So I finally got around to watching Harry Potter 7 Episode One, and I thought I’d make a small (spoiler-free) review about it. I will not talk about the plot; you either already read the book and know it all anyway, don’t want me to spoil it for you, or don’t care. Instead, I will talk about how it got translated to the screen.
Here in Germany, we again have the debate about ending the draft, a change that I support. My guess: It’ll be gone by 2020, but survive this legislature period (which runs until 2013). In the debate about this, one hears a lot of phrases like “Staatsbürger in Uniform” (uniformed citizen) or “Verankert in der Gesellschaft” (anchored in society) as support for the draft and the dreaded “Staat im Staat” (state within a state) as the opposite. What the hell is all that supposed to mean?
I finally did it and wrote the spam filter that I had promised a while back. It was less work than I thought, actually. Anyway, you can now write comments again.
I had not originally planned to bother you with a blog post for this, but [Björn](http://gernert-net.de/) argues that I ought to. So behold, my new car!
I used to fight spam in comments here using a simple blacklist, which contained words that only spambots used and that were hence forbidden here. That worked pretty well. Now, however, I seem to be locked in some sort of epic struggle with a spambot who posts very similar posts, but has an astonishing variety of expressions at its disposal and thus manages to slip through again and again.
First of all: Sorry it took so long, I finally put up [a PDF version of the slides][slides] of my presentation on March 27th, 2010 about my bachelor thesis. The movie in there won’t play, this being PDF and all, but it really is just the same as in [my last blog entry about this][last], minus the “real” part because that just didn’t look good enough to be projected with a huge beamer.
Today was another day of “Bildungsstreik” (education strike, i.e. students protesting against failures of education policy) in Aachen. Just like [last time][lasttime] I was there to take some pictures from the sidelines. My guess is that it were less people than last time, though I have no way of saying for certain (it was still quite a lot). Here, a few pictures with minimal commentary. Each links to a larger version of itself.
Damn, I haven’t updated this in a long time, have I? Don’t worry, though, I will now post more here, as I have found a good topic: My bachelor thesis, which I recently started working on. Let me introduce you to it.
Aachen yesterday is exactly what the term snow chaos was invented for. Sudden snow fall, slippery roads and winter services that just couldn’t keep up brought most of the city’s traffic to a halt in the afternoon. An especially nice touch were the many bus stops on steep grades, where the buses were unable to start after having stopped. Some of that did that in the Seffenter Weg road, at the Kastanienweg bus stop. Since surprisingly many people were interested in the pictures I [posted of that on Twitter](http://twitter.com/zcochrane), I thought I’d post some pictures here as well, taken at the same time but with a real camera and tripod.
I’m currently remodelling my homepage, together with a new database, so I’m not really into posting new stuff at the moment, since I’ll have to then put it in the new database by hand. This, however, is something I really wanted to show:
Deutsche Version