During the past weeks I have been communicating with Johannes Hanika irregularly. The topic of our emails is mostly vkdt. But sometimes he wirtes one or two scentences about things that are going on in his life. A few weeks ago he happend to mention that he is unhappy about the fact that there are hardly any women among his students (I had asked him if there were many transgirls among his students). I think his colleagues at the univerisity are exclusively male. This made me think.
Clearly, this is mostly a matter of education and idols. I realized an important thing about why I chose to study humanities. Actually I already made this choice when I was 11, or, more precisely, a friend of mine made the choice. In the 2nd grade of middle school, we had to choose between 3 Gymnasium branches: the so called "neusprachliches Gymnasium" with 6 years Latin, the "Realgymnasium" with more STEM, and the "wirtschaftskundliches Realgynasium". If I had gone my very own way, I would have chosen Realgymnasium, I remember that very well, this was my first logical thought. I wasn't particularly interested in STEM, but I was the best in math in my class, and I was wondering: Why learning Latin for 6 years? When I was 11, I was interested in geography, biology, philosophy and things like that. Last but not least, Realgymnasium appeared to be logical, because there were several doctors, pharmacists and a chemistry teacher in our family. But I chose Neusprachlich, because the clique that I was part of chose Neusprachlich. Actually it was my friend Kathi, the leader of the group, who made the choice. All other members of our small clique were bad at math, except me. In 3rd grade we had an awesome Latin teacher who held a PhD in archeology, and of course I was also the best at Latin. At age 12 I had the idea of aiming for a PhD in art history for the first time. Of course, back then, this was still one of several possibilites, but kind of all of them involved humanities. So, that's my story. Probably, my whole life would be completely different, probably easier and more successful, if I had chosen Realgymnasium. Btw, Kathi later chose to study economy which involves a lot of math...
Well, and I want to mention one more thing. I finished the first part of my univerisity studies when I was 20 and I had to wait almost two years for a slot in an Oberseminar. During that time, I passed some exams but also experimented with Linux, that was in the early 2000s. My mum, who has no idea what computer science is, suggested that I switch to computer science. But I didn't think about that because I had finished the first two years with summa cum laude, and because I thought that coding was difficult and not the same as playing around a bit with Linux. So I had no self-confidence with regard to coding. On the contrary to many young men, who do have more self-confidence in this respect but later give up studying computer science.
Btw, approximately 1 of 10 art historical diploma theses is written with Latex, and I heared that other humanists are also using Latex.
OK, that was that, now more about hiking and Mr. H. A few weeks ago we went up to the Große Scheibe from Mürzzuschlag and back down on the same way. This hike is marked as easy in many books and websites but... it is definitely long and exhausting. However, there are indeed no technical difficulties, it's just a good trail 850 meters up and down.
The first pic is the view from the Große Scheibe towards Upper Austria and the Salzkammergut I guess, the second one is the view of the Schneealpee. The first one did not get many likes on Pixelfed and that's why I have decided to share more of the less popular pics here in this blog, because the successful ones are in the gallery anyway. So more "unsuccessful" photos from my previous hike to the Naturpark Mühlviertel:
I am thinking of writing an article about “The charm of early spring and snowless winter landscapes”. This season, early spring is not really a “sexy” season. The trees have no leaves, neither green nor yellow or red, and everything appears to be kind of “dead”. And there is no snow either. So at first sight, this kind of landscape seems to be the most unphotogenic. Yet I think there is something that is fascinating about these landscapes, although it’s clear that they are not the kind of photo that will be very successful on social media. I think they somehow remind me of some works by Egon Schiele, although in general I don’t like Schiele’s art. Of course, Schiele is an extreme example. I am not really sure what this kind of landscape expresses, how one could describe it with words. I think it somehow has to do with the fact that the nature seems to be dead, but isn’t because she will be colorful again. So I think it kind of has to do with hope and good things to come? And maybe… these pictures also express that being sad is part of human/intelligent life. Always being happy is not possible/normal. Also… I think it’s challenging to make a nice picture of a subject that is not actually nice or pretty. And, last but not least, snowless winter landscapes are just the reality of today's word which is heavily impacted by climate change, as my friends on discuss.pixls.us pointed out. A good part of the year looks like that, it's the truth. Why only show the pretty things? It doesn't look so nice but that doesn't mean that we have to be desperate. Of course, this could also be an interesting project for an art exhibition or a research project...
Mr. H.... He found my website and sent me an email last summer or autumn. He asked why I wanted to learn C and suggested to join me on my hikes. He is a Linux guy, actually he has several commits in the kernel, lives in the same district as I, and he is several years younger than I. He emphasized that he only wanted to join if the hike is not difficult but... I guess his definition of "difficult" is different than mine... If the trail is moderately uphill, I walk faster than him. But if it's really uphill/downhill and rocky, he is faster.
Btw, I am playing around with Hyprland and NVK. Unsurprisingly, Hyprland doesn't like the proprientary Nvidia driver. It works, but not flawlessly. That's why I tried NVK with vkdt. It works, but it's not very fast. But I guess it's better than I expected. I am writing this article on Garuda Linux which is on an external SSD and I am thinking of installing Arch or something Arch based on my internal SSD since quite some time now. I wonder whether it's time for that... Anyway, NVK is not in Mesa yet, so on Arch you need vulkan-nouveau-git, and you have to add nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1 to the kernel (6.7 and newer) parameters for Turing and Ampere.
Well... I am preparing my trip to the LGM in France. This is the workshop that I will host. I want to stay a few days longer in Britanny but at the moment I am quite annoyed about the fact that public transportation is really bad there.