after weeks of playing around with colors and setups, i finally managed to upload my new frontpage. i hope you like the refreshment – and to all of you often complaining that i never wear or use colors: i made this side in blue for you! coders would want to take a look at the source, for it took me ages to realize all that without graphics, rollovers, and table coloring, just pure html, css and js. — actually, i had a nice long blog just finished, in which i extensively thanked you all for your birthday greetings, apologized for not answering your ordinary, christmas or new-year’s emails just due to pre-christmas stress, peri-christmas internet- and computer abstinence, and post-christmas lack of preciousssss time not to be wasted behind a computer, and of course slow isdn-connectivity. but: my pc froze totally before i could post what i had just written. too bad that i could not recover it, for i had reported everything exiting from my winter holidays, including a comprehensive comment on the second part of the lord of the rings, meaning aragon, sagrotan, legoland, sagesmir, holmirbier, frodo „flennbacke“ baggins and of course gollum whith which alice almost fell in love with. i also wrote a line on my birthday sit-in with alice, kilian, linda, christoph, ben, antje and alex in the take5, the nice presents i got this year, why and how alice had too much drinks in the zentralbar in giessen with thomas and kai, a totally wasted first day of this year after a phat new year’s party at lena’s place and way too much drinks, our visit to the laboratories of krefeld’s sewage and garbage site where alice’s mom works as a biologist and made this sneak possible. — on the 1st of january, kilian took off to singapore and you can read about his adventures in his weblog. also alice left me, when heading back for dublin on the 4th. i for my part am back to maastricht since, working on my website, relaxing and preparing for a stupid resit in economics. i also got in contact with the people from bmw-motorsport where i applied for an internship. exited i am how this all turns out, since it will largely determine how my last year of studies will actually look like. i had a good talk with professor semeijn today about thesis and internship and all that, and i finally heard an educated opinion on my plans. so we’ll see what happens next. either way, it would be absolutely grand to get the bmw internship, since it must be a blast working for a racing department of an automobile manufacturer. ‚freude am fahren‘ in its very essence…. — i will close here for now. the navigation will be functional within the next day, as soon as all content pages are operational. you log – i blog. take care!

We left on Wednesday with the illusion to be able to reach the capital within 4.5 hours. As I said, an illusion – we needed 6 hours in total. I was overwhelmed by the size of Berlin, which actually becomes really apparent, when you pass by a sign already 10 km away from the motorway saying „City Centre 35 km“. As I wrote before, we stayed at Mathieu‚s place in East-Berlin, where lots of, well, alternative people live. However, we learned not to judge a Berlin house by its outward appearance. I had my first Indish meal in the evening at the „Neu Delhi“ – it was a great restaurant, not only because they sell Weizenbier there for 2?. — Next days we did the typical tourist’s roundtrip. WE SAW EVERYTHING ;) Most worth mentioning however is the Berliner Dom (simply a overwhelmingly incredible and beautiful building), the Reichstag (queuing for entrance to the rooftop is really worth it!), and Potsdam with Sans Souci. Amazing is, that you do not notice at all where West and East once used to be on first glance. It really requires a closer look, because all signs of the divided city have vanished by now. We also visited the house where my grandmother grew up and has lived until Berlin received heavy bombing during WW2. Finally, on the last evening, we had the best pizza in the world in the Tiergarten. Later, we took advantage of the „Long night of musea“ and visited the famous Pergamon Museum and two other more for only 8?! Unbeliveable, how they managed to put a complete antique temple into a building! — Concluding, I very well can agree with the German saying „Berlin is worth a journey“! When we left on Sunday, we were glad that after all the walking around we had some feeling left in our feet. The trip was exhausting as hell, but has resulted in the strong wish to come back and have some more time to enjoy the things that make this city what it is. Although Mathieu did his best to lead us to cool nightlife locations, we were way too tired to actually enjoy Berlin’s nightlife. — When I finally get my photo-section to work, you can all have a look at a selection out of the 150 pictures I took….
So much for now – take care!

Where on earth did the time go? Today in a week university will start again, and with that my (hopefully) last year of studies. This is crazy! — As you can see, everything is back in place: My page loads fast again and the commenting system works. I kicked Enetation for it was not worth being used and installed HaloScan which seems to work in a different manner. We will see for how long. — It has been quite a while since I last updated what was going on in my life, so I will need to compress everything a little in order to put the most important things here. — There was „Kirmes“ in Burgsolms, my home-village, and traditionally we drank lots of „Bosskopp GT“ (?ppelwoi and Cola) all night and left the fareground at 4 in the morning. Not bad, you say, but last year we were the very last ones leaving the place. Amazingly, Alice behaved like she grew up in Hesse: She did not fail on her dose of ?ppelwoi! — The month August is really the month of accomodations, housing, and moving. I visited Lena’s new place in Giessen Central, very cool, old building and terribly central to everything. Ren? is also almost done with his appartment, and we picked-up a cool 80′-porn-style sofa from one of these give-away-everything gals. It is still unbelievable what one can do with colors and paint. Two months ago, his appartment looked like grandparent’s place and now the methamorphosis is almost complete. Thomas and Kai are still searching for an appartment, if I am up-to-date, after they were screwed by the last landlord they almost had a contract with. Alice is busy with accomodations for Dublin, too. Browsing hundreds of ads every day and getting only negative response is not really a truly motivating activity. Maybe someone reading this has a hot tip? — After almost two weeks at home I had to leave for my own four walls – I simply can’t manage to stay longer than 10 days at my paren’t place without missing my own style of living, including eating, cleaning, and sleeping. I stopped by in Krefeld for the weekend and we went to D?sseldorf („warum ist es am Rhein so sch?n?“) to see „Warphotographer“ and have some Altbier in the city center. — Back in Maastricht, I researched internships and found a very cool one, an exact match so to say. It’s at Porsche and concerned with e-Commerce and motorsports. People who know me, say it: Is this my kind of business? ;) I will send my application as soon as I have my papers ready. It’s a shame: There you are, having a digital camera, but too lazy to put on a shirt and tie in order to make a photo for your application letter… — Talking about digital cameras, I just found a firmware update for Canon S30. — For all of you having asked me about blogging and how I did it, and all the ones who will be asking in the future, I have created a tutorial and put my sourcecode online. Check it out in the FAQ-section. — So much for now, I have to phone Mathieu about a trip to Berlin and I am working at three. See (or read) you soon!