Some personal notes

First, everyone always wants to see pictures, so here are some taken in 1996, 1999, 2002, and 2007:

This page is about my personal interests, so let's leave everything professional out, no saying that of course my job is certainly also part of these interests, and that just as well I like my job. But, as said, leave this all aside: there must be a life beyond profession, and this may be a short description of what is in there in may case.

Sports

Whenever we have time, some friends of mine and I go cycling, usually somewhere between 40 and 100 miles a ride, and most of the time on one of the hard rides with the A&M Cycling team or the Brazos Valley Cyclists. Though I'm a bit older than most on these rides, I'm happy to still be able to keep up most of the time :-)

College Station has an excellent cycling scene, with a tightknit group of a few dozen good and fast riders all of which know each other well. This makes for a very supportive environment where people care and wait for each other, something that is often missing in larger cities with so many riders that you only ever know half of those you ride with. The only thing we're missing a bit here are mountains: In about every other place I've lived before (Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Zürich), there was a mountain almost right behind my house, usually rising some 400-500 meters (1200-1500 feet) above the city. Riding up these mountains is a good way to forget about the things which didn't work that day. Austin at least has some decent hills to the west; that's not too bad either, going up and down all the time without any flat parts in between, but there are few roads for really fast downhill (> 40 mph) and no long climbs.

Music

Then there is music. It's diverse as well, and my interests in music are equally so. I played the piano for more than ten years. I had to stop it when I left home in 1995, but there remains an affection for classical romantic piano music. Then, having grown up in the 80ies, there is more Rock and Blues in me than present Hip Hop, Techno, or Boy Groups. Lately, I also often hear New Rock, good to let out your bad feelings if there should be any...

I was initiated to Jazz at the tender age of 20 by a friend studying with me in Stuttgart. He gave me a copy of Keith Jarret's "Köln concert". Since then, my collection of mostly piano jazz has grown to a sizable portion of what I have.

Languages

In some way like books, I am attracted to languages because they are so diverse. Unfortunately, learning them takes so long, and so the number of languages I speak and write really good is restricted to German, English, the beautiful Suabian (the local dialect of the region I come from) and C++.

But there is a number of other languages of which I have differing degrees of proficiency on my side: French (the remains of five years' learning in school), some basic Japanese, two or three words of Zulu (which I acquired when being in South Africa for five weeks back during my school time) and several other computer languages (Pascal, Perl, ...). I never took time to learn more and probably I would not even have the talent to do so well, although I would certainly like to do so.

I think the language I would like most to learn more about is Japanese. I tried twice for about a semester, and some things remained, but not enough for any reasonable purpose. It's actually quite a simple language, it is easy to pronounce for a German, and it's grammar is also not terribly complicated, so I guess one should be able to learn to speak quite quickly. However, the difficult things is of course to read and write: Japanese high schoolers will have to learn somewhat like 2,000 characters and in order to read a newspaper or a book in Japanese, you will probably have to know a good deal of these. Things with these signs get even more complex because they stand for different words (with different pronounciation) depending on context. And it is also the other way round: many words are pronounced the same, but are written differently.

But who knows, maybe I will once have the opportunity to go to Japan for a limited time, and then I may do it and try to learn the language. It's certainly something I'd consider...

Literature

Books are great: You can spend so much time with them, lose yourself in them. They tell you stories about strange people, just ordinary people, other countries. I used to read about 30 books a year, mostly novels, until some time during my Ph.D. I found it more pressing to read professional literature, so my average is now down to about 15 to 20 books per year, still something. Here in Austin, I no more have a TV set (and will not get me one), so chances are that I will have some more time for reading in the future.

I have some favorites. Not so much authors, but origins: I feel particularly attracted to books from Japan and Central Africa. I have never actually been to these two regions, but have read a lot of books from there. Don't ask me why, it just fascinates me...

A nice side effect of reading many books is of course that you can stuff your home with them. A house without books looks empty to me, and I like being in a room with many books. One of the saddest things of coming to this other country is that I have left the largest part of my collection of books at home. They roughly fill shelves of three meters width from floor to ceiling, and without them my home looks kind'a empty. I try hard to read as many books here as I can to fill up this emptiness - during my first week here I spent about 100 Dollars on books... :-)

Computers

Since I made programming part of my profession some years ago, this really is not much of a hobby any more. I have contributed pieces to a number of public domain software projects in the past, and still do if it is related to something I presently need for my work. But I try to not use the computer at home as far as possible - using the computer all day at the university suffices for me, however much fun it is. Part of my work, the deal.II project is Open Source, however, so in some way I am still involved in public domain software.

Besides this, I think I am rightly described as a person who likes playing with C++ templates, an art which I believe have acquired some mastery in since I started programming in C++ in 1991.

And I'm a maintainer of the GCC compiler, being responsible for the bug database. Some people have even said something nice here and here about me :-)