Blog | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

I just returned from an experiment where I got paid for playing with LEGO Technic. Kind of reminded me of how I spent huge parts of my early christmas holidays… However, the thing today had a serious background: A psychology student wants to find the best way of presenting information to untrained workers. That’ll help to enhance the cognitive factory, another project of the CoTeSys cluster of excellence.

End of the Bladenight season for this year. Doesn’t seem like there’s anything similar in Shanghai.

Today the MusikSommer 2007 ended with a great concert of the Sinfonietta, the symphony orchestra of TU München. The Russian evening (“Bajuschki baju”), featuring vocalists as well as a dance group, took place at the Theatron in the great ambience of the Olympiapark.

I regret I didn’t know about the MusikSommer before, there would have been more interesting events. I have to mark it on my calendar for 2009…. Done.

I was kind of surprised when I discovered several IKEA tables in a corridor at the university:

After one and a half hours of discussing whether it’s possible to do something tomorrow evening we finally agreed to meet at the library. After it closes at 20:00 h we have at most two hours until they need to continue studying. I think that’ll suffice for a warm meal. Don’t know if another friend will come along. They said she resolved to learn eleven hours tomorrow.

The intermediate exams in engineering are tough, no question, but that doesn’t mean you have to learn 24/7. This year’s freshmen are overdoing it a little bit. How could we succeed without brooding over our books all day long? Didn’t we manage to have at least some evenings were we sat together talking?

Before going north I assumed there wouldn’t be any fast people. Though I never had a problem with changing trains I often couldn’t cross four-lane streets at once because the green phases of the traffic lights were just sufficient to reach the traffic island in the middle of the road.

And at first it was hard to find the youth hostel because the house numbers aren’t counted the same way as in the rest of Germany where the odd numbers are on one side of the road and the even ones on the other. In Berlin they start on one end and then count up on one side turn around and continue on the other one. So numbers 9 and 34 may stand vis-à-vis.

Berlin is about to replace Paris as my favorite city. Never thought that could ever happen. The last time I’ve been there was so determined by culture, museums, sights that the city itself was forced to the background. But it’s such an amazing place.

In order to attend the Raumfahrer.net Meeting 2007 I am going to fly to Berlin tomorrow. The flight (500 km) will last 75 minutes, the train ride to the city (20 km) between 35 and 50 minutes.

By the way: The homepage of Verkehrsverbund Berlin-Brandenburg, the local public transportation network, lets you chose how you would like to change trains: normally, comfortably or slowly.

Aren’t there any fast people in the north? Or is it just a question of how you define “normally”?

Emmm… No.

Well, ok, the second line’s true.

I called Tongji University yesterday to ask them when the spring semester 2008 will start. They didn’t know, told me “the schedule is not yet aranged” and I should try again in november. The whole thing seems to depend on the Chinese Spring Festival whose date is well-known. I suppose it’s one of these intercultural challgenges we have to cope. ;-)

Just to show the difference to Germany: The winter semester 2008/2009 at TU München will be from October 13, 2008 until February 2, 2009.