BLACK FOREST 2014

I had been keen to visit The Black Forest in Germany

ever since I read about it in Hans Krebs' autobiography in my student days. That dream came true this year. 

GETTING THERE

Twelve years ago Popular Mechanics reviewed the possibilities presented by the then proposed Airbus A380.

They fantasized about shopping malls in the air, restaurants, health spas and a host of other amenities. The reality has turned out to be anything but, as it happens. There are seas upon seas of just seats.

It appears commercial pressures have shaped the interiors more than any romantic fantasies. In spite of that the A380 remains a delightful aircraft. I was privileged to fly A380s on the Dubai-Heathrow leg of this trip, the Quantas one

on the outbound trip and the Emirates one on the inbound. The confidence and stability of ride on the A380 is in a class of its own. It takes turbulence in its stride, not surprising with a wingspan of 80 metres. Sometimes it is hard to tell it is moving at all. The Emirates one had a choice of 1700 entertainment channels, most of them on demand. It also had power sockets,

a real boon to long haul travelers even though it was only 110 volts. I had never seen that on any aircraft before. National Express buses have some competition at last!

Not all A380s are born equal though. Just like motor cars, the buyers' realities determine the fittings. Relative to Emirates, the fittings and facilities on the Quantas A380 are modest.

The major downside on Emirates is the halal meat. So I went vegetarian all the way.

Worries are like onions. No sooner do you peel off one layer than another appears underneath. My first worry on this trip was overflying Somalia

on the Harare to Dubai leg. When we safely got over that, my next worry was overflying Iraq on the Dubai to London leg. The standard route was supposed to take us directly over Baghdad.

To my relief, we veered off into Turkish airspace instead. Obviously the pilots decided ISIS are more likely to have sophisticated weaponry than Somali tribesmen. 

My next worry after that was time pressure in London. I had only three hours to connect from Heathrow Airport to the holiday coach at Victoria. I was aware that once Airbus A380s disgorge their contents, long queues in the immigration hall are inevitable. In the end I made it to Victoria with about 20 minutes to spare!

The holiday coach was a double decker and I wondered how that would get through the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone. Up to that point the only long tunnels I was familiar with were tube train tunnels

and even narrower mine shafts. The Channel Tunnel turned out much bigger than I had imagined. Big enough to accommodate double deckers and more.

 

On a visit to Switzerland  nine years ago I discovered that The Black Forest was not far from Basel. When I enquired about the possibility of going across, I was advised that a Swiss visa was not enough, I needed something called  a Schengen visa. Eight years later, this Schengen thing cropped up again on my escapade in Croatia. So this year as part of my preparations for the German trip, the Schengen was the first visa I secured. After all that fuss nobody ever asked to see it! So it was in effect US$80 down the drain. I went in and out of France and Germany without anybody ever asking to see my passport, let alone my visa. 

THE BLACK FOREST

The Black Forest is a mountain range in South West Germany covered in pine and fir woodlands

that are occasionally interrupted by lakes of glacial origin.

The highest mountain Feldberg is 1493m high.

So as part of preparations for the holiday, we were advised to "please check that your policy covers you for walking at altitudes up to 1493m". Strange advice for me considering the altitude of my house is 1481m, like the rest of Harare. 

The main economic activities in the Black Forest area are tourism and logging. So there are plenty of hotels and lodges

and an extensive network of very well maintained footpaths.

We stayed at a traditional Black Forest farmhouse in Dresselbach.

In return the local Tourist Board awarded all 58 of us complimentary rail, bus and tram passes for the duration of our stay!

The railway descent from the Black Forest mountains to the Rhine Valley is reputed to be a remarkable feat of engineering. Unfortunately most of the civil engineering details are actually not visible to passengers riding on the line!

A LOVELY SURPRISE

The Black Forest is a natural beauty area.

The best way to take it in is through walking.

So our holiday was primarily a walking holiday. 

One surprise excursion was to the German Clock Museum in Furtwangen.

The Black Forest area is the cradle of the cuckoo clock

but the museum was all embracing.

The collection included sandy hourglasses

through to atomic clocks.

AN AMUSING ANTICLIMAX

The museum excursion was part of a double bill. In the afternoon we proceeded to view the world's biggest cuckoo clock.

We timed our visit to include the cuckoo emergence at 3:00pm. The clock itself is impressive.

However the cuckoo deserved to be cooked, it was so anaemic and feeble for that size of clock!

I suspect the anticlimax was deliberately crafted. We certainly remember it more vividly than many other excursions. A similar trick was used to similar effect in the movie Too Late The Hero.

PERFECTIONISM

I was already aware that the Germans were more than just good footballers. 

I have enjoyed considerably lower blood pressure ever since I started using German gearboxes in Gwatamatic machines.

Since then I suspected that Germans were perfectionists. Now I know they are. Their perfectionism is not limited to just engineering.

It seems to reverberate thorough all aspects of their work, including firewood stacks

and even the alignment of geranium pots on window ledges.

Not just some of them but all of them. Throughout the 

Schluchsee and Frieburg area I never saw a single flower pot out of alignment. Maybe they really are superior after all!

 

FRUSTRATIONS

Their only weaknesses were in the provision of WiFi and bureaux de change. It was an uphill struggle finding either, at least for tourists anyway. 

Throughout the holiday I was suffering from a chronic WiFi deficiency condition. Then we came across a hot spot in Schluchsee that felt like an oasis! I spent longer than most there and got separated from the rest of the crowd. Picking my way through the forest

from Schluchsee  back to Dresselbach spawned a drama. I took a wrong turning and ended up in a cemetery. Then I went back to the beginning and tried again. On my second attempt I took directions from a passing jogger and ended up at a horse farm. In hindsight, I should have just commandeered one of the horses! This time there was hope on the horizon, literally. I spotted a giant windmill

near the farmhouse and headed for it. This time I made it, but nearly missed dinner. As expected for such a large group, there was no shortage of piss-takers. They conspired to kill me by over-feeding. I'm told ring-leader Helen

even over-exposed me on Facebook!

Fortunately being a Christian crowd, there was no shortage of forgiveness either. So I never defriended anyone. 

FREIBURG 

One of my missions in Freiburg was to find the laboratory at Freiburg University where Hans Krebs discovered the ornithine cycle (that is a cycle of biochemical reactions through which mammals produce urea from ammonia). It was the first ever metabolic cycle to be elucidated. The original buildings are still there but unfortunately the biochemistry laboratories are now housed in a modern block. So I never found the original lab but spent time in a fascinating University museum.

THE FOOD

Oak Hall (http://www.oakhall.co.uk/) have put together a great value package tour of The Black Forest. It is primarily a walking holiday. That means for what you save in monetary terms you pay in sweat. In spite of that I still put on 4kg, which says a lot for German fare. German food is right up my street, not too spicy.

Most importantly there was no evidence of garlic anywhere. It was like a breath of fresh air in more ways than one!

The fresh breath did not last too long though. The original Black Forest Gateau is laced with soooo much liqueur.

If I had been breathalyzed after just one slice I probably would have failed!

THE TRUTH

I have seen more BMWs on the Western Bypass in Johannesburg than I ever saw on any German street. 

In spite of their engineering prowess, Germans seem to drive/ride modest vehicles.

Maybe that is why they are wealthy. They certainly create more value  than they consume. I don't know whether the same could be said of any African country. 

MORE TRUTH

The German sausage

was a disappointment. Maybe my expectations were too high.

Boerewors

 is streets ahead! A case of a derivative surpassing the ancestor.

ANOTHER LET-DOWN

Pilgrimages to Foyles bookshop have thus far been inevitable parts of my visits to London, even when I was only in transit. This time I was shocked to find the bookshop shutters down.

It turned out to have moved to a new address also on Charing Cross Rd. I was relieved to find it still exists even though it is now a shadow of its former glory. The entire mathematics collection is now housed on all of one shelf.

Previously it took up almost a whole floor! If such venerable institutions could die at the hands of The Internet then nobody is safe! I don't think I will bother with any more pilgrimages to Foyles. It was a sad conclusion to an otherwise brilliant tour. 

Newsletter 2013

Innovation 

Surprisingly, there are people out there who can still handle my sermons! Those close to me have no doubt had enough of my sermons on innovation. In March the World Intellectual Property Organization invited me to speak at a conference in Dar Es Salaam. 

The president of Tanzania, who was due to open the conference, was late (or rather delayed). So the conference only started some hours late. To make up for lost time, some of the afternoon speeches had to be abandoned. I was one of the casualties. So I ended up with just an all expenses paid holiday!

I was not always so lucky. I had three more speaking engagements during the year where no such excuses were forthcoming.

They say the length of a progress report is inversely proportional to actual progress. Accordingly, considering I spoke at length about innovation this year, I made little actual innovation.  Probably the only useful thing I developed this year is a gasket-less boss for heating elements.

Traditionally, asbestos gaskets were standard in thermal engineering. With the phasing out of asbestos, synthetic substitutes had to be found. Unfortunately the performance of the substitutes I have used has been less than satisfactory. Fortunately I have found an idea that does away with the need for gaskets altogether. The solution I settled on is a tapered boss

for heating elements. I have done more than six months' trials of it and looks very promising.  Initially I was considering going to  China to find someone who could machine threads with a taper. Then I was pleasantly surprised to find someone who could do it in Msasa, Harare!

I also had a monumental catastrophe on my hands this year.  It was a case of more haste, less speed. To save money, I mounted a water tank up a tree.

It worked well for a while until one fateful windy day. The tank swayed and eventually keeled over.

When the wooden pallet it was resting on cracked, it made a racket so loud that dogs in the neighborhood barked!

So I'm now up there with The Tacoma Narrows Bridge in the league of monumental failures. 

However failure often comes with the territory of innovation. It cannot be eliminated but its probability can be reduced. One tool for doing that is mathematical modeling. With that objective in mind I have resumed meaningful effort towards my maths degree. 

To test new ideas I still have to fabricate pilot models by trial and error. Needless to say that is a slow and expensive way of doing it.  It happens to be one reason why the central cooling (the reverse of central heating) project is taking long.

If successful, it could obviate the need for  separate aircon compressors for each room. 

It could also help work on the Testikooler ( a mobile personal air conditioner). 

A decent grasp of mathematical modeling would speed up everything. 

Adventure

In the local council elections held on 31 July 2013, I stood as the Christian Democratic Party candidate for Ward 2, Harare. After a  grueling campaign trail, I garnered a princely sum of 76 votes.  I was disappointed but it was therapeutic to remember Simon Pitt's words from a prior council election in which he was pitted against Rev Alan Spence.

Simon said gravely, "God looks after his own." So maybe there is good reason why I didn't get in this time. 

After my election defeat I retreated to Montenegro to lick my wounds in peace and seclusion. 

You can read about the holiday in a separate post below. 

Business

One of my boyhood heroes, Frederick Sanger passed away this year. 

Reading about how he bagged two Nobel prizes is among my most enduring formative experiences.

I vividly remember the newspaper article in which he described himself as "probably above average but not an outstanding scholar."

If a non-outstanding scholar could do so well, then there was hope in biochemistry even for me! That's partly how I was inspired to study biochemistry. My other heroes at the time were pop stars. Without Sanger, I might have followed a very different course.  In which case the Gwatamatic(http://youtu.be/7k0Dyi6UwuQ) would never have been. I probably would have ended up playing lead guitar with the Sex Pistols, Four Play or similar sounding groups. 

The only biochemistry I do now is sadza cooking. Needless to say I don't expect to win a Nobel prize for that. But I do win Gwatamatic contracts from time to time. 

In common with other businesses of a contract nature, it entails a feast-or-famine trend. Feast when the contracts are flowing and famine when they dry up. Business was terrible this year but my body and soul are still together, so there must have been a net feast. Maintenance work used to pay the bills when there were no contracts. However things have changed somewhat. 

In a sense, the business is hoist with its own petard. The Gwatamatic rigs are now so sturdy thanks to German gearboxes and Korean PLCs(programmable logic controllers).

Sturdy enough to cope with even ZESA power surges. As a result maintenance revenue is now minimal! One day I might have to invent gremlins to create some maintenance work!

This year I came up against the first serious "technology transfer" attempt that I am aware of. That is the euphemism they use nowadays for theft of intellectual property.

A certain large organization attempted to violate my Gwatamatic patent. Fortunately they haven't got very far, so far anyway. They are probably finding it more involved than they bargained on. 

Underneath all that hardware, intellectual property is at the core of what I sell. So I view threats like this as on par with attempted burglary. It's one reason why I won't partake in illegal downloads of music or other proprietary software. 

Spiritual

During the year I retired from the Easyworship (video projection) team at the church after an eight year stint. 

My idle interval was short lived though. I was soon invited to join the remuneration committee. That together with regular elders' duties is enough to keep me out of mischief. 

Family

My nephew has succeeded where I'm still to succeed. He's found a bride and the wedding is in the Christmas week.  So the whole clan is likely to descend on Harare this Christmas. I'm looking forward to it. 

I wish you all a good Christmas. 

Finally, it appears selfies are in. Even the Pope is doing it! So I've weighed in too: