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!

My valued visitors, life turns out to be extremely boring these days. I would not call it relaxed, since there is so much to do for university again, but I simply can’t manage to get my ass down on something productive. Horrible! I guess the only output I recently created are the 2 more galleries I added to the photo-section, and three more are about to come. So check ‘em out. — Apart from that, it seems that the christmas-season has really started and I did not fail to shop for the usual suspects: Marzipan, Lebkuchen, Pfeffern?sse and the like (I do not care about the English translations – should you be aware of them drop ‘em in the comments). Due to the weather, which is seldomly appealing, one has even less incentive to move outside, and instead rather hooking up oneself behind the computer, TV or whatever seems appropriate to enjoy what the christmas bakeries of the world have produced. If I do not watch out, I might get a belly ;). The next plausible reason not to move is the terrible pain in my back I caught while changing one of my car’s tyres. Sad enough, there was reason to do so: Once again, my car became the victim of a bored and envious kid of the neighborhood: Some mentally impaired ghetto-idiot put his knife in one tyre. Thanks a lot! I really begin to hate now, even feeling the slight effect of too many ego-shooters. I imagine myself out there with a minigun waiting for the next hair-gel-and-turned-basecap-idiot-on-a-bromfiets to appear, touching my car and receiving his well-earned load of rounds… Well, surely not the way to do it, but I can tell you shit like this really sucks! (I should watch my language…) — Enough of that crap, gotta go to university now. BTW, comments are always welcome!

Allright, you wanna know what kept me from sleeping last night? Kept me out of bed until 4? I worked on my photo-section all night until I reached the point where I could not simply turn off the computer and say, “hmm, I finish that tomorrow”. Noooo way, not so easy. Cruel though, you reach this point always then when you should really go to bed. But somehow you know, it’s only very few things you have to do and then you can even upload. Enough words, here is what the “Strohwitwer” did: my photo-section. Applaus, applaus. Anyways, it’s only one gallery and not the “final-final layout” since I would like to ask people to test the scripts and if it works on different platforms, I will soon finish it of. Promise. But, I wouldn’t say that I am unproud of it… — Work for university is done for this block. On monday, Christoph, Nils and I did one fine job of a benchmarking presentation about low-cost carriers, on Thursday I once more did a presentation on electronic payment systems, and on Monday we are required to show our self-running presentation with voice-narration about instant messaging to the audience. I am really looking forward to this session, since Julia and I laughed our guts out yesterday, when we were recording voice to the slideshow. Really cool – two thumbs up for Powerpoint. So, more and more, I develop sophisticated Powerpoint-Skills ;) — I will spend the weekend at my parent’s place, in order to let my eyes rest a little and to withstand temptation of being busy with the remaining galleries all day. Take care!

Hey there! I guess I should provide you all with an update. As you might have read in my previous statements, I am currently enjoying the relaxedness of life “auf’m Land”, which basically means that I am staying at my parent’s house in my 13000-souls hometown. What am I doing there? -Well, mostly everything I am not doing in Maastricht: Spending the largest share of the day outside on some physically demanding activity; spending almost no time at all behind the computer; smoking less but consuming more locale-specific beverages (St?ffche or ?bbelwoi); talking German only; taking care of my parent’s house and garden, my two grannies and the dog; and enjoying a simple but hard-to-describe feeling of a certain freedom. Today we drove around looking for a new car for Kai who had to sell his Audi A3 (what a pitty). Later on, Lena called for a phat BBQ in her garden, after which I at home tried to get the pump to work to feed the plants with some H2O. Finally, Lena, Thomas, Kai and Ramona came over and brought dog Nala with them, what of course contributed to the entertainment part of us all, whether the aforementioned humans or my dog Filou. People can tell what they want, I stick to my opinion: Having an own garden where you can BBQ and sit and drink until late at night is simply fantastic! — One thing that pisses me off bigtime is my current Internet connection at 56k… If only I had never started with flatrate! You simply get so damn used to it! — Time to hang up….

Well, well… Here we are back again with the new page! Incredible: You hook yourself up in front of your computer, you stare into Dreamweaver and Fireworks and suddenly it is 6 hours later while you have managed to do your homepage-reboot half-way. People, this is fantastic! I did this page in less than 48 hours (except for some sleep). My thanks belong to Kilian and Mathieu for putting cool sites on the web many people can learn (and steal) from, and my personal art-director Alice for disagreeing with some of my creative output… I am now testing my Blogger-enabled webfront, but up til now, I think it works out fine. Due to many complaints I received and the negative experiences I myself had with my old page I have decided to make it compatible for more screen-resolutions, even including 640×480 (not encouraging people to acutally use that – it looks really shitty, but it works though!). — 2morrow Germany will play again… Ticket or semi-finals? We will see… My guess for the final is Korea – Turkey :) — What have I left to say? -N-joy my pages, browse around and leave me a post in my guestbook! Comments and critics are welcome, but are subject to individual evaluation ;)