Summer 2009

A lot has happened since my last entry. The biggest change in my life has been that I've decided to follow Gwen and return to Vienna. We had never planned to stay in London forever. But even sticking to the plan wasn't an easy decision as there is a lot I really like in London.

I've put together a tiny selection of some of the pictures from the last months.

In May Gwen and I spent a weekend with friends in Amsterdam. Here's a picture of Gwen, Reinhard, and me. Amsterdam with its canals is one of the prettiest cities I've visited.



One sunny Sunday in June Gwen and I were randomly walking through London when we bumped into a piano. No one was around so Gwen gave it a try. Street pianos are a great idea.



Another picture taken in June is this one. Gwen tried to teach me how to dance at a friends wedding. Tonight Gwen will be taking me to dance lessons.



Here's a picture taken in July. One of my favorite places near London is Dover with it's white cliffs.



In August my little sister visited me in London and we went to Greenwich. Behind the sky scrapers in the picture is where Gwen and I lived in London.



Also in August Gwen and I made a weekend trip to Paris where we saw this cute dragon. One of the nice things about London is that you can take fast trains to many great places (including Paris and Amsterdam). I never realized that - like London- Paris has many museums that don't charge admissions. This picture was taken in one of these visitor friendly museums.



And here's where Gwen and I have moved to. We're spending almost all of our free time trying to bring the house back into shape. The last 1.5 days I spent cleaning up the garden - now it's possible to use the drive way again!



One of the nicest things about the house is the view from the big roof terrace. Here's the evening view looking away from Vienna. It doesn't feel like living in a city.

Rampert Dance Company

Gwen and I saw the Rampert Dance Company tonight at Sadler's Wells.

We particularly liked the piece A Linha Curva. The stage design with the colorful lights, the energy, the choreography, and the samba beats were awesome. The percussionists even used berimbaus at one point.

Epping Forest

We cycled to Epping forest today. It's a beautiful ride along the canals.


Picknicking in the forest.


Huge soccer field: only about one third of the goals are visible in this picture.

Highly recommended: Justitia

Tonight was one of those evenings where Gwen booked the tickets in advance and all I knew was that we'd be seeing something. We were a bit late, and Gwen was running when we arrived at Sadler's Wells to pick up our pre-booked tickets. Except the performance wasn't at Sadler's it was at Peacock. Luckily the two are only a bit more than 5 minutes apart by bike if you move a bit faster than usual and you're really lucky with traffic lights (or pretend to be). We made it just in time.

We saw the dance theatre Justitia. And it was absolutely awesome! The stage design was beautiful yet simple. The story was interesting and kept me thinking. The timeline was non linear to the extreme: time-freeze, rewinding, parallel threads, and non chronological order. The dancing was great, they even had a part which reminded me a bit of this ping pong video. The music ranged from classical to electronic. Gwen and I even discussed if we'd want to see it a second time.

The only tiny bit I didn't like was that I didn't understand why her lawyer explained that her husband was a tyrant in court. That seemed counter productive to the story she was trying to sell to the judge.

Python rant: vague built-in data structures

It's surprisingly hard to find out details about built in data structures in Python. For example, the official python data structure tutorial talks about using lists as queues but doesn't mention that list.pop(0) is expensive (O(n)), and doesn't mention that the list is implemented as an array. The documentation of list is very short and omits details related to computational complexity. I like how Java in contrast makes things a lot clearer (LinkedList vs ArrayList etc).

I wonder if the decision was based on the assumption that those using Python wouldn't want to bother with computational complexity? (On the other hand they introduced array in Python 2.6.)

To quantify this rant I Google searched for "<language>" "data structure" "computational complexity". Below are the number of estimated search results.

8990 C++
8780 Java
4090 Matlab
3020 Python

Even Matlab scores higher than Python!

Oxfam Festival Steward Training

Last Thursday Gwen and I attended the Oxfam steward training. Gwen will be volunteering at 4 festivals this year, and together we'll be volunteering again at Summer Sundae Weekender.

Gwen and I should have already attended the training last year, but all training sessions were booked out when we tried to sign up. So this year was our first one.

The training was 3 hours long. The material that was covered would have normally put me to sleep within seconds. (Especially with the lack of sleep I had.) However, the trainer turned out to be a really good entertainer.

We learned lots about what to do if someone comes running out of a festival tent and is on fire. (Depending on how bad the burns are and if the person is still able to follow advice, one option is to kick the persons feet off the ground and role them over. Breaking a leg might be the least to worry about in that situation.)

We were also given lots of fun examples of how to communicate with those under the influence of hallucinogenics. We saw videos on how to not help an ambulance drive through a crowd, and generally learned a lot about various potential dangerous related to crowds.

Btw, Oxfam are still looking for volunteers for this year.

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park

I pass through this cemetery on my way to work.