The next day we enjoyed the beuatiful weather in and around the pool, just relaxing and talking, playing some garden games (Boule, Beachball, Water-Volleyball, …) from time to time. We even witnessed a partial lunar eclipse that night!

Though the weather was predicted pretty bad (a lot of rain and strong winds) we again were rather lucky. It just rained a little bit Thursday night and it got story Friday, but that was it, the rest of the weekend was rather pleasant, not too hot or cold.
Because of the wind on Friday our pavillions mostly consistet of random sticks and fiber-reinforced tape by then. (Hail tape! What would I do without it?)
As I didn’t expect the parking area to be some sort of remote from the campsite, I removed the backseats from my car (which was surprisingly simple, cheers Toyota-engineers) in order to be able to fit my bicycle trailer in there. Arriving at the festival around midnight (the Filderstadt friends had saved some space for me), I realised that this was no necessary. As the concert area and the camping area were on different sites, there was plenty of space and one could just drive the car right to the campsite. With things beeing very well organised and easy going, I could just dive right into the festival spirit and relax. (Aside very good operated sanitary installations they also organised a small tent-supermarket with all the basics)

The next afternoon, Martin and I met at the beergarden in Leinfelden. After a laid back late brunch we went to Vaihing to get drinks for the party at Flowrider’s garden that night. At the mall we stumbled into a store selling nonsense gadgets like Hawaii flower garlands and soap bubble toys, of course we couldn’t resist and bought a bunch of the garlands and bubble toys for the party.
As things already got late, we drove straight to Flowrider’s party in the fields behind Vaihingen. The usual crowd barbecued and partied all night, getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes from the nearby pond.

Another big luck was the beautiful weather I had for the whole stay, just as I arrived at the airport on my way back home, it started raining again.

Cheers
Tim

Bilbao Airport:

Guggenheim Museum:

The City:

I know it has been a while, so let me give you a brief update:
As most of you probably know I moved to Darmstadt to start a postgrad position at the Department for Computer Integrated Design at the TU. I found a pretty nice flat at the southern outskirts of Darmstadt and settled in quite well so far.

The job is just in the field I was looking for, the intermediate area between engineering and information technologies and my project allows me to get around a bit.
So far for now, I’ll also add a few more details about my recent trips.

Cheers
TIm

All my boxes are packed and tomorrow I’ll be ready to go!

Let’s see when I’ll be able to post again, hopefully activating the DSL-line won’t take too long!

Cheers
Tim

After I spent the last few years in Germany without a car, I recently decided (with the push of my parents) to get me a used car. The decision which car to buy was rather easy, as I quite liked the Toyota Yaris which the ADAC (German Car Club) rated best in its class regarding runnig costs. (fuel consumption, maintenance, etc.) After just one week of browsing the offers I can now introduce you to Zaphod, sticking to my previous namespace, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Happy new year everyone!
Tim

The panoramas were created using hugin, a really nice tool for mostly automatic panorama stitching.

Local Culture

I made it home well, right in time for quite a few late summer / autumn festivals. The first and biggest was the traditional Wasen, a few weeks later I visited the Fellbacher Herbst for the first time. A pretty nice wine festival in the heart of, you guessed it, Fellbach with live music and many booths selling local wine and food. The last local festival in that row was the Krautfest, a festival around Filderkraut, which is typical for the Filder region and only produced here.

Good old Friends

Two weeks after I returned back home some good friends from highschool times and I went to Switzerland. The first day and evening we spent in Basel, joining with one of our friends who had worked there for his studies. After we finally decided on a restaurant I had a really nice wild boar roast which I won’t forget for quite a while.
The second day we drove to Luzern and started hiking up the Pilatus with fog all around us, one could barely see 50m. Overall the elevation difference would have been 1600m in one day, but in my corrent condition I gave up at about 1000m and took the cable car to the top. There we had a reservation for the hotel and enjoyed a relaxed evening (the others were totally tired as the last 600m were the toughest part).
Sunday the fog had cleared and the view was really marvellous. After a brief sunbath we took the cable car back to the lower station where we had parked the car and spend the rest of the day browsing around the inner city of Luzern.

The Studymates

The last weekend of October my group of best friends from the aerospace studies in Stuttgart gathered in Hamburg. The first day had a bar crawl through the Schanzenviertel and along the Reeperbahn.
After everyone had recovered from the night before, we went down to the pier (Landungsbrücken) and took a boat trip around the warehouse district (Speicherstadt) and the harbour. After that we just walked around downtown a bit and found a really nice and small mexican restaurant where we managed to get a table for the nine of us. After a good meal and some Tequila we retreated to Oli’s place where most of us stayed and had a rather calm last evening.

My Grandma’s 88th Birthday

As we planned the gathering in Hamburg quite a bit ahead, I could arrange that it would be the same weekend as my grandmother’s 88th birthday. So Sunday I got up a bit earlier, took the bus to the main station to get a few fresh flowers and visited her. It is truely amazing how clear her mind is, everytime I really enjoy talking to her. As usual I ate quite a bit more than I had planned, but I guess that’s a universal fact for grandmas all over the world!

Cheers, Tim.

The small glasses and the lack of authentic German food aside, this Fest was definitely a good experience.
Cheers, Tim.

Cheers, Tim.

I’m sure this will be fun:

The new place is really nice, with a big spacious kitchen and a backporch with a big open space.

Victor Wooten Concert
Ben and Zach had been telling me about Victor for quite a while, claiming he is one of the best bass-players ever! As always I was a bit skeptical.
Arriving at the Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points, Ben first went to the Turkish place next door for some falaffel. Sitting in front of the snack bar, we started chatting with the owner, who told us that they just opened that weekend. A little into the talk he realised where I was from and started talking German! He and a few more of his staff had spent a few year in Germany before coming over to the US. Being a really nice guy, he offered me a free falaffel, which I couldn’t refuse, and it indeed was very good!

With some food in our bellies we went back to the Variety Playhouse to see the concert. And I must say Ben and Zach were SO right with their raving! Victor Wooten really is one of the best, if not the best, bass-player I have ever seen performing! Toghether with a really amazing band they just blew my mind away! Every single musician was so good and as they seemed to be playing just for the fun of it, the whole concert felt more like a jam in some friends livingroom.
You can find the photos i took right here in the gallery.

In the meantime I switched from sweet tea to Pilsner Urquell, but lets just go on …

Graduation Day in Columbia
Three weeks later Zach and I drove over to Columbia for a weekend, as it was Mitul’s graduation day.
This being the second trip to Columbia (we went there for St. Patrick’s Day as well) I must say I really like this city with its central bar district and pretty much all of Ben’s and Zach’s friends living really close to the downtown area. One funny thing that evening, highlighting the absurdity of some of the regulations over here, was that we got refused to enter a bar because Zach and Steven were wearing “Gang Style”! Yeah! Those two guys really look dangerous! ;-)

Everybody being a bit tired from the night before (hanging out at Chubby’s) we just went to a nice spot at the river and relaxed there, playing with Jerry, Janna’s crazy dog. In the evening we went to a nice restaurant where they were brewing their own beer and got some nice southern food.

Plum Hollow Bluegrass Festival
Steven, who I just got to know on our recent visit to Columbia, told me about this Bluegrass and Moonshiners Festival in northern South Carolina and that he planned to go there. As I always liked small festivals and Bluegrass we planned to meet there and camp out for the weekend.
After a relaxed ride north to Spartanburg on the interstate 85, I arrived in the area around noon and soon realised that this is as cliche as it gets! When I had to ask for directions I could barely understand the heavy southern accent. The whole town was decorated with US flags and on the roads you could only see pickup trucks. After a few extra turns I made it to the Plum Hollow farm, where Steven was already setting up his special campsite. A nice hidden spot, with quick access to the whole festival.

As I expected sitting around a campfire at night, i had prepared some stick-bread, which is mostly unknown in what the Americans call the world and the rest of the world calls the Unites States (sorry i couldn’t resist :-D ). So the first evening Steven and I were wandering around the campsite, joining different groups around their fires, spreading stick-bread and trying moonshine people brought along. Soon I was known as “The German with the stick-bread” all over the festival (around 200-300 people I would guess).
The stage was set up nicely right in front of the forest with a well needed tin roof providing some shade for the listeners. So bluegrass bands were playing pretty much all the time till around midnight, when people would move to their campfires and start playing their own music, jamming with others.
I managed to record two songs with my camera and converted them to mp3-format:

•  Puttin’ On The Ritz (download)
•  Wagon Wheel (download)

the first two pictures below show that scene at about 2am around a pavillion.


Overall I must say this was all I hoped it would be! I really enjoyed spending the weekend with these friendly and down-to-earth people sharing food (thanks for the fresh-hunted deer burgers) and a great time!Well … that’s about it … hail to those who made it all through this long post, I know how short the average attention span these days is.
Hope I manage to get my lazy bum up and write more often, so I don’t end up with these almost “half-year-reviews”.

To cite Tony Blair: “That is that, the end.”

I’m sorry I haven’t updated this site in the last few weeks, but I was pretty busy settling in at my new town.

Let’s do this in a chronological way. After doing my thesis-presentation, I had three days left to get my bags packed. With a little overweight, I left from Stuttgart airport, boarding a direct flight to Atlanta, GA.
As I had slept pretty bad the night before, and just had a few short naps on the plane, I was pretty worn out by the time I arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson. The long immigration procedure and the double checks of my luggage didn’t really relax me either.
After I picked up my rental-car outside the airport, I made it to Kristi’s place rather easily, meeting her again after three years. She had invited me to stay at her place for the first few days, which was soooo helpful! (Thanks so much Kristi!)

During this first week I managed to find a nice shared flat, just about five minutes away from my new workplace, Engineous, Inc.
My new flatmates, Zack Zach and Ben, are two really friendly, laid back Americans, both from South Carolina. Ben works as a webdesigner while Zack Zach studies epidemiology. We share a nice kitchen connected to a well equipped livingroom (Cable, XBox, RC-Heli,Stereo) and two bathrooms. Amongst the amenities are a washer, a dryer, a mircowave, an ice-cube-making fridge and a really nice “Lean-Mean-Fat-Reducing-Grilling-Machine”. In the appartment block we also got a swimming-pool, a tennis-court and barbecues in the garden.

My workplace at Engineous is really nice as well, a small professional team and I got my own cliche cubicle! ;-)
The last few days I was pretty immobile, as I had returned my rental car. To get to work, Ben gave me a ride in the mornings and in the evnings. As America is really organised around cars (drive-thru-everything), I was looking for a used car. Last weekend Zack Zach and I were driving around the area, looking at some offers I had found on craigslist. In the end we found a 2000 Toyota Corolla, which is said to be one of the most reliable cars over here. As I didn’t have an insurance yet, Paul (another friend), whose insurance would cover any car he’s driving in, brought the car to my place, where it sat the last days, as I was waiting for my insurance to kick in. After getting all the needed paperwork together, I took “Heart-of-Gold” (her name) for a ride and got my the registration plates just today!

Actually I just came back from a round of tennis with Ben, though I lost 0:4 it went way better than I had expected after a break of ten years or more!

Well, so far for now, I’ll try to keep the updates coming more regularly.
Cheers, Tim.

just recently I came across a site of brillian nerdy geek humor by Ernest Cline (to cite him, this is “Airwolf”).
I especiallly loved “The Geek Wants Out“, either read it, or even better listen to it in mp3.

Cheers to you all,
Tim.

Tim

After learning for the last few exams, Jörn and I took our bicycles for a tour to the far end of the airport, where landing airplanes pass just a few meters above ones head. It’s pretty amazing to listen to the sounds the wingtip vortexes create in the air. On the way back we headed to a beergarden and had some great local food, Maultaschen with potatosalad. With a nice cold beer the perfect refreshment after a tour of about 30 kilometers.

So long (and thanks for all the fish ;-) ),
Tim.

After 24hrs in the vacuum bag, the first wing just looks great! It’s really stiff and strong, I just tested it for about 4g loading without any noises or anything. (a crackling noise is a first indication for overstressing the compound material)

The chord of the wing still is larger than the final wing, as the trailing edge is excess material and will be cut to the final shape later.

Cheers,
Tim (smiling)!

Yea, I know I haven’t updated in a while, so I’m doing this right now.
Aside the work for my assignment I’m, as always, learning for some upcoming exams, if nothing fails, these are my last ones!

As my last rc-plane got damaged during the last launch I’m working on a new one. Basically the same flying-plank concept, but this time with higher wingspan and thus higher aspect ratio. Another novelty will be a small electric motor (brushless outrunner) with a folding prop, to assist the time in between thermals.

The design of the wings is different as well, this time I cut a styro-foam core (with Joern’s help ;-) ) which I’ll cover with 1mm obeche veneer. First I tried using the rest of the styro and 36kg in water bottles to press the veneer to the core, while the epoxy was curing, but this didn’t work well in the strongly curved areas around the leading edge.

For some time I thought about using a vacuum system for the pressing, so this time I decided to finally build such a system. All I need is a airtight bag, to put the wing and veneer in and a vacuum-pump to evacuate the bag.
For the bag I got me some 0.09mm PVC foil which I then sealed with a hot wire on a wooden bar, pressing it to a flat surface.

To create the vacuum, I used a cheap aquarium-air-pump, reversing the tubes on the inside, measuring the pressure-difference with a small tube, hung on the wall of my kitchen with the open bottom end in a bottle of water. The height the water rises when a vacuum is created on the other end is proportional to the pressure-difference, with 1m corresponding to roughly 0,1 athmospheres. This showed a sufficient pressure-difference of about 0,3 athmospheres while the pump was still rather quiet.

On the last two pictures you can see how nicely this works. But these were just preliminary tests, without the epoxy. The real test will be tonight!

I’ll post some further update once I see how the final test worked.
Cheers, everybody!

My friends and I started the Worldcup with a nice barbie at Oli’s place.

Especially the night out after the match Poland - Germany was amazing, around 70000 people partying in the city. The best thing is that there’s hardly any violence or aggression!

But I think after that night I’ll need a few calm days without these crowds!

Cheers,
Tim.

As I haven’t written much in a while, I’ll just give a brief overview of the last events.

As the new version of Ubuntu was released this month, I organised a small release party in Stuttgart. Though this was quite spontaneous, we ended up with a group of six Ubuntu interested people.

A few days later Kathi and I randomly got to watch a pre-worldcup soccer theatre performance in front of the new castle in Stuttgart. Especially the pyrotechnics were really impressive!

I also started working on my assignment, focussing on evolutionary optimisation of rule based designs. Ask me in person if you want a more detailed description of this. ;-)

So far for this update, cheers …
Tim.

We went bbqing at the Max Eyth See

and had a nice afternoon flying our model planes in Scharnhausen.

I even managed to get up and give my flat a spring-cleaning!

Just yesterday I went to an interesting concert in the “Laboratorium“, some modern blend of balkan/gypsy music. The band is called KAL and consists of mostly young musicians from the area around Belgrad.
After a few songs more and more people got up from their seats and started dancing around the tables … really great athmosphere in that small venue.

So far for this update, have a nice time!
Cheers, Tim.

After learning for nearly 2 1/2 months now, my mind goes on strike. Words start to become meaningless rows of letters after a while. There’s hardly any difference between my brain and my dessert anymore!
Little more than a week and I’m done for this semester, finally! Hopefully the weather will be more like spring by then.

I’ll try to wobble some more nondestructive testing into my jelly-brain.
Cheers, Tim.

And some video as well: one of the first flights
Next I’ll get me a longer rubber, to get to a higher altitude from the begining, giving me more time to fearch thermals.

Cheers everyone,
Tim.

This time I also chose a thinner airfoil (JWL065) adding the need for a spar. To get a smooth surface, I’ll cover the wing with adhesive foil.

Read more once I managed to test this guy. ;)

Cheers everyone,
Tim.

To let you know what I’m doing at the uni, I posted a few pictures of the laboratories for non-destructive testing.

This is me, pictured by an infraredcamera; I guess those structures at the side of my forehead are veins.

These are the inner structures of my mobile-phone, x-rayed from behind.

The left picture shows a standard photo of the nosepart of some wing. The right shows the same part in ultrasound exited thermography, where the defect (a small crack between two rivets) shows up in white because it radiates heat.

Aside this we are preparing for the final presentation of our airliner-design and the last few days I started preparing for the tests coming up in the next months.

G’day everyone,
Tim.

Lately I managed to decide on a new monitor. After reading quite a few tests, I chose to order a Hyundai L90D+

replacing my old blurry Eizo T662 tube, which I had bought used three or four years ago.

It’s amazing how well logistics can work! It took less than 24 hours from clicking the “buy” button till the delivery guy rang at my door.

Aside that not much new to tell, my friends and I finished the work at the airliner design contest and handed in a report of 160 pages. After the final presentation I will put the paper online, for those interested in our work.

So far, have a good time!
Tim

Cheers everyone,
Tim.

A happy new year to everyone,
Tim.