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| Personal background |
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Hi, Guys!
My name is Volker, born in 1961 in Bremen, Germany. Don’t tell me that you’ve never heard about this city before… it’s the place where the best coffee beans in the world are shipped to… then carefully blended and roasted they create Mom’s and Dad’s most enjoyable cake & coffee Sunday afternoons you can imagine (while the leftovers go to the United States and other countries, hehe…).
As a child my first favourite TV series was “Daktariâ€Â, but then, as more and more space things appeared on the screen, “Star Trek†became my absolutely favourite one, followed by the Star Wars Trilogy later. I was fascinated by all these interstellar adventures and even more by the imagination of the endless space which obviously was sooo huge that there must have been a slight chance of hosting another intelligent species than only human mankind.
I could not stop watching all these TV documentaries about planets, stars, super novae, black holes (spooky!), dark material, big bang, red light shifting, space-time-correlation and, of course, Einstein’s and Hawking’s theories – the fascination still lives on! And now, since technology allows a detection of smaller and darker objects by their indirect gravitation effects on suns – planets have been found! It is not a question, if there is another intelligent life form, but when it will be found (or we will be found by them).
Well… ummm… I finished school in Bremen, then started an apprenticeship in a photographer studio and retail store, after having finished the exam, I switched to one of Germany’s big department store chain, stayed there for 11 years and after getting tired of the boring job, I chose to live another dream…. No, not becoming an astronaut, but being a little closer to the stars and surrounding our home planet almost like a satellite: I became flight attendant in 1998! Today I’m working as a senior flight attendant (purser) for Lufthansa on Boeing’s 747 and 737 as well as Airbus 340.
As I’m creating this self-description, I’m in Vancouver’s Pan Pacific Hotel, during a layover, with a magnificent view of coal harbour and Grouse Mountain. I moved a lot within Germany, 10 times altogether, my final residence is currently in Frankfurt, which I really don’t like a lot. If you say “Frankfurtâ€Â, people think of first: airport and second: banks. And this is it, a banker’s city with a huge airport, the biggest and busiest in Germany and the one with the biggest space problems. I mean space as another word for territory…. The airport was built when no one had an idea about the fast growing air traffic. The available space for expansion is highly limited, many activists try to penetrate the expansion plans and are using all legal (and sometimes illegal) tools to keep the authorities from building another runway or aircraft maintenance facilities.
I’m living in Frankfurt only for professional reasons. My favourite city in Germany is definitely Cologne (Köln). If you ever come to Germany – don’t miss it. You will, of course, go to Munich (Oktoberfest?) or Berlin, but make sure that you won’t skip Cologne and the most precious medieval highlight of the country: Rothenburg ob der Tauber. This is a treasure, a must, an unforgettable time travel, because Rothenburg has survived all wars and destructions over the centuries – and it is today a medieval city as it has been 1,000 years before. If you wondered where Walt Disney took his images of the nice and cosy villages from that fascinated us in many cartoons – it was copied from places like Rothenburg.
During the soccer championship 2006 Germany was present on every TV channel in the world, and also when Pope Benedict XVI. visited his old home Bavaria in September of the same year. So you might have got a clue how this country could be. If interested to experience with your own eyes: Herzlich Willkommen! (A warm welcome!).
http://www.koeln.de
http://www.rothenburg.de
http://www.frankfurt.de
http://www.citybed.de |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Well, I’m running SETI@home most of the time when my PC or laptop computer are online, which is most of the time… even during a flight I have been working with it. Lusthansa offers “Flynetâ€Â, internet on board, in cooperation with http://connexionbyboeing.com. It works perfectly! Sending e-mails, chatting, working even a phone call via VOIP is possible. SETI@home is a nice chance to do something good with your computing power which – most of the time – is not needed for other tasks. If you think of these millions of home PCs or MACs which are doing almost nothing in a standby mode day by day and what else could be done with this computing power - - everybody should join the club.
This is what should have been done more: advertising. More information via computer magazines and scientific printed matters. And as I see from the donation chart, money is needed… there was a peak of donation, after that period the donations were decreasing. Was there an advertising campaign? I guess there are so many forums and blogs in the internet, much more advertising is needed to help the project to be continued.
You should contact Mr. Ranga Yogeshwar, the chief journalist of science at Germany’s biggest TV station ARD. His TV show’s homepage is http://quarks.de
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