Today marks two major turnarounds in my life.

Today I have handed in my Bachelor’s thesis. This means my Bachelor studies are finished now. Good bye university. We might meet again for a Master’s degree someday …

Also today I have signed a contract with SoundCloud. This means that starting in September I will be an API developer there.

Both are big news. I’m going to write more about each of them in the following days. But for now I am off celebrating!

]]> http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1326/feed/ 0 http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1244/ http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1244/#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:14:22 +0000 Johan http://www.freenerd.de/?p=1244

I am currently sitting in a cottage in the woods some kilometers east of the town Hazyview in East South Africa. The 3G network is more stable and faster than I have ever experienced it in germany.

In South Africa the summer has just ended and autumn has broken, which means that it is not getting warmer than 30°C … good for us. Furthermore it is raining every now and then cooling down the air even more.

We arrived here yesterday in the night, after a 2-days-1-night travel from Berlin to Doha/Katar to Johannesburg. We fetched our cars (decent mini-family-vans with an undersized engine, not in the above picture) and drove to our accomondation. Door to Door about 37 hours.

Today in the morning, we drove to a clinic in a rural part of South Africa. In these area the inhabitants are mostly poor, mostly black and often without a tap water connection at there home. It is one of these parts in the country where the legacy of Apartheid is visible a lot. A former ghetto that has not yet been reconnected.

The journey to the clinic led us first through a very touristic area where one high-prized hotel followed the next. We then took a well-built asphalt road driving north. We left that road for a dirt road as you can see it on the picture above. After a long time (which we mainly used for regretting not to have a 4×4 offroader) we arrived at the clinic.

The clinic is part of a SAP Research project where they test the usage of computer technology in the rural primary health system. After having a tour around, we started to deploy our system. We plugged our server into the local network and set-up terminal test computers.

Then we spoke with the hospital staff about their processes and their opinion on our system. The buglist piled up fast … but so did our understanding of how things work in the clinic.

One of the biggest issues for us during the tests was the language, because even though the people speak english, it is sometimes hard to understand them. Which is the same for them with us as well …

During our stay technicians showed up at the clinic to install a satellite dish for an internet connection. They have not succeeded yet in installing (“we have to cut down some tree branches, otherwise we cant see the satellite”) but they will hopefully do so tomorrow. This internet connection will allow us to maintain the system from germany and to get feedback on the usage of it.

We finished the day with driving to another clinic and having a talk with the staff about their processes and opinions.

On thing, that astonished me during this day, was how near first and third world are. From a shopping center of european standard to an area, where people walk on a sandy half-destroyed road carrying tapwater to there home in less than 20 minutes.

During the next days we will continue working in the clinic, finding out how we can introduce real-life meaning to our bachelor project (and eventually make some sort of scientific sense with this trip).

(read the second part of the report here)

I’ll hopefully be able to tweet and send some photos … and I am really excited right now. It is actually the first time ever that I am leaving Europe.

• What have you been thinking about lately?
• What have you been working on lately?
• What is important to you?
• What have you been excited about lately?
• What is your story?
• What is the most amazing thing you have seen today?
• How do you like to spend your time?

Print or bookmark them and use the questions at the next opportunity.

[based on this post and the comments]

Du bist Terrorist (You are a Terrorist) english subtitles on Vimeo.

This is not a joke. Watch the video. Check the website.

At the moment, there is a petition at Bundestag going on demanding further investigations into this matter. You can sign it online here (until 17.02.09). It’s worth the 2 minutes.

If you need more information check Wikipedia (deutsch/english) or the site of the supporters of the petition (deutsch).

[ via dataloo ]