Movie Review: Transformers 2

Last year during our USA trip we also visited the wonderful town of Lone Pine and the even more wonderful Alabama Hills (if you haven’t been there and like movies - go there! It’s a magical place). While we stayed there there was on site filming for the movie “Transformers 2″. Thus we have to go to the cinema and watch it. Today we did…

…and I must say I am impressed. Really impressed. This has been the biggest pile of shit I have seen in a long time. Wanna know more? Read on…

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What a day…

Great day today. For one simple reason: After a huge amount of work I’m through with version 1 of my Ph.D. thesis. I just finished writing the last bit of real content this afternoon while listening to Jon Schaffer’s incredible “High Water Mark” from Iced Earth’s “Glorious Burden”. Great album, powerful track and it just fit the moment.

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GNTM: A close second place for Witten

Usually I do not watch formats like “Germany’s Next Top Model” (the German equivalent of “America’s Next Top Model with our Heid Klum). Today was the final show of the 2009 edition. This time I did watch the show.  For patriotic reasons. Seriously.

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Using presentation channels with brains…

Now this here is a very cool way to present a web comic. The most enticing I have seen so far.

Book recommendation: Azincourt bei Bernard Cornwall

Just to get a quick tip off: This saturday I by pure chance bought Azincourt by Richard Cornwall. I’m very interested in medieval history and also love a good yarn with medieval background. So far I only managed the first 156 pages but I am having a lot of fun following the adventures of Nicholas Hook, english forester, outlaw, archer and more on his way to the famous battle of Agincourt/Azincourt. Well written, interesting so far, decent characters (by far not as great as in the First Law trilogy though). If you want some pretty well researched medieval storytelling, here you go!

Trying to “Web 2.0″-enable myself…

For a long time I was not interested in blogs, twitter and all this social web 2.0 stuff - mostly because I thought that I would not have the time to care about these things. But things are more complicated than I would have expected… hints would be appreciated to save me some time. 

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Do I have a problem?

It seems I have  aproblem… one I did not know about. Google just showed me two articles that indicate that I have  a problem. I didn’t know that…

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My wishlist

Occasionally someone asks (especially some ADOM fan). So if you fell like saying thanks for ADOM (or something else ;-), already have finished the postcard quest and don’t just want to send money via Paypal but otherwise express your gratitude, you can make me happy by perusing and using  my Amazon wishlist - I love surprises, I love packages and I love gifts

Recommendation: First Law Trilogy

Since I just talked to some colleagues about this I would like to recommend the following trilogy to anyone in fantasy literature. It’s not for children, it’s different and it’s… brutal. But the characters in the trilogy are some of the most unlikely and different characters I have seen in a long time. And the author, Joe Abercombie, really has a talent for very swtring characterization and the language skills to suit that talent.

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SpringOne 2009: The side talks…

The most interesting thing about conferences (besides having the chance to hear about something you simply missed while being distracted by your normal daily workload) is that you can meet all kind of interesting people. Well, actually you can all kind of people and some are more interesting than others. But if you manage to identify the particularly interesting people and get to talk to them about your and their interests, this really can widen your horizon (not really surprising, but I need to remind myself of that every once in a while when I sit in a particularly boring or uninspired talk). Yesterday night we explored Amsterdam and actually had a very interesting discussion about what we perceive to be major problems of the software engineering discipline as a whole - not with someone new we met but with a good old acquaintance we hadn’t met for some time. The night ended after 2pm in the morning but the resulting 5 hours of sleep were a tiny price to be paid for the great evening - both intellectually and socially. Thanks, Nils! So what did we discuss…?

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