A nice ‚hello‘ to everybody! I felt it was time to calm down and erase rising rumors that I finally died of my Internet addiction after giving up my broadband connection in Maastricht. But nooo, I am still alive. Nevertheless, I think there is one thing worse than no Internet at all, which is slow Internet. Really, trust me, I would rather start writing letters again by hand than having to cope with a 56k dial-up connection for the rest of my life! Insiders already know that DSL is the only reason why I would visit Kai and Thomas or Alice’s parents regularly lately… Enough of that bullshit, let’s get serious. Since I started living with my parents again, I am basically jumping over boxes all day. If there is one thing I absolutely did not do in the past week, then it is sorting out, unpacking and re-arranging the stuff inside those boxes. It’s terrible! I am afraid of having to start all over with my stuff, having to take everything in my hands again. I’d rather wish to simply grab the boxes as they are and unpack them in Bamberg. Besides enjoying the benefits of ‚Hotel Mama‘ I havn’t done anything of particular importance. As I said, I see friends quite often and pretend that I am living here. Friday I went to Bonn, where Alice is doing her internship with T-Com. Yesterday we went to Gregor’s and Roland’s b-day party. And today we played badminton. WOW! No really, at least I got myself to keep up the will to do sports and workout. It seems it is time to get a new agenda, new tasks and a timetable, cause I began to vagabond around and get sick of my long long holidays. By the way, I uploaded new photos to my Yahoo-album, showing shockingly nasty moments of wasted youth!

Back to boring, back to Germany… Of course, we will write the obligatory travel report, but right now, we need to get slowly used to the computer and internet, next to no beach, no sea, avarage-tasting tomatoes, muggy heat and absence of sheep and goats on the streets and later in the pan.
N-Joy the summer and await pictures, pictures, pictures…. as we took 455 digital and 15 analogue photos.

dear home-stayers, during the next two weeks i won’t be blogging anything at all! why? -well, i will be spending zero thoughts on the internet, my blog, emails, downloads, news and so on, but rather enjoy the manifold joys of life on the gorgeous greek island crete. no worries, just sandy beach, sea, and sun! damn, i am really looking forward to it! kai and ramona are also there, but have chosen for crete’s „ballermann“ or lloret de mar, so to say. i am curious how they like it there, so far i have only understood that it’s needless to bring more than one pullover or long pants, since it’s truely hot there, somewhat around 40 degrees celsius. whatever… my suitcase is almost packed, and guess what, it’s a real lightweight as opposed to my trip to dublin, not to mention alice’s suitcase when she came back from ireland… — it’s my father’s birthday today. normally, we would have fruit-pies or cakes for teatime with the family, but he has conferences all afternoon. so we will only be having an extraordinary lunch together before i start my next travel-adventure: for the first time, i will not be using my car to drive to krefeld, nor use regulary train service of the deutsche bahn, no, this time i will be using the rostock-cologne line from interconnex. they are operating only twice a day, so cologne-rostock and back, but they are ultra-cheap. especially when you are younger than 26, because you get a 30% reduction on their rediculous prices. well, rediculous, big word; but i will save 11 euros for the same route and just spend 20 minutes in cologne’s main station because i have to switch to a regular train taking me to krefeld. although prices are comparable to using the car, a travel time of 3.5 hours is still a lot, if you can do it in 1 hour 50 minutes by car, given your right foot is really heavy that day and the motorways are empty enough ;). — of course we will take pictures, pictures, and pictures. we are equipped with my s30 and alice’s ixus 330, which makes a pretty promising duett together with a total of 512 mb flash memory and 4 batteries. now, be calm and DO envy us, but don’t expect emails, blogs, or pictures before july 18. cherete!

1. what is the one country on the planet that you would like to visit but have never been to? i guess that would be hobbiton. or, sweeping that lord of the rings-gewgaw aside for a second, it would be new-zealand. all green and peaceful, you know?! no honestly, since i got hands that can do work i would not hesitate to start a sheep farm down there, live without mobile and internet, having a look into a paper once a week just to not miss the moment the un invades the united states to disarm bush…. (no, i gotta stop this sarcasm!)
2. If you had to pick another country to be born and raised in besides your native one what one would it be? let’s stay in europe for this: as a visionary, believing european, there are nice countries around germany. i wouldn’t wanna choose austria and switzerland, except for skiing and the mountains in general. france and holland are nice for holidays and their typical products. hmm, belgium, where would i need that for? crossing the channel at oostende? or the fact, that they aligned with germany and france in the un? denmark doesn’t make too much sense either, but people like it for holidays aswell, although you cannot pay with the euro up there and alkohol is too expensive. alice comes from poland, so better no bad words about it, but they sell cigarettes and alcohol very cheap. leaves us with the czech republic. no clue. probably do a lot of fdi there and in poland, which could pay off bigtime in the future. so i rather go for replacing helgoland with hawaii, deport the garden dwarfs and the musikantenstadel, and germany is fine for me.
3. What country actually really scares the hell out of you? there is a country far away, with an evil man as the head of state. a man, not elected by the country’s people. this country doesn’t have a health insurance for everybody, but rather tons of guns and too many weapons of mass destruction. many of the country’s people carry a gun every day, because the street murder quota is in the world’s top ten. the evil man’s actions are religiously motivated, because he believes his nation is appointed by god himself for saving the world by being the world’s greatest country……….
Bonus Question for comments: What do you think is the sexiest accent known to human kind? speaking of women, almost every accent is sexy, isn’t it? (except for women having a german accent when speaking english…) just think of the beer commercial „lieb?r arald, kaanst du mir nischt etwas von d?r sch?cken?“ -fantastic! i also do like gaelic, since it sounds like elvish, just for being returned at the lotr…

i found these questions via mitch on the page of 8bit joystick and thought it would be fun to answer them and of course spread them further. so go ahead and copy to post your answers as well in your own blog.

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!

I am only 45% Internet Addict!!!

According to the test, I could go either way. Deep into the madness of nights filled with coding Scripts and online games, or I could become a normal user. Well, thanks a lot!

Take the Internet Addict Test at fuali.com

Unlike my expectations, the Belgian Railways indeed managed to get me to the airport on time and without any trouble. I got airborne with no frills, meaning no disgusting air-food, no rediculously small cokes, no comfortable seats, and most important no space for my legs. Yeah, you gotta pay the price for cheapness. Remember one golden rule when flying to Ireland in the early evening: Sit on the left, for you are about to witness a beautiful dusk with increadible light over the sea! — Upon arrival in Bail ?tha Cliath (or Dublin, in English), Alice picked me up and she introduced my to the Irish capital, where actually 1/3 of the Irish population lives and works. Well, at least the southern part of the city, where also Alice resides, works, the north is criminal, run-down and unemployed. Roughly… The easiest way to the city is the Aircoach, a bus dropping you right in the middle of the city at Trinity College. From there we took one of Dublin’s busses, and one does good to have a great deal of patience with the rather random arrival of busses and complete ignorance of schedules. — In the following days we explored the city till our feet hurt. I saw everything! Well, almost. I will not cite the tourist-guide for what to visit and what not, but just to make sure I do not cause people to think that culture for me is not solely included in „Kulturbeutel“, the interested Dublin-visitor should definitely go see St. Patrick’s Church, Christ Church, The Book of Kells, and Trinity College. You can find more information here. Make sure you take a walk along the cliffs. We went to Bray and took a long walk along the coast following the „let’s see what’s behind the next corner“-system… Since the weather was not always really astonishing, Alice and I decided to pay a visit to what is Dublin known for worldwide: Guinness! We started our really academic excursion with a market analysis (we went to a typical pub), followed by an assessment of the quality of the product (pint of Guinness). The absolute highlight of our research of locale-specific „wines and spirits“ was the Guinness-brewery. As a student you still pay 8 Euros entry, but a pint of Guinness above the roofs of Dublin is included. Be sure that you will never get a fresher Stout than in the brewery itself! — Talking of prices: Ireland is extremly expensive. One pack of cigarettes is 5.30, a pint 3.60, a BK meal 6, DVDs 35, fruit and veggies double the price than over here, rents skyhigh. It’s said that the country got wealthy 5 years ago, and as Constance, the landlord of Alice, puts it: „People spend the bloody munney hea, where else would ya go?“ True, when on an island. So Constance did not fail to reward my work of installing a broadband router and linking every room of the house to the Internet with a gift voucher for a meal for two at the best Indish restaurant around. Really cool move since the food was outrageous. — All in all it was a fantastic trip made possible by the low fares of Ryanair, although the landing on the flight back felt like the first parking tryout of a Belgian drivers-license aspirant ;) I also did not mind the 40cm-share of Alice’s matrace, though it was, well, crowded in the beginning. I expect Ireland to be even more beautiful when everything is as green as always said, so I might fly over again and have a look at the countryside then. — So much for now, blog on regularly and take care!

Hey there! In two hours from now, I will be sitting in the train to Charleroi where Ryanair is going to pick me up to bring me to Dublin in exchange for Euros. If everything goes smoothly, I will have plenty of time at this big and interesting Charleroi airport (h? h?), but would you trust Belgian public transportation? See, me neither! So I take one train earlier in order to avoid any stress since I am forcing myself to look at my trip as if it was holidays. I really need „Tapetenwechsel“ as we would call it in German, some odd feeling of not being able to feel well in one’s 4 walls anymore. Especially after the tests, which went quite ok I think. Weather forecasts are bad to really bad for continental Europe in the next days, so hopefully the weather in Dublin will be the complete opposite. I really wanna see the ‚green‘ exposed to phatt sunlight. Must be marvelous. Another thing radically removing barriers to travel nowadays is the Internet. I was really astonished to find myself with really ALL information I could possibly need for my journey in less than two hours. I even have a map of the arrival area in Dublin, and therefore know where the toilets are… for example ;). The website of the Belgian Railways turned out to be really informative as well. But they didn’t bother to put travel-related information like maintenance-work, which apparently is the no. 1 reason for late trains in Belgium, in languages other than french. Really handy. Apart from that, there is still one variable left, namely, whether they speak Dutch or English at the Vis? train station, where I need to buy a combined, reduced ticket, including a roundtrip Vis? – Charleroi and the bus transport to the airport. Nice, and only 22 Euros. — My suitcase is full, and full here means a level where I think I would not be troubled by the nice ladies at the boarding desk who will weigh my luggage. Last time we managed to trick them and save Alice a fortune for her suitcase was almost double the weight she was allowed to carry, but I am not sure if I can lift the tablet of the scale again without someone noticing. By the way, I tried this trick also in the supermarket yesterday and got 3 apples for the price of one. Drie halen, 1 betalen! Yes, this is the only effective means against price increases. — I am getting nervous here. Dunno why exactly. Simply a certain, let’s call it respect of air transport will always remain. I am not afraid of flying, surely not, but you can never be sure that everybody contributing to such a flight has done his/her homework, if you know what I mean. After all, you are in the air, and if shit happens, you can only blame Newton for inventing gravitation ;). — Anyways. I am really look forward to seeing Alice and having some nice days in Dublin with broadenig my horizon. Should I not return, you know, I love you all. — I will blog you upon return!

Oh what a day… [Task: Create a sentence with 3 or more hyperlinks.] After voting, the day’s main mission was to get Alice to Charleroi Airport, where she took off to Dublin with Ryanair at 18:40. All in all, everything went smooth, except for incredibly bad weather with pouring rain and thunderstorm on the motorway. I just received an SMS from her, she’s doing fine, she says, and everything is ok. In the future, however, I strongly reccomend you to read her weblog regularly, where she will give frequent updates for all you nosy people out there. (IF they finally deploy Internet in every house ;)) — Having just arrived back in Aachen, I had to hear that my grandmother died this afternoon, which urges me to leave Maastricht tomorrow and take care of things at home and support my parents. Please understand that I probably won’t be able to answer mail or instant messengers. Thanks. — As I said, oh what a day! Under all persitent circumstances right now, I will not fail to drop some philosophical words: Days like today demonstrate, what it means to say good-bye. I have said good-bye a couple of times in the last months, and the lesson I learned is: As soon as it touches your heart when you say farewell, the other person is locked into your heart and will remain there, being even closer than it would have ever been possible before. — Live every day as if it was your last….

Upcoming Sunday elections are held in Germany. In order to make a qualified, serious and most important UNBIASED ;) decision, I checked out the party’s website to gather some latest up-to-date information. The result is really astonishing. Therefore, I have decided to share the best markups with all of you. For example, for the few people among us who are still convinced of Ede Stoiber, I really advise you to check this video first before crossing the wrong circle. This is really cruel intentions… The craziest stuff the interested, politically motivated viewer might need can be found on the pages of Guido’s FDP. Make sure you get your update at Radio Westerwelle… no comment! Ever got an 18 Euro note? Man, how rediculous. Although I would never vote for them because of the infamous eco-tax, the Green Party actually earned my respect for their outstanding ecards. Don’t miss that – way too cool! But, let’s be fair here in this very instance and have a look at the PDS as well. Now, if you don’t have any clue what this party is all about, then you can check out their transparents in order to gain some instant-insights in how to put up statements everybody must agree with. Now, someone please tell me, who on earth will vote for this party?! However, they still believe that they have some seats reserved for them in the parliament. Dreamers! So we finally come to „der Doris ihrem Mann seiner Partei“, the SPD. In order to mobilize voters, Schr?der is actually the only one having a flash-based homepage. RESPECT! Amongst tons of good reasons why to vote for SPD, I found some very appealing feature no other party can offer: The SPD Travelservice. Unbelievable. Crazy. By whom are we governed? I think I will vote for the PBC, the party of hyperchristians that will make Jesus chancellor ;) — People of Hessen, you are in a by far more severe dilemma than all the others. We have to decide whether or not the „Konnexit?tsprinzip“ (I do not write down English translations for words I do not even understand in German) will be added into the constitution. Well, since really NOBODY was aware what the f*?! that is, I have searched the wonderful Internet and found a good explanation. So now we can all make our decision… — I am really looking forward to the elections – I do believe that in either case it will turn out a surprise. — For the last days, I have been busy with Alice’s Website. You better check immediately! She will update all of us about her adventures in Dublin in her weblog. — Now, time to close – sorry for this „click-blog“ ;)