All posts by Sascha

Munich Hamburg Munich Oxford Munich Geneva Munich

27 September 2014CERN, Geneva, GeoCaching, Germany, LEGO, Munich, Outreach, Oxford, Physics, Switzerland, UKSascha

What should I say, the last week has been quite interesting and maybe a little bit too much.

Friday, 19 September it all started with a – at first – smooth road trip from Munich to Hamburg. Unfortunately, two road blocks turned the whole thing into an exhausting ten hour drive.
After some relax time with friends (greetz), it was time for the first BYOPD event in September on Saturday. The “Tag der Forschung” (Day of Research) at the HZG in Geesthacht turned out to be very successful event for BYOPD with over 75 participants. After eight hours of science, Legos and kids, the day found a deserved end with a great BBQ (thanks).
On Sunday it took me another ten hours to drive back to Munich. Only bearable due the fact that I found a very nice geocache along the way ;)

After a too short night, I was on the way to Oxford to spend some days (including my last two days of parental leave) talking and thinking about SUSY after the restart of the LHC in 2015.
Here it also turned out, that I apparently not only found treasures on my previous road trip, but also two ticks happily

After finding my way back home and sleeping for four hours, I made my way back to the airport (good thing the ticket I used to get into town was still valid) with all the Legos to go to Geneva.
The PopScience event – part of the European Researches’ Night – took place the FNAC store in the centre of Geneva and featured yet another BYOPD event in September. Not as big as the other one, but still with some very nice contributions.

Today there’s finally some spare time to write this and I am very much looking forward to get to the airport and back home :)

The past weeks

2 September 2014Berlin, GeoCaching, Munich, NurembergSascha

Being on parental leave and partially in the offline world over the past weeks has caused my blog to run a bit dry. So being back in Munich it’s a good time to wrap up some of things that happened.

I’ve had my first ever geocaching giga event (Mia san Giga!). In fact, the whole world had its first giga event on 16 August 2014. Though I only stayed shortly at the main event, I, together with some fellow cachers (greetz), used the day to do some more geocaching and had a nice walking tour somewhere south of Munich.

After that, we took off for some holidays in and around Berlin, which turned out to be surprisingly disconnected from the online world, again full of geocaching and filled with meetings … with friends, not work (greetz to everyone).

On our way back home, and due to the twelve hours of horrible traffic on the southbound highways we had already faced, we decided to have a little break and stay for one night in Nuremberg. We got ourselves a room in a well located Youth Hostel, right next to the old castle and used the time to see some parts of the city.

Now we are back in Munich trying to get back to a bit of routine …

B2M

2 August 2014Berlin, MunichSascha

Today, I changed the license plates of my old and new Hyundai from Berlin plates to Munich plates. I had to destroy the Berlin Bear seal on my old plates myself. An emotionally moving moment, which the Bavarian clerk did not fully grasp. She tried to calm me down by offering me the Münchner Kindl as substitute, but as you can see, she failed to know their own seals. It ended up to be the lesser coat of arms of Bavaria. Well … in her defence, the Kindl ended up sitting in one of the papers I got , but still.

In the end, I have to say that I was quite impressed by the efficiency of my visit at the authorities. Despite the waiting time (57 people in front of us and today no advantage in bringing the your little son), the whole procedure, including office work, payments and pressing/printing the new plates only took 20 minutes. The fact that we jumped on the wrong train afterwards, did probably cost me more time after all.

Excitement

18 July 2014LMU, MunichSascha

… well … at least a little bit of entertainment.
I was volunteered to call 112, smash the window and hit the fire alarm button at the institute today … yeah :)

H&G – FIFA World Cup

16 July 2014Honour & GlorySascha

What to say? I guess we all agree that this year’s FIFA World Cup had quite some excitement. Not only on the Honour & Glory side, but also on the football side as well ;)

Jokes aside … Germany is now on par with Italy in having four titles (only Brazil has five), Klose is now the sole top goalscorer and I won H&G :)

I guess, I should thank everyone for taking part in this year’s Honour & Glory highlight and congratulate especially Teresa and Anne for their second and third place, respectively. Your trophies are waiting for you!

Besides that, we had a new all-time high in the number of participants (21, with an average of 16) and a couple of achievement that deserve to be mentioned. Michael and Teresa managed to gain points in eight consecutive matches. Bernd, Carsten and Michael even got three consecutive matches right to the exact score. Anne lead the board for in total 37 matches, though wasn’t in the top three as much as Teresa and me (56 matches). In any case congratz for these records as well. You can find those and more below the now final standings table, matchboard and scoreboard. The (relatively) new football all-time stats now also includes the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

As you might have seen already, I also introduced the new bets view in the matchboard, which since this year’s semi finals shows the bets of everyone as soon as the match started.