So I waited until Thursday, the appointment was between 12:00 and 18:00 and the technician did show up at 17:20. The only problem was that he had broke his diagnosis tool, making it impossible to fix my line. How great is that? Anyway, he promised to come back on Friday morning at 10:00, hopefully with a new diagnosis tool. Well, I waited until Friday 10:00 and guess what, no technician. 20 minutes later, the technician called and told me he would come a little later because he’s busy with another costumer. So I waited and waited and at 12:00, he finally came. Well, after running around testing things for an hour, he finally managed to get a sync with his diagnosis tool, but still couldn’t get my modem to sync with the line. He simply told me that the modem is broken and I should get a new one as he doesn’t have any replacement hardware. How I do that is my problem, but he won’t charge the €100 because the line was broken too. So I still don’t know why my line is broken and now, when it is finally fixed, I don’t have any hardware to go online. WTF!

Unluckily, my VDSL modem is more than 2 years old, so it’s already out of the warranty, so I decided to call T-Com to ask for new hardware. They have a special hot-line for ordering hardware, but it costs 14 cent/min! What kind of rip of is that? I called the normal support hot-line (which is free) and let them transfer me the the hardware hot-line. A quite unfriendly and nerved service lady picked up the phone and after I told her the story, she told that I can either buy a new modem for €80 or a new router with integrated modem (W920V) for €199. OMG, I’m paying €70 every month for my VDSL line and after a whole week offline, I should still pay a whole fortune to get new hardware? Any other ISP would have given out the hardware for their long term customer for free (I know that from 1and1 as my girlfriend is using it and she just got new hardware). I told her that 1and1 is offering the same VDSL now for €20 less each month, free hardware and €200 bonus if I switched, but I’d stay with T-Com if they give me some hardware to go online with. Guess what she answered: “Sorry, I can’t do that, I guess you’ll just have to switch” I seriously didn’t know what to answer to that. I mean, doesn’t the T-Com want to keep me as their customer? I’m one of the few people using their most expensive packages right from the beginning. Is this the way early adopters are treated now? I recommended a lot of people for VDSL at T-Com, but that is over now!

As my contract is still going for a few month, I went on eBay and bought myself a new W920V for €100, thats half the price than what T-Com wants from their paying costumers!

Spiele auf dem Handy (PDF)

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.

1. The less the a Li-Ion battery cell is discharged, the more often you can charge it. Discharging 5% will allow you to charge it hundreds of thousands of times, while completely depleting it will drop the charging cycles to below 10 times. Luckily, most batteries will turn themselves off once discharged to 40%. Here is the thing about cheaper batteries promising to have more capacity than original batteries. Li-Ion cell’s power capacity is limited, so to increase the usable capacity, the manufacturer can either increase the battery size or allow deeper discharges. The second choice is a cheap way to buy “more” capacity by lowering charging cycles.
2. A Li-Ion battery will go bad on its own. The only question is how fast. When a Li-Ion battery is fully charged, it’ll lose about 20% a year of its capacity when stored at 25°C, or 35% when stored at 40°C. Placing a fully charged cell in the fridge at 0°C will slow down aging to about 6%. A only 50% charged cell will only age for 2% a year at 0°C or 4% at 25°C. This is the reason why notebook batteries are always half-charged when shipped. Lower temperatures will slow down aging, but never cool them below -25°C, which will break the battery.

So the big question is how should one use their battery to get the most out of it. A lot of friends ask me this question, as most known battery hints are either for Ni-Cd or Ni-MH batteries and not for Li-Ion batteries. I usually tell them to charge when it is convenient and use when needed. The thing with Li-Ion is that charging cycles will drop when discharged deeply. But if you keep your batteries always full, they’ll age a lot faster. So when the best trade-off is to charge them fully and use them right afterwards and recharge when you know you’ll be using it again soon.

Some people bring their own food to the university, but I like my lunch to be a hot meal, not some cold sandwich or similiar. So that’s not a solution for me. Until a few days ago, I didn’t had a choice and tried to avoid to eat at the university. Now everything changed, thanks to the Get2Card. With it, you can eat 2 for 1 at a lot of restaurants in Berlin, just like “Schweinske”, right next to the TU-Berlin. Their meals start from €5.00, so with the Get2Card and someone else who’s just as hungry as you, you can eat for €2.50 in a real restaurant, with someone serving you. The portion is about twice to tripple of the Mensa-Meal, so you get a really good tasting meal, with more than twice as much meat, salad and a side dish for as cheap as a Mensa meal. Did I already mention that it tastes really good as the meal is freshly prepared for you and not kept-warm like in the Mensa?

When you think about it, a real restaurant can make money when they sell food for €2.50 to you. It’s fresh and tasty and there is a waitress serving you. How come the Mensa, which gets financial support from the government, can’t offer it for the same price? Where is the money going? I mean the Mensa only offers meals with less than half of a portion of the restaurant for the same price without any service, but they’re still unable to make it eatable. Something fishy there… As for me, I’ll never go to the Mensa again.

I have to admit that didn’t expect that driving next to the river Elbe with the bike would be that beautiful. The have a really well build bike road there right next to the water, where you can enjoy the view to the other side of the river. Our first goal was “Belveder”, a hotel/restaurant on the cliff of the Elbe. Unluckily, the restaurant was on the other side of the river and on top of the cliff, so we had to first cross the river and then climp the cliff. But once we reached the top, the view was really beautiful and the food was really nice. I had the best “Schnitzel” I’ve ever eaten there. It was kind of hard to guess the prices though, as we didn’t have any Czech koruna, the currency of Czech and neither did we know what the exchange rate was, so we actually didn’t know how much the food would cost. I picked the most expensive “Schnitzel” they had and paid around €10. I guess we’re lucky they accepted Euro, but it seems most of there costumers were German.

Hrensko, a picture from our bike tour

The next day, we wanted to go inside the Saxon Switzerland national park to see the Schrammsteine, but unfortunately, it was raining really bad that day. We did climp up, but because of the bad sight, there wasn’t much to see. So the second day ended pretty much with us having completely wet pants climbing up and down. It was really fun though. I definitely need to get waterproof pants for my next trip.

A view from the Schrammsteinaussicht

On the last days, the weather changed completely, again, so we went to the “Schrammsteinaussicht” to finally see the Schrammsteine. Our program for this day is really full now, after not beeing able to do anything the day before. So after enjoying the incredible view for a while, we descended for our next destination, the “Pfaffenstein”. After climping to the top of the Pfaffenstein, we were quite astonished to see a huge restaurant there, right on top of the mountain. It seemed like it is a really well visited mountain there. After we reached the “Baberine”, an emblem of the Saxon Switzerland, we quickly understand why. You really need to go there and see for yourself. It’s simply incredible.

Two targets are now left for that day, the fortress “Festung Königstein” and the “Bastei”. I think I don’t need to describe how beautiful both are. There is one thing on the fortress “Festung Königstein”, the biggest fortress in the mountains of Europe, that really fascinated me. It was their well and the system how they got their water. Over 150m deep and I believe 5m in diameter. It was a little creepy looking down this huge and endless hole. As for the “Bastei”, there is that incredibly famous stone bridge there, the “Bastei Brücke”, connecting “Neurathen” with the “Bastei”.

Looking from Neurathen

After this short trip, we decided that we definitely want to go there again. It is so beautiful there…

Whenever a client connects to the server, the server will look through all existing users and check if there is one that has the same account. If no, it allows the client to continue normally. If yes, it will send a “alive” message to the other client and first let the new client continue as usual. At the same time, it will wait for an answer from the other client. If a message is received, the new client will get disconnected, as the user is already connected.

This approach works very well on my server. To make this system work for guests too, a unique key would be needed for each user, which should get saved as a flash cookie (browser wide). That will also prevent the user trying to join by opening the chat in different browsers.