Markus, David, Roman and I spent the last few days at the ADAC-24h-Race at the Nürburgring. Like in 2008 we went there with a caravan, which turned out to be a good idea because of the bad weather. Luckily the rain stopped every evening – so we could have barbecue. 🙂
Even after sleeping for something like 15 hours I am still kind of wasted, but the whole thing was well worth it. I think next years trip will be much more comfortable because we mean to get srsly rich in the meantime and start at the race with our very own team. 😉

[picasa]Nurburgring2010[/picasa]

P.S. Thanks to Ronny & Marcus for listening to my complaints about the damn export from Picasa not working and trying to help me with this.

It’s already three days since Micha moved out but I didn’t manage to rearrange my stuff since I attended another birthday this weekend. This meant little sleep, tasty cakes and a awful lot of time to listen to the audio book of Terry Pratchett’s „Eine Insel“ on the train.
It’s great to read/hear such a uplifting book about loyalty, religion and nationhood while reading Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece „Maus“ which portraits the horror of the Holocaust in such a unadorned, touching and depressing way, that one could easily despair on mankind.
P.S. Also I forgot to take my cagoule with me when I left the birthday party and guess what: It of course rained when I arrived in Berlin. Gnarf!

After two and half years Micha is going to move out of my apartment on May 1st. I’ve done the maths and decided not to look for another flatmate and instead use both rooms for myself. I’ll have to restrain myself, but I think it’ll be worth it. After all having a bedroom and enough room for all the stuff that piled up over the years is just priceless.
Last week a bunch of cool stuff I ordered arrived. The package contained a flash light for my DSLR (Finally!), an ultra-cool web cam and four graphic novels, three of them by Alan Moore plus Art Spiegelmann’s Pulitzer Price winning comic „Maus“. Obviously Karsten kind of hooked me to the world of graphic novels by presenting me the first volume of Neil Gaiman’s „Sandman“ as a gift for my birthday… More things to spend money on, that’s exactly what I needed, Karsten. Great! No really, great!
This weekend we went to the movies to see „Shutter Island“. I heard a lot about this movie and I was more than curious to see if it could keep up with the hype. It can. Go and see it!
Also I feel like falling sick. Since this morning my throat is sore, my bones ache and I am somewhat feverish too. Gosh darn it! Not now!
P.S. Still no update to the site. Been busy playing poker. *sigh*

What a exhaustingciting weekend that was! Marcus invited us to a former pioneer camp for his birthday party. Besides the function room, where the actual partying took place, there were some cabins to sleep, a ping-pong table, a swingeing swing grill and lots of other cool stuff.
I talked to many friends I haven’t seen for quite some time, some people I knew from online gaming but haven’t met in person and a lot of cool new people. As I already foretold we also had some good games of Poker, there was tasty barbecue and totally unexpected I played ping-pong for the first time in like ten years – but fortunately nearly everyone played as awkward as me… *chuckle*
On Sunday we left kind of early (given the fact that we went to bed at half past five, noon definitely _is_ kind of early!) and while waiting for my train Ronny and I used the time to train some heads up play and discuss the hands we played.
When I arrived in Berlin at nine pm I was wasted and ready to sleep for a decade. This is going to be a looooong, looooong week. *sigh*

P.S. No flutes where harmed during this weekend.

After being enormously lazy at Easter now it’s time for yet another weekend on the road. Tomorrow I’ll be going to Effelder (yeah, right, that’s a lovely small „town“ right between East Bumblefuck and the middle of nowhere…) for Marcus‘ birthday party. To shorten things, make them way more pleasant and also a tiny little bit cheaper I go to Gera by train from where Ronny will give me a ride. The whole transfer will take something like five hours anyway, but it will be definitely more fun that way.
I’m looking forward to a weekend with a lot of nice people I haven’t seen for some time, a game of Poker and some weird „Rock Band“ performances.
Also the technical issues with the blog seem to continue. While Karsten for some miraculous reason is able to comment once again, Markus helped me a lot understanding what’s wrong. I’m going to do an major update soon but until then I relaxed the spam restrictions. Within five days after writing an entry everyone should be able to comment without having to face a human check.

Yesterday my birthday party took place and I want to thank everybody for coming over and of course for all the neat presents! Special thanks go out to Markus for a very cool flash light and the nerdy note! Awesome stuff!

Some user seem to have problems posting comments to this blog while using Firefox or Opera. Right now I can’t say for sure what is causing this problems but I suspect the captchas of not giving the right value. If you run in such trouble I recommend you to

1.) stay calm,
2.) make sure cookies are activated,
3.) wait for something like two minutes to reset the IP block,
3.1.) dance around your computer and mumble incantations and blessing of your preferred religion,
3.2.) get rid of the crumbs in your keyboard
3.4.) now really do activate cookies,
4.) reload the captcha until it shows a well readable three digit value by clicking it,
4.1.) read the text above the captcha that says „activate cookies“ and activate them,
5.) send the comment again
6.) and celebrate your success.

Good luck!

I just wanted to thank everybody for the congratulations on behalf of my birthday. Especially those of you who actually wrote an e-mail or (even better!) called me instead of just dropping a half hearted line on some social network or instant messenger. In times where everybody seemingly moved on from letters, to postcards, to phone calls, to e-mails, to SMS and finally to a hastily dropped line on a social network website I appreciated this very much! Call me old fashioned, but I definitely miss the times when there was more than just monitions and advertisements to be found in my letterbox…

_Somebody_ bugged me a lot lately about adding a list of books I read and I am currently reading. The last time I had such a list was back in 1997 on my first homepage and maybe it actually is time to revive such a site. Well then, here we go.
I decided to add links to Amazon.de where you can find more information and customer reviews. Also these links do contain a referrer ID so if you choose to buy something after following the link you will make me incredibly rich!

Some days ago I posted about Ubisoft acting like dicks and requiring a permanent internet connection to play a single player game.
As if by miracle it seems that Electronic Arts had the same idea simultaneously and jumped on the bandwagon too. But EA being EA they of course had to top Ubisofts dick move and passed on something like a note on the box that actually can be seen before spending your money on their shit. But see for yourself!
On a completely unrelated note LJ stumbled upon this awesome papercraft of a combat shotgun from Fallout 3 and I just wanted to share this!
2010/03/23 edit: Normally this wouldn’t be something to be moaned about here, but since it _is_ related I think it’s OK to mention. Yesterday the internet connection in my flat suddenly stopped working because of an faulty DSLAM. My single player games didn’t stop to work though. This once again reminded me not to spend money on single player games that require an internet connection to work.