2026-06-11

My therapist told me to dare more inconsequential small talk to practise and overcome my social anxieties. So, I decided to ask this cool guy at university, that I know I share many interests with, whether he'd like to go have a coffee with me ... I shied away at the last minute and sent an email instead. An email I took 1.5 hours to compose. An email including bibliographical references. An email I had my wife proofread. I think this is probably not what my therapist intended.


2026-05-22

The old internet was beautiful: A few days ago, Neo left a nice comment in my guestbook, which led to me visiting the original Matrix website in the internet archive. Besides being a very cool site in general, this official promotional film website had a links page, listing—among other things—AI research projects. So I had a look into the state of speech recognition and synthesis in the nineties, particularly the website of the Interactive Systems Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University. That page in turn linked to the personal homepages of the researchers, so I ended up on the personal web page of bavarian linguist Susanne Burger (hosted, of course, on the official website of Munich University) ... who presented not only her professional portfolio, but also her passion for Star Trek, by uploading her collection of Star Trek TNG graphics. There was a direct path from an official Warner Brothers promotional website to some German student's nerdy Star Trek fan site and I think that's beautiful.