My attachment to the www

Freitag, 29.09.06 [date of writing]

I spent most of today at college on the internet; 5 hours in the computer room and then an additional 3 hours sitting outside in the corridor after the room closed. Quite impressed with the battery life of the laptop. I then went to the other side of the building to check the project listings for this upcoming semester. The place was empty by now, 7pm on a Friday and it was dark. But as I opened doors, the lights in the whole corridor turned itself on as by magic. I am constantly discovering little things that are different here but make a big impact on saving energy and sustainability. Other examples are:

-the escalators will only start running milliseconds after you lift your foot to the step
- you can get money back for taking glass and plastic bottles back to the supermarket [to a machine which would read the barcode and determine how many cents you are rewarded with]
- special step mechanism on the trams to accommodate the low and high platforms, so it isn’t necessary to build all platforms to the same height

[photos to follow]

Like my computer batteries, I was pretty drained by the time I got back home and to my frustration found the last remaining lightbulb had just blown. So I had to make dinner by candlelight and the timed corridor lights, the ones where you have to keep pressing them to reset the timer. But I didn’t stay in my room for much longer as the guys wanted to have a little party in the kitchen as it was Max’s last day here. He even gave me a spare lightbulb he found in his miscellaneous bag. :) Yet again, we were discussing the issue with beer in plastic bottles before heading out to a nearby club called Subway at 2am [yes, we also had a good conversation on the sandwich joint of the same name and I was explaining what really goes on behind the scenes there.]