except that a car needs way more power, so the effect on the environment is stronger. also, the energy a car uses is mostly (talking about gas and fuel) more “dirty” than the power the computers use. however the evolution of cars isn’t that different from the ones of computers (in the aspect of power consumption, of course).
nowadays we can build an engine with a given power way more energy-efficient than in the past. but is this done? no. people do rather want bigger cars, like tanks that need way more fuel and pollute the air stronger.
and what’s even worse: they don’t even care. that’s where politic fails today. cars that are unnecessary big and heavy need to be more expensive. it would probably be the best to raise the costs of fuel and put this money into environment protection, as it is intended with the co2 fee (german). this way it would be possible to charge the ones who are responsive for the CO2 production and not anybody or people who do already take care of this. and it would also motivate people to use means of transport that are less destructive for the nature.
another point where we see that political influence in environment protection isn’t strong enough is the following: 1.3 million trucks drive trough switzerland each year (german), most of them trough the gotthard tunnel. why? because it is cheaper than the transport on rails. but it needs way more oil and energy to drive a truck trough switzerland than to drive a train the same route. as we can see, oil-related goods are still not expensive enough.

about blogactionday
even if I wanted to write about the problem with our environment for a long time, I always forgot about it or didn’t take the time to do so. now there’s a really nice project (my girlfriend told me about) called the Blog Action Day that encourages bloggers to write about the environment on a given date. I think it is a really nice idea, and so I participated.

First of all, we didn’t really know where we were going, we only knew that there were some relatives of Sarah. After i made my ticket on wednesday, we took the train to Olten. But there was already a train conductor which stopped us because I made a mistake with my ticket. Strangely, he knew indemini and told us that there wouldn’t be a disco or something like this and that it really is in an area where nearly no people live….

5 hours and a small trouble with the postal car later, we arrived there and were really impressed by the small village with its own, old style.

We talked a little to Sarah’s relatives and then we went into a house which we could use for our 5 day holiday. It was really old and nobody lived in there for … let’s say 15 years. And it looked like it There was one room which was cleaned for us. This room was really haimish.

On the third day we went to a really nice small river with very cold water… However, it has been really nice there and we took some short baths. We have also taken some pictures of this spot which you can also find in my gallery. In the evening, we watched some movies on my laptop in our room and enjoyed the calmness in the village.

On the fourth day, the weather wasn’t that nice and so we didn’t do much special. We found a really nice spot a little higher in the village and chilled there a little. We had some nice discussions and watched another movie together.

Before we went home, we made a hike up to St. Anna (1432m over the sea) and took little Luisa with us. Later I had to carry her because we didn’t have really much time till the bus would go.

Alltogether, we had a really nice time in indemini and we were treated very well.

Links:
See my gallery
Indemini.ch

I’m still working at PMI AG in Aarau and I will have holiday the coming two weeks. I’m really looking forward to this, I didn’t have holiday for some time now.

I’m working with some interesting things with databases and I’m making progress with VBA. However, I’d more like to do some network related jobs.

The next week, from wednesday to sunday, I’ll visit Tessin with a friend of mine. After this me and my girlfriend will camp somewhere in Switzerland, maybe also in Tessin. We will have a nice time

I had a lot of work and also some private things (I’m not going into details) which really stressed me. But now the most important things are arranged and I’m looking forward to the things I’ve (maybe) been starting (and I’m also looking forward to the weekend, of course).

One thing is that I will maybe set up the virtual testing machines for the development in my company. More interessting than this is the fact that i explicitly told the PL that it would be much better to have a Linux-Distribution which hosts the different target-systems (mainly windows). He was quite impressed about what I told him and I think my chances aren’t too bad

I had to write a target agreement for my company for the next year (this is usual, nothing special) and I wrote that I want to get the lpi certificate in the middle of this year.

There were more things to tell but I’ll see if I’ll write about… Good morning

(and yes, I’m so atheistic, I don’t care much about)

however i had a quite good time the last few months. besides some less comfortable happenings i had a really good time at work because i had only 2 week blocks to work (work, 3 weeks course, 2 weeks work, holiday, 2 weeks work (now) and the last week of the year will also be free.
I’ll use this time to visit the kladde.org lan, which I also visited last year. I think at this time we’re having nice games to play at the lan, for example Serious Sam 2 and NFS:MW. Quake4 will also be played and we will surely not forget about Battlefield 2.
I ordered a game controller for my pc. I wanted to do this for a long time but I always forgot about. It will be very nice to play racing games and football simulations
on the technical side we’re waiting for our cvs mirror to be included in the offical gentoo ebuild. you can read what null wrote about on his blog. another thing i’m going to set up will be freenet, a p2p application that doesn’t allow censorship or control. I’m interessted what I’ll find in this network
yesterday the fc basel was very lucky to not be thrown out of the uefa cup. they managed to remain in the contest even if they lost (3:1) against as roma and it didn’t look good as belgrad lead 0:2 against strasbourg. but strasbourg ended the match with 2:2 what made it possible for basel to continue with their actual points.

I made some screenshots you might want to have a look at: