Too Far Afield

If you could use a guest ticket for Systems, a fair for IT, media and communications in Munich (23.10.2006 – 27.10.2006), please contact me and I send it to you by mail. I got this ticket today and I can’t be in Munich during the fair, so I’ll give it to the first one, who asks. For free as in beer of course.

Today I got a letter with an old school stamp. The sender address was just a post-office box in Hamburg – no name was specified. At first I was a bit surprised. Personal letters normally contain sender names – not only a post-office box. Company letters do not have stamps at most times. Instead, a postage meter marks the letter with a special mark, thus producing evidence of postage (in German: Freistempelung). Turned out, that the letter was sent to me by my bank. It contained a new cash card. This seems to be a new layer of security by obscurity – actually quite nice. I wonder, if it really helps, though. I mean, the letter was actually sticking out quite a lot by using this combination of no specified sender name and an old school stamp…

Network connectivity of our computer science department has been down the whole day now. Turns out the network link between Stellingen Campus and the main datacenter of the university is somehow broken. According to our operating, there is a break somewhere in the cable. Connectivity is expected to be down till later tomorrow morning until at least sometime tomorrow evening till Friday.

For reference:

• Status page of the main datacenter regarding this outage
• Stellingen network status part 2