Well, I instantly jumped back into the car and drove back to my home. If anyone has been to China before, they know how crazy the traffic is here: Big trucks driving really slow on the overtaking-lane, a whole bunch of beginners blocking two lanes at the same time and everyone too lazy to use their turn signal when changing lanes. Trying to get through all this is nearly impossible, but I had to try.

Once arrived at my home, I jumped out of the car, ran back to my home, up 15 floors, got the backpack, 15 floors back down and right back to the car. Running this much in Germany wouldn’t be a problem, but in Beijing, with the extremely thick air, it’s hard to breathe enough oxygen.

The time shows 13:05 now, only 25 minutes left until check-in ends. I felt my heart pumping more and more adrenaline in my blood. 10 minutes later, traffic jam! I couldn’t believe it! Why now? It’s lunch time, everyone should be sitting somewhere eating, not blocking my way to the airport! I took my phone out and called someone I know at the airport. “Get to the check-in gate for Hainan Airlines and tell them that I’ll be 5 minutes late! Try to check in for me. My passport number is…” – 2 minutes later – “No can do! They need to see your passport first!” – “Okay, get me a spot at the counter so I don’t need to wait!” Luckily, the traffic jam only lasted for a few minutes. At 13:20, the road was empty again. No time for speed limits now! 140km/h, 150km/h, 160km/h… OMG, a huge truck driving only 80km/h just switched from the rightmost lane to the leftmost right in front of me. The brakes squeaked and we stopped 5cm before the truck. Phew…

At 13:35 I finally arrived at the terminal. 5 minutes too late, will they still let me in? I dashed as fast as I can to the counter and showed the lady at the check-in counter my passport. She quickly checked my passport and gave me my boarding pass, which she had already prepared, tagged my luggage as extra urgent and told me to take it to the overweight luggage check-in so they can bring it on the plane real quick. I was so relieved.

This effect is caused by playing the sound “ba ba ba”, but showing the video for “ga ga ga”. You brain will see the lip moments and decide that the only possible thing to hear is “da da da”. People who can’t lip read at all will hear “ba ba ba” and hearing impaired will hear “ga ga ga”. You won’t encounter this effect in real life, because lips are always synchronized with the voice, but in some amateur dubbed movies, the is the possiblity of you hearing something which has not been said.

I’ve found a video on Youtube showing this effect:

Here is another with an complete sentence as example:

More about our trip can be found on my girlfriends website: Junny’s Homepage

I filmed a little with my N70, so here is the video:

Download this video (Right click, save as)

Yes, there is! It’s a fairly black colored liquid called “Coca-Cola”. It gets you awake and motivated quick and dirty. All you have to do is put 90 cent into the vending machine and press the big red “I NEED COKE NOW” button. But last thursday, something was different. I woke up after a short sleep, got to the university, walked in front of the vending machine, took out 1 euro and threw it into the vending machine. Then I pressed the bid red button. 5 seconds later: nothing happend. 10 seconds later: still no reaction from the machine. 60 seconds later: I finally realised that there was no coke bottle for me there. What happend? I hit the “GIMME MY MONEY BACK” button. But that didn’t seem to work either. So I started hitting and kicking that machine. But still, it didn’t even think about giving me a coke bottle or returning my money. A friend of mine was standing next to me and tried it too. Same thing, no coke! So we called the Coke-Vending-Machine-Service-Center. A friendly woman wrote down my name and cell phone number and promised me to pay my 1 euro back. Now I was really excited to see if Coca-Cola is really going to pay me back. This thought was so fascinating that it kept me awake for the rest of the day, so coke saved the day again!

So Sunday evening, when every lazy student like me realizes, that he has to get up early the next day to go to the university, he goes to set his alarm clock. But what time am I supposed to set it to? So here was my first problem: I didn’t have a time table because I was too lazy making one before. Well, I went back into my working room, started Firefox and opened TU-Berlin’s Homepage. One click on “VV” (university calendar) and I should be able to quickly plan my new term. Well, at least I thought so. My next problem just started. It seemed that TU-Berlin had so many more lazy students like me that the “VV” server had crashed by a deady DoS-attack (Denial-of-Service Attack) from thousands of evil little student computers owned by those lazy people just like me. So no way to look up courses now, or is there? Well, I called Jonas and asked him to send me a list of courses he has finished already so I could catch up. So now we used Google and tried to find our courses. And again the problems started. The results were mainly from 1994-1998, where the first websites started for those courses. But nonetheless, we found our courses after hours of searching. Here are some courses I’m taking this semster: Automatic image analysis, Analoge and digital electronics, embedded realtime systems and computer graphics.

http://www.creativitysquare.com

Well, there are a lot of people who were betrayed by them. Maybe they are too good-hearted or simply too greedy. But many of the betrayed definitely lost a lot of money and are having really hard life returning borrowed money or loans. Spam mails are really annoying, especially when they are trying to rip you off. But now I found a quite interesting site. It’s called 419eater. They reply to those spam mails and make those scammers do funny things. It is really quite fun to read the email conversation between those who are thinking they are scamming someone and those who pretend to believe the scam. In one of the mails they even got money from the scammer by scamming them. It’s quite funny. Have a look!