Diary

Today I bought a Vodafone SIM-card. People had told us it would be a lot cheaper to temporarily sign up with a New Zealand provider than to use international roaming from my normal provider. But this was not a great success. The card came with some initial credit so Julia started by calling her sister Tallie to tell her when we were planning to visit her, but she ran out of credit within a minute and I was forced to top up my account with another NZ$ 20 to finish the conversation.
At least we knew now when we would be expected in Eketahuna at Tallie and Henk's. But before we were to go there, I wanted to go North first, to the Bay of Islands. So that was our plan for the next day.

This last evening in Auckland I wanted to surprise Julia by going to a real top-class restaurant. In the "Yellow pages" I had found "dine by Peter Gordon". I am not sure why, but I had a strong hunch this was exactly what we were looking for.

I had made a reservation by telephone and 15 minutes before the agreed time we set out for 90 Federal Street. According to my map it should be very near the hotel. Federal Street was easy to find, but where was number 90?? Not a sign of it! So we still managed to get lost. But we came into the same street time and time again; it just had to be there!

We did see number 88. It looked like a big hotel and at the entrance was a very dignified door man. Maybe he knew where to find number 90? It turned out his speech was just as majestic as his looks. In the most perfect British English I have heard in all of New Zealand he said: "Dine by Peter Gordon? Yes, madam, that is in here. You just proceed into the lobby and walk right to the end. And there it will reveil itself before your very eyes." What a lovely use of language! And what good news: We were already there: The restaurant was housed in the hotel lobby.

  
It turned out I had guessed right: Peter Gordon is a cook with international fame and this restaurant has already gained several prizes for its quality. We were welcomed and served in perfect style. It was obvious to see this was going to be quite an expensive meal, but we deserved it!

As a starter Julia had "Warm sautéed Zany Zeus haloumi salad with fennel, shichimi spiced pine nuts, marinated zucchini, honey-comb, lemon, rocket and plantain crisps." and I decided to take "Ras el Hanout crusted baby squid on beetroot, orange, quinoa and hazelnut salad with garlic lemon yoghurt". For the main course we both had "Roast Cambridge duck breast on soft smoked polenta, cumin roast baby carrots and rainbow chard with truffled olive, radicchio and chestnut salad" and we drank a bottle of "Craggy Range 'Kidnappers' Chardonnay, Hawkes Bay 2007" with it. It is quite a mouthful, but that is exactly what restaurants are for.

After that we wanted our favorite dessert: A French Coffee, but they did not know that. So I explained to them how to prepare it and they set out to make it. Unfortunately the result did not meet our expectations: They did follow my recipe, but the coffee they used was by far not strong enough. What a pity. Maybe I should have explained the right way to make coffee first, but to me making coffee goes without saying. I had forgotten people abroad don't mean the same as Dutch people when they say "coffee". The staff was quite shocked by this result and they refused to let us pay anything at all for these coffees.

So the total bill came to NZ$ 200 and that is expensive indeed, according to New Zealand standards: It is the highest restaurant bill we have had in all our vacation. But yet... If you convert it into Euros, it is only 80 Euros. That is nowhere near enough for a dinner for two in a top-class restaurant in the Netherlands!

Labels: nz

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We quite liked Auckland by night. One of the most prominent features of this city, especially during the night is of course the Sky Tower. It is 328 meters (1094 feet) high amd that makes it the tallest building on the southern hemisphere. It dominates the skyline of the city and during the night it is illuminated to make it look even more pretty. We were standing at the base of the tower at 1 AM and I made this picture from a somewhat unusual angle.

Then it was finally time to go back to our hotel, where we officially celebrated the start of our vacation with a (Grand Marnier) toast! "Kia Ora!" (To your health!)
The next morning we started with an elaborate English style breakfast and then we went for a walk in the city. Suddenly Julia said:: "Hey, look at that, a dinosaur!" And indeed: The aotea moa (dinomithiformes) is a bird, but it is a very close relative of the dinosaur. For millions of years these were the largest land animals in New Zealand, until they were all exterminated about two centuries ago.
There were 11 species, and this is the largest of them (dinornis gigantues). It could be as big as ten feet, weigh up to 600 pounds and it laid eggs of up to 8 inches in diameter. So this is a life-size statue!

  
We ended up in the park and there it was quite obvious we were not in Holland any more. Look at these palm trees for instance. But there were more unusual species of trees to be seen, with very remarkable roots. Maybe these were mangrove trees? I don't know. I thought those only grew in wetlands or swamps...

  
That evening we took it easy. We were still very tired due to our journey and we had been walking in the city all day long. So we decided not to go find a restaurant, but we had dinner in our own hotel.

Labels: nz

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After all the necessary stamps had been put on the forms and in our passports in Los Angeles, we had to wait for our plane to be prepared for the next part of the journey. And then we were allowed back on board.

From Los Angeles to Auckland is even further than from London to Los Angeles: About 7000 miles. So this part of the trip would take even longer than the one before: About 12 hours. I can't handle being locked up for so long very well, but the prospect of a long vacation in New Zealand did make up for a lot of discomfort. Julia handles these things a lot better than I do. She slept a lot and she read her book. I had brought a book along with me too: "The Hobbit" by JRR Tolkien. There happens to be a strong relationship between the books of Tolkien and New Zealand, but more on that later.

I can not sleep in an aeroplane at all. And I kept my book for later. I preferred to listen to an audio book on the in-flight information system: "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't" by Jim Collins. Interesting stuff, but not applicable for me at work. I sure wish my boss would read books like this one!

If you have been paying close attention, you may wonder what I did on January 15th...
Well, there was no January 15th. for me this year! That has to be due to the fact that we crossed the international date line. When you travel, strange things happen to date and time. But January 14th. and 16th. were extra-long days for me. So that gives some compensation. Man was I glad to finally see the sunrise!

Finally even this flight came to an end and we could get out of the plane at Auckland airport. Here there were some formalities to deal with with the immigration offce too, but that is normal: They want to know who comes into the country of course.
The next step is the luggage claim and... You guessed it: Our suitcase was not there! So we had to go to a desk to report our missing luggage. This was all handled in a very polite and efficient way and we even got a "survival kit" with a toothbrush, soap, a clean T-shirt, some sanitary items and other things you urgently need when you've lost your suitcase. Our suitcase would be delivered to our hotel as soon as it would arrive. Great service!

Finally we were free to stand on our own feet and walk wherever we wanted again. First we went to the Hertz desk of course to pick up the keys to our rental car and the portable navigation system. We have grown totally hooked to our turn-by-turn navigation systems ("Rudy" and "Kitty") at home, so to be without one on our vacation is unthinkable! We decided to name this navigation system "Trudy"...

The first destination was our hotel: Rendezvous Hotel in the center of Auckland, at the corner of Mayoral Drive and Vincent Street. Even with Trudy's help it turned out not so easy to find that. Driving on the left side of the road in a busy city with a navigation system you are not yet familiar with is quite heavy. Finally we decided to park the car and go find the hotel on foot first. Julia soon found it and then everything was soon fixed. It turned out we had a very nice room with a large bathroom.

I had been up for 48 hour now without any sleep and Julia was quite tired too. So first I took a nice, hot bath and then I got into my bed.

We woke up at about 8 PM and we were full of energy again. Our biological clock told us it as early morning; not evening! We went into the city and we were surprised all the shops were closed. It should not have been a surprise; soon it was almost midnight.
There was hardly any restaurant that would serve us a meal at this time of the night. We did find a sort of Turkish takeaway where we could get some falafals... Made of Halal-meat!

Labels: nz

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The alarm clock woke us at 5 AM and we proceded to wash and get dressed. Julia had ordered a taxi to pick us up at 6 and take us to the railway station. Everything was well-prepared, so we even had some spare time. We knew there would be little opportunity to smoke during our travel, so we were glad we had time for a cigarette.

We were standing in the hallway at 6 AM, ready for the cab... But it did not come! At 6:05 I took another cigarette. Experience has learned me, that usually the bus will come around the corner as soon as you have lit one up. But this time it did not work. Even when Julia lit up a cigarette too, there was still no taxi coming. Was our journey about to fail even before it had begun?? Julia called the "Eindhovense Taxicentrale"... The phone was answered by the same guy she had spoken to the day before to order our taxi, but he pretended he had never heard of us. And he never drove at this time of day anyway, he said. So Julia called Cibatax and soon everything was fixed. We reached the railway station in time.

Once we were on the train, we could relax: We had made all the arrangements for this trip, now all we had to do is transfer from one transportation to the next and we would reach our destination in Auckland automatically. Julia immediately started reading her first book.

Check-in at Schiphol Airport went quickly and easily. And passport control was no problem either. It is so nice all my personal records now match again with my appearance: My passport and my ticket both have my female name on them. For most people this is nothing special, but I have had to travel with documents that still had my male name on them for years.

Once we were in the transit area, it was shopping time of course. As usual we got our maximum allowance of tax-free liquor and cigarettes. We got 700 ml Grand Marnier Rouge for 24,00 Euros and 10 packets of Dunhill for 30,25 Euros. It is a lot of money, but still it is about half the usual price.
Liquor is, of course, a liquid and liquids are not allowed in airplanes nowadays, but the bottles are neatly packed into sealed bags in the tax-free shop and those are allowed on board.

Speaking of cigarettes... Is there still a smoking area at Schiphol Airport? Yes there is! It was a bit difficult to find, but a bartender gave us directions in Amsterdam dialect. Understandably this smoking area is very popular amongst the passengers and it was very crowded: There was so much smoke in the air, you did not really need to smoke your own cigarette to get the needed amount of nicotine!

Then we were ready to get on the plane, but our flight was delayed again and again. We had to wait for hours so we had clearly gotten out of bed way too early. The first part of our flight would be to London Heathrow but we heard they had very heavy fog there, so they could not accept any incoming flights. KLM offered us vouchers for drinks and telephone to make ourselves comfortable and to make any necessary arrangements. So we returned to our new friend, the Amsterdam bartender. He not only spoke in Amsterdam dialect, but he also had the informal style of conversation that is typical of an Amsterdam pub owner.
He overheard our conversation about what to drink and immediately reacted to it. After all this coffee, maybe we should have a beer now? I was not so sure: Alcohol at this hour of the day? It was not even noon yet! Julia did not have any doubt: She wanted a Hoegaarden white beer. And I took one too: We will not likely find that in New Zealand!

Then, after several more hours, flight KL1009 was finally ready to go. A KLM Boeing 737 took us to Heathrow in little more than one hour. It was very fortunate it went so quickly, because all the slack we had for changing planes in London had been taken up by the delay!

People say Heathrow has been completely modernised, but we didn't see that at all. Just like in past years we had to cover a great distance on foot and by bus to get from one gate to the other. And we were running out of time. The signs were indicating they were about to close the gate for our connecting flight. All we could do was walk as fast as possible: Maybe we could still make it in time?
I also started to worry about our suitcase: Would that be able to make the transfer as fast as we did? In my fantasy I saw our suitcase had grown a pair of legs and it was running along with us...

But we did make it in time. We were able to queue up at the end of the queue for the security check. This time we even had to take off our shoes. Isn't that rediculous? I told them there was no metal in them, so there should be no problem to keep them on when passing the metal detector, but that did not help. Ow well, let them have it their way. "Whatever you want", I snapped as I threw my shoes onto the conveyor belt along with our hand luggage.
Of course the security check did not find any weapons or explosives on us. We had no intention of blowing up the plane and neither had the other passengers. But what about our suitcase? Did that make it to this flight on time? "I very much doubt it", said the ground stewardess. Well, so did I, we would have to wait and see what had happened when we would get off in Auckland.

This second part of the journey we made in a New Zealand Airways Boeing 777. The distance from London to Los Angeles is almost 6000 miles, so the flight takes ten hours and that is not fun at all! Fortunately the Boeing 777 features an in-flight information and entertainment system with an interactive screen for every passenger, so we could monitor the progress and watch all kinds of entertainment and even some educational material.

Finally, finally we arrived in Los Angeles. It was now 8 PM local time, but to us about 24 hours had passed since we got out of bed. And the Americans had some "entertainment" planned for us: We all had to get off the plane and queue up for the American immigration office.
But... but... We did not have any intention to enter the USA?? All we wanted was to get out as soon as possible! Of course burocracy does not listen to reason. We had to fill out the well-known, green I-94W forms, queue up for an officer and talk to him. They also took everybody's fingerprints and pictures of their irises! I really wonder if they have any right to do this, but what can we do about it? We had no lawyer specialized in international legislation with us, so we could only let them do to us what they wanted like a herd of sheep.
Everything was handled in a typical USA way, with lots of stamps and formality and in the end we ended up just where we started in the same plane we had arrived in. Needless to say there was no smoking area anywhere...

Labels: nz

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I am going on a holiday to New Zealand for about a month. Of course I will post an elaborate report here. So be warned: If you see this logo, you are reading a page about that strange country on the other side of the world!
Tomorrow, January 14th 2009, we will get up at 5 AM to start this adventure...

Labels: nz

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The first Saterday in every year is traditionally the moment for the T&T Eindhoven New Year's reception. But this year Julia and I could not be there. We had other business to attend to: A stage performance by the Gniffels in Utrecht!

The "Vereeniging Groningen en Ommelanden" in Utrecht had their annual New Year's reception in a hall in Utrecht and the Gniffels were contracted to play there. All the guests were seated at two long tables and there was a stage were we could do our performance. It was my duty to set up and operate the audio equipment this time...

When everything had been set up and tested, I had some spare time to drink coffee. The coffee was served in genuine old-fashioned "kraantjeskannen". (I still don't know an English word for those. Does anybody know???)

The afternoon started with a speech by the chairman, who read out the report about last year's activities. After her "Thomasvaer en Pieternel" entered the stage. This is a traditional comic act often performed in Groningen. They also discussed the events in the past year, but in their own special way.

 
After that it was our turn. Julia and Geert-Jan had prepared some songs from their CD "Wijs met Groningen" and also some new songs. The audience had a great time!

 
 
And meanwhile I was taking care of the audio equipment. While I was working on this, I was offered a traditional Groningen delicatesse: "boerenjongens" (raisins in liquor). I never tasted that before.
A huge glass? Noooo, a very tiny MiniDisk-player. I used that to make an audio recording of the complete performance...

After all the performances, it was time for dinner. Traditional Groningen food of course: "Maus!" -- "Errr, what is that?" -- "Curly kale with potatoes and sausage!!" -- Yummy!

 

Labels: Gniffels

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This month Julia and I had to take care of the cash register again at the T&T-evening. And we had a lot to do! Every month we start with 500 coins to sell and this time I even had to go to the bar to get some of the coins back, because we were sold out!

The community center is busy adding a new room to the building that will be the official smoking area. This was the first time we could enter that room. It was not completely decorated yet, but soon it was the best place to be. Soon the heating will be functional too and we will only have to get out of the smoking room to get our drinks at the bar...

Julia and I got a bit confused by one of our new guests. It was a guy from Belgium. He asked us whether there were more boys frequenting our monthly events. We did not quite get it at first. Maybe he was a homosexual, looking to meet other gay people? In that case the T&T-evening is not the right place to go.

Julia is never too shy to ask difficult questions and she also manages to hit the right tone, so that the questions don't even sound embarassing when she asks them. And so we found out the truth: This boy was born in a female body! Even now that we knew, we had to look very closely to see any sign of that. OK, he did have a smooth skin and a smooth complexion, but many young man have that. There was no sign of any facial hair, but that could have been attained by a close shave as well. Fortunately he did not have large breasts, for that would have been difficult to hide. To be quite honest we saw nothing indicating he was an FtM (female to male transsexual). We don't see many FtMs on our evenings and that is a pity, because we want our evenings to be the place for all transgender people to get together in a safe, informal atmosphere.

Anyway, he did have a good time. He chatted a lot with Julia and me and with others too. And he danced a lot with his MtF girlfriend. What a nice couple! I do hope we will see them more often on our T&T-evenings in Eindhoven.

Previous T&T evenings: November 2008, October 2008, September 2008, August 2008, July 2008, May 2008, March 2008, February 2008, December 2007, October 2007, October 2006, September 2006, August 2006, July 2006, June 2006, May, April, March, February, January, December, November, October, September, July 2005, June 2005, May 2005, April 2005, March 2005, February 2005, January 2005, December 2004, November 2004, October 2004, September 2004, August 2004, July 2004, June 2004, May 2004 and April 2004.

Labels: TandT

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This is the seventh article in a series about the Elektorlive-event.

Mikrokopter by Holger Buss and Ingo Busker a great project. It is a miniature helicopter equipped with four propellors. The heart of the system is a small controller board with an AVR microcontroller from Atmel: An ATMEGA 644 working on a 20 Mhz clock frequency. The board can be so small because SMD components have been used. It features a lot of interesting periferals: 3 piezo gyros, a 3D acceleration sensor and optionally also a pressure sensor for measuringing the altitude. The four propellors are directly driven by brushless electric motors, with I2C-controlled driver chips.

The Microkopter can be controlled with a normal remote control used for model airplanes, but the receiver has been modified for this project: It does not have to control servos in this project, so the multiplexed signal is fed directly into the microcontroller without decoding the information for individual servos.

The system is also capable of autonomous flight, but unfortunately it is not allowed to have autonomously flying objects in the open air. I saw it flying inside the Evoluon and I thought I had made a nice video clip of it, but it was not recorded. So please watch a clip made by the builders instead.

Labels: Elektorlive

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This is the sixth article in a series about the Elektorlive-event.

The Eindhoven company Shapeways specializes in "3D-printing". You can upload a 3D-design to their website and they will "print" it for you. That way any shape can be produced.

In the pictures you can see some phantasy objects giving a demonstration of the possibilities, but there are lots of practical applications, like building a case for the prototype of you latest invention for instance.

The products can be made out of different materials: Hard or elastic, transparent or opaque, even metals are possible. The costs for this service are really only determined by the type and amount of material used. You can make a bracelet for instance for $10 but a fruit bowl would cost you hundreds of dollars...

Labels: Elektorlive

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This is the fifth article in a series about the Elektorlive-event

Elektor has published many articles on audio amplifiers over the years. I started reading the magazine in 1974, but this is an even older design: The "Edwin-amplifier" from 1971. Harry Baggen had borrowed it from Jan Buiting's collection to be able to show "how it all started".

The Edwin-amplifier has some great advantages for a hobby-project: You don't have to tune any bias current and there are no special requirements for the pairing of the two power transistors. When little output power is needed, the energy is going directly from the driver stage (that has a class-A lay out) to the speakers. Only when more power is needed the power transistors come into play... A very clever design!

Personally I am not into building audio amplifiers. I have never even built an audio power amplifier myself. I am very glad we have integrated circuits these days: A big chip or module you can screw onto a heat sink. Just add a few capacitors and your power stage is ready!

I have built some pre-amplifiers. In the shop there are simply no pre-amps available that match all my requirements. They always have a lack of inputs and (at least back in the eighties) they had no remote control. I want to be able to connect many input sources: Tuner, TV, CD-player, pick-up, cassettedeck(s), MP3-player, computer(s) etcetera. And I want to distribute the audio signal throughout the house, so that you can keep listening as you go from room to room. Yes, my houses have always been full of wiring to connect everything together.

My main interest in this stall was not in the equipment, but in the guy behind it: Harry Baggen, editor-in-chief of Elektor and my second employer (or most important customer) for my free-lance translation work. This was the first time we ever met in Real Life! This was definitely one of the highlights for me on this day...

Labels: Electronics, Elektorlive

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This is the fourth article in a series about the Elektorlive-event.


Of course I went to see Jan Buiting, who did a talk on "retrotronics": That is vintage electronics. He had brought lots and lots of electronic equipment from the past sixty years and invited the audience to select which device interested them. He had wonderful anecdotes about the origin of each device people selected. Many stories were about Philips company, where a lot of this equipment has been produced.
For example he showed us one of the very first pagers. In our time of text messaging and wireless Internet it may be hard to imagine, but at the time the pager was invented it was a state of the art device! The size of it was about 12 x 12 x 4 inches and it weighed well over 10 lbs. Fortunately it had a strong belt that could be used to carry it on your shoulder. So it was a real portable device.
So what did it do? It was for wirelessly receiving "messages". These messages consisted of a single digit number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. That was all it could do. To use it you would have to make arrangements (with your boss for instance) what each of these six codes would mean...
When the system was first released to the press, the receivers did not really work yet, so the people from Philips had secretly mounted a foot switch below the table where the device was demonstrated. This way they could activate the lights by hand foot during the demonstration...
Jan's talk went on and on with one device after another. Some equipment was also passed around amongst the audience so that people could get a close look, feel and smell of them. Yes, a smell: Vintage electronics has a characteristic fragrance, you will find nowhere else these days.

The audience couldn't get enough of Jan's talk! A real success.

After the talk I took the opportunity to have a close look at some of the equipment on the tables. One table was full of old Elektor-projects. And there I found a well-conserved specimen of the SC/MP, MY first computer, which I built in 1978.
This system (published by Elektor in May 1977) had no less than 256 bytes of memory (no, not kilobytes, not Megabytes, just bytes)! It had to be programmed bit by bit with the switches you can see at the bottom of the picture.

Another beauty in the collection was this test system for vacuum tubes by Heathkit:


If youlike pictures like these, you will also like the Vintage Electronics groep on Flickr. I also found a link to this video clip there. As I said: Once upon a time all this equipment was new and modern!

Labels: Electronics, Elektorlive

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This is the third article in a series about the Elektorlive-event.

The second lecture was about fiber optics. More and more people know about this, as more and more homes are connected to the Internet (AND to cable TV AND to the phone) through optical fiber. This technique is called FTTH (Fiber To The Home). Fiber optics is not very new really. It has been in use for the "highways" of the Internet for a long time. A great advantage is the enormous speed of information transfer compared to copper wires. Another advantage is this type of cable is not sensitive to electromagnetic interference.
This is one of the reasons fiber optics is often used for information transfer along railroad tracks. The electromagnetic interference produced by a passing electric engine is very heavy indeed.
And speaking of railroads we run into another application of fiber optics: They can be used as a sensor! Optical fiber cables are very sensitive to bending and that can be used in many smart ways to make them work as a sensor.
An optical fiber can be used to check whether a track is occupied by a train, but it goes even further than that: It can be used to do detailed measurements of the condition of each individual wheel of a train as it passes by! This means the trains don't have to go to the workshop until they really need maintenance. A great reduction in cost!
This picture shows the measurement result when three wheels have passed the sensor. The first two wheels are good; the third one needs maintenance.

Optical fibers can also be used for measurements in aeroplanes and dikes. The possibilities are really amazing.

Labels: Elektorlive, trains

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This is the second article in a series about the Elektorlive-event.

The first lecture I visited was about the Elektor Internet Radio (EIR) and the speaker was Antoine Authier. Most of the speaking was done by Harald Kipp, who developed the hardware and software. The hardware is the Ethernut 3 card, which is equipped with an ARM7-processor, 256 kbyte RAM memory, Ethernet-interface and hardware for codering and decoding MP3-data. It also has a slot for MMC-/SD cards, which make it possible to extend the memory-range — a lot!

Unfortunately there was no Internet connection available at the stand, so they had to use a Southcast server they had brought along themselves for the demonstration. All that did not work very well, but still we could see this Internet radio is a very interesting piece of equipment with lots of cool possibilities.

Of course one can simply use a PC to recieve Internet radio, but that has some disadvantages. A PC consumes a lot of power, much more than is really necessary for this application. And in some situations a PC is simply not suitable. For instance it is not very practical to connect a PC to the stereo set in the living room.

The system is a great platform for creating new projects. If you build your own radio, based on open source software, it is easy to extend and adapt it for your own applications. The Ethernut board can be used to build a stand alone radio. All you need in extra hardware is a few pushbuttons and a display. And you need some software to control it all...
In the picture the card has been extended with a graphical color display.

Later that day I met Harald Kipp outside, where the smokers were flocking together in the open air. Once again it turned out that the smoking area is a great place for networking... Harald is a very inspiring person and it was nice to discuss my own ideas for applications of the Ethernut board with him. How about using the card as a Southcast server? (This would make it possible to broadcast Internet radio instead of recieve it.) Harald said it would indeed be possible for a limited number of simultaneous connections...

Labels: Electronics, Elektorlive

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Today I visited the Elektorlive event in the Evoluon in Eindhoven.
Some 1500 people had pre-registered, but the whether conditions were not optimal. It was the first snow day in this winter. But more than 1000 people did show up!

Of course most of the people there were men. There were only an handful of women and even those had only come along with their friend or husband. I think I saw only one other woman by herself. So pretty soon someone spoke to me and told me what he was thinking: "Hey, a woman here? I am surprised!"
Well, at least he had recognized me as a woman from a distance.
But as we were talking, he soon figured out there was something more going on and said: "Oooww, aha, now I understand..."
"Yes, I used to be a man", I admitted.
"So you are a transvestite?"
"No, I am a transsexual, that is quite something different!"
"It is??"
So there I was again, educating him about the differences...

Of course one could ask what on Earth I was doing at such a male-dominated event, but hey, i do work for Elektor, and I saw this as a great opportunity to finally meet this client I have been working for for eight years in real life! And I am simply interested in electronics. It is my profession!

I had carefully planned the lectures I wanted to see and that was quite a tight schedule; I had had to make some difficult choices, because it was simply impossible to see everything that interested me. Over the next few days I will cover some of the things I have seen at Elektorlive in seperate blog entries.

Labels: Electronics, Elektorlive, transition

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