Preparing for JAX 2009

This afternoon we are heading of to JAX 2009, the first of two big yearly Java conferences in Germany.

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Oracle buys Sun

Wow… Larry, you are a genius. Now it’s official. And I think it’s a brilliant move of Oracle.

Not only that they suddenly own Java, they now also have their own IDE (Netbeans), a hardware platform (Solaris) for distributing their high power applications and a lot more (even MySQL, LOL). At the weekend I joked about this, now it’s reality. I’m really curious what this will mean for IBM in the future. And I would love to see the face of the IBM manager responsible for the negotiations between IBM and Sun. He’s probably at some cliff right now and looking down… either out of free will or with his hands bound behind him.

Interesting times, really interesting times 🙂

Entenhaus im Aus?

Wir lieben das Entenhaus in Bochum-Stiepel. Und die Website existiert auch noch… doch als wir heute abend dort essen wollten, standen wir vor einem leergeräumten Restaurant. Kann es sein, dass die besten Entengerichte des ganzen Ruhrgebiets nicht mehr verfügbar sind? Um sachdienliche Hinweise wird gebeten… hoffentlich wird das Entenhaus nur renoviert und es hatte noch niemand ein Schild ins Fenster gehängt. Liebe Entenhaus-Inhaber: Das wäre aber ziemlich dumm…

Gran Torino

Today we watched “Gran Torino” directed by Clint Eastwood who also is playing the main character. I have been a huge fan of Clint Eastwood for a long time and thus it is no suprise that I really loved the movie. Go watch it or buy the DVD or watch it and buy the DVD. Why did I lke the movie so much?

Spoiler alert…

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Gamma World 7th Edition…

…is one game I definitely would love to see. But not at any price…

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Being a Fanboy… and a Troll

Today is a good day. After a long hard day of work, I visited my blog and noticed that the Trollgod himself graced my comments with his wisdom 🙂

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Obscure RPG Quest, Part I

As I mentioned elsewhere I am collecting roleplaying games (of the pen & paper variety). I probably by now own more than 400 such games and the number is growing whenever I spot an interesting new or old game.

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Pure Presentation Power

I really love good presentations and currently am trying to learn to become a much better presenter. Therefor I usually recommend to anyone interested (and some not interested… but anyways) the brilliant PresentationZen blog by Garr Reynolds and his likewise brilliant book based on the blog (which is a bliss to read for anyone interested in doing interesting presentations).

This presentation again recommended by Garr Reynolds really caught my eye – just focus on the text and listen:

Stardust / Der Sternwanderer

We just watched “Der Sternwanderer” (Stardust, by Neil Gaiman). I absolutely love this movie – what a wonderful fairy tale with great characters, nice twists and turns. I fail to see the issues some critics had about the movie and being able to follow the story. My recommendation: Watch it, enjoy it and take it as what it is – a simple yet moving fairy tale about all the strong motives of classic fairy tales: great evil meeting bravery in the face of at first unsurmountable adversity, true love and the strength of innocence. 

BTW, I recommend everything from Neil Gaiman, his Sandman comics probably being one of the most powerful pieces of fantastic literature I ever read (yeah, literature in a comic series – can you believe that? The critics had some problems with that [initially]).

Design Fascination

I’m really interested in design. Sadly I’m neither very talented (as you can see from the way I modified this blog theme) nor did I ever happen to enjoy any formal design education. Nonetheless I once more noticed how much I enjoy toying around with colors, fonts and more. I usually feel very inspired to start writing while playing with fonts… there are so many fonts out there that just ooze feelings… and provide ideas for stories, games and more.

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