Monthly Archives: July 2005

Windows Vista everywhere

Posted on by
Reply

Although it’s still in early beta stage, Windows Vista (or the Windows formerly known as Longhorn) is everywhere. Screenshots, reviews and discussions are flooding the net and I ask myself: Why? – True, some people have been waiting for this one for a loooong time now, nontheless I’m not overly excited yet – after all it’s going to be at least another 3-6 months until the real deal is in my hands and who knows which features will be in the final product…so here’s what I’m going to do: sit back, relax, have a look at screenshots and a laugh at the Pro/Contra Microsoft/Windows discussions as they start to pop-up once again… ;-)

Yesterday in court…

Posted on by
1

Yesterday was a really emotional day. I went to court to witness the revision of last year’s trial (short summary: a drunken driver hit and killed my mate Sascha Himmelsbach on December 9th 2002 – he was on his way to uni that day and couldn’t do anything about the accident…the accident assessor calculated that there were 0.7 seconds of possible reaction time from the time that the drunken bastard started to skid until he hit the car of my mate :( )…he was sentenced to 22months in jail in the last trial, which took place in May 2004, but he appealed, so yesterday the revision took place.

After hours and hours of story telling and lying (or at least stretching the truth) he was once again sentenced…this time to 16months in jail. I guess it’s impossible to make up for killing someone, but 16months and some insurance money doesn’t sound right to me – but what can you do, you gotta take what you get.

I really hope that this is the end of this (once again he could appeal because it was a new trial)…as it’s hard to see the guy walking around free for over 2 years now although he’s been sentenced once and now a second time.

Sascha Himmelsbach, 18.08.1978-09.12.2002
Gone, but never forgotten!

Koelsch Cup 2005

Posted on by
Reply

Alrighty, yesterday it was time for the Koelsch Cup again. Short description of the Koelsch Cup:

  • A team consists of 2 players
  • A match’s duration is 10minutes max – if a team scores 10 goals the match ends immediately
  • The Koelsch Cup is the Koelsch Cup because (almost) everyone is drinking Koelsch…that said: most of the early matches are high-class, most of the later matches tend to be really funny with (almost) all players a little bit drunk ;-)
  • The pitch is 15m x 8m with two little goals (see here)
  • All matches are strictly fair play!
  • The Cup is all private…

I had my fourth go at the cup this year and once again played with my partner Benjamin “Ailton” Keiper. This year 20 teams competed for the cup – the preliminary round was played in 4 groups (A-D) on two pitches (first time ever). We ended up in Group D and were able to watch some interesting matches before taking the field ourselves – we lost the first match 5-7 against our FCM II rear gunners “Buuunsch” and “L.Oe.”. We won our second match 9-2 after trailing 0-2 and at this point we were almost through to the final round (4 out 5 teams of every group play the 1/8 and so on) so we weren’t really focussed on winning anymore and lost the remaining two group matches. After that we played our 1/8-final (which we didn’t intend to win) and were able to watch the remaining matches without any hassle – drinking and eating without interruption :-)

Overall it was once again a really nice Cup so I decided it would be my turn to help out tearing down all the stuff…so it was a short night (in bed shortly after 2am, alarm went of at 9am)…but all in all it was worth it as we were able to get the stuff sorted quite quickly… :tup:

Hopefully there will be another Cup next year – this would be my 5 year anniversary :-)

Busy weekend

Posted on by
Reply

Oooh what a weekend. Went out to play Golf for the first time ever on friday and it was really fun! I could really like it. We went to the GolfClub Niederreutin which is so beautiful you couldn’t even imagine. As we were mostly beginners (some mates have played before, some haven’t) we went straight to the driving range and tried to get our swing going – tbh it does seem so easy when you look at the Golf Pros on the telly, but believe me it isn’t. Nontheless we didn’t do all that bad and were able to even hit some good shots with the Woods (W1/W3/W5) in the end. To finish up our golf experience we visited the chipping/putting area and had a little fun there. All in all a really good experience – I guess this won’t be the only time we were playing ;-)

After the Golf experience we headed off to play a little private poker round which started at midnight and lasted until around 10am on saturday morning – I split the main pot with my mate Armin in the end…so noone was really disappointed.

After that it was time for a little brunch and some chillin’ on the couch…about 2pm it was finally time to take a nap – and after a good nights sleep the weekend is almost over again. Time to regroup and head off into the first week after the semester:

Exams are coming up in September/October, so still enough time to get the learning on it’s way…besides that it’s time to start our “Fachstudie” (a team of 3 students are analyzing something over the course of 3 months) – we’re covering the topic “BPEL4WS vs. WS-CDL in different scenarios”. This should really be fun and a good way to deepen our knowledge about Web Service Technolgy!

Looking for hosting?

Posted on by
Reply

A mate just informed me that the Dreamhost promotion code “777” is still valid for new customers. So if you need hosting and would like a full featured account (2.4GB space, 120GB traffic, shell-access, …) head over to Dreamhost and sign-up for the crazy-domain-insane package (yearly payment) and enter the promotion code 777 and you’ll receive the first year of hosting including 1 top-level domain for $9.24 after the major rebate…please use the Dreamhost-button on the right hand menu or this referral-link – that way I’ll get “some” referral money :-)