We all know, getting into your university of choice can be quite hard. But, who knew getting out of one (properly) is almost equally as complicated?

I am telling you, the university wants to see how much I can suffer, one last time. By sending me across campus multiple times to acquire signatures and pick up forms. And stand in line (first to pick up the form, then to fill it out, then to hand it in, then to pick up the signature). And by telling me that they decided to close their office on Mondays. And Fridays. And to open it between 10 and 12 only, the rest of the week. By-appointment-only, naturally.

Oh, and by closing my favorite on-campus coffee place, of course.

Now, it’s not all that bad, really. There are also interesting new discoveries to be made. Like, that the computing center (Rechenzentrum) apparently has a women-only computer pool. In an imaginary press release, they might say: “The new, three-desk facility was established to give all women studying computer science in Karlsruhe room to work at once.” Of course, I am exaggerating. The actual student statistics for 2008 reveal a whopping 10 % of students in computer science are women here. And at any rate, the computing services are used by students in other departments as well. But, more seriously, what’s wrong with the other computers? Guess I’ll never know.

(The picture shows the department of business/economics at the university of Karlsruhe in 1967. The buildings still look quite the same today. In the background, the Karlsruhe residence castle. CC by-sa licensed by the Germany Federal Archives on Wikipedia Commons.)

This week, I handed in my master’s thesis (German: Diplomarbeit) with the title “Transaction Management Challenges For Federated, Workflow-Based SOA Applications”:

Need I say more?

Searching for “Karlsruhe” on Amazon.com, I found a few sellers that reprint old photochrom (sic) photographs from the collection of the Library of Congress. Among them, these three beautiful old photos of my university city Karlsruhe (Baden), dated somewhere around the turn of the last century:

First, the “General View of Karlsruhe” as seen from the residence castle, facing south.

This one, “Lake in Public Garden” shows the Stadtgartensee, which is now inside the Karlsruhe Zoo.

At last, the Vierordtbad — a public, in-door pool, that’s been built in the 1870s. Completely renovated in the early aughts, it has now as “young” a look as ever. (Side note: The picture title is, incorrectly, “Vierortsbad” = “four city bath”, but it was actually called after a gentleman named “Vierordt” who donated some 40 % of the original building costs back in the day).

Very nice photos! But, while this makes the city look “old”, Karlsruhe is actually quite the kid, compared to other German cities. It was not founded until 1715, when the Margrave of Baden-Durlach decided to build a new residence — and a nice little city to go with it.

Carnegie Mellon’s wireless network makes me sad: I get about 20 KB/s of constant noise (all day, every day) from, mostly, Windows computers announcing their presence to the outside world via broadcast packets.

In the “network” window, this looks like that:

If this is a secret ploy with the intention to empty everybody’s laptop batteries as fast as possible, it’s working! Then again, unlike University of Karlsruhe, CMU puts power outlets into every seat when they drop a bucket of money to renovate a lecture hall. At my home university–with the exception of the new library–laptops have to be mostly powered with their owners’ love and respect: Places with appropriate power connections are rare.