But first there is family. Grown to a party of four it is very exciting to see the children blossom and develop. Every single new achievement, regardless of sophistication, makes us very happy parents – day after day. I am really enjoying every minute spent with my family. Especially when riding the bike/out hiking or just going for a walk – exploring the near and not so near environment – together. To watch the kids reactions is truly amazing. With almost three months of the youngest private life is getting more and more relaxed, but in all honesty, sometimes it really was hard to say the least.

Timewise, I have to admit, that the focus currently lies on business development. The last month were quite exhausting. Full of days working at least 12 h per day. At least I managed to keep weekends work-free quite successfully. Although my father in law would think quite highly of me (if he knew) I am aiming to abandon this Japanese style of time distribution within the next 12 months. Probably.

During the last weeks most of our efforts paid off and rewarded us highly. Not only financially but most important of all our business strategy proved right and is leading us to all the goals we set for ourselves. Our team is growing steadily and we continue to be more efficient than ever before while handling numerous projects at a very decent quality level. Best of all is the possibility to spend time on our own projects and ideas. We are investing our resources into two serious startups. It is great to feel the spirit and to share it with many great people from all over the world. I will be talking more openly about our endeavours within the next months on our usual business channels. Please be patient with us. We are on the verge of becoming a full member of a global business community. Hello World!

I cannot repeat it often enough how excited I am about all which is unfolding at the present. Still there are so many beautiful planned milestones and spontaneous surprises ahead. I am happy.

People I want to thank for this wonderful journey so far: my parents for supporting me so much by supporting my wife and the kids. A very understanding and supportive wife which is growing karma every second. My team which constantly shows the hunger I am demanding. And my partners whom I fully trust. A very special thank you goes to Senpai: Looking forward to do the crazy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When we are old we all have to tell some stories.

Basically I just dropped by to post a new panorama: View from Behamberg to Kürnberg
Shot using new gear for taking panoramas. And I just love snowy tracks. Looks like white Christmas to me.

To sum 2009 up in a few words: the last year was great. Many personal achievements, business developing great and looking forward to an exciting 2010. Already tweaking the master plan and extracting some great goals for the next year. A year which I am quite sure will reveal some mayor milestones on our journey.

During the next weeks you are most likely to meet me somewhere between Salzburg and Vienna… maybe not at home so much. I wish you nice holidays, a happy new year and some challenging resolutions for 2010.

By automatic instant upload of a life photograph (most probably taken with an iPhone) to his Facebook account he managed to become internet-famous super quickly. Sadly for him not in the good sense of internet-famous. If you really want to see the nasty details you can find a screenshot of his Facebook wall here (NSFW). Be warned: the photo really is NSFW and might even be considered NSFL.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise so be sure to check for updates in mid/end of may. In the meantime (while I am enjoying tasty asian cuisine and colorful sunsets at Odaiba beach after relaxing in traditional Japanese Onsen for hours) you are invited to take a look at a recent “just for fun” project: topsellerblog.de. The German platform for brand clothing gives you a high quality listing of brand clothes available online directly at the selling companies. Third party services like Google friend connect allow you to easily share your thoughts on the products.

From a webdeveloper’s point of view I am truly amazed by the great facebook framework. Seeing the great success of the platform does not make me feel anything than admiration. But from a social point of view I am really concerned about the ongoing abstraction of internet communities from the real world. It just makes me sad that I did not wake up earlier. At the moment I am just happy to have stopped this social nightmare.

The dilemma I am in right now is that my profession is webdeveloper. I am earning money by producing online systems. To not follow the mainstream is quite risky for a one-man-show company and might create a bad reputation at business partners who do believe in all buzzes. I hope those people too will one day find out that not everyone is happy with information overflow and real social isoliation created by online worlds.

My current quest is to find a way back to reality for online services. I want to use online technology to enhance my social experience in real-life… not to replace it. Today I was attending a NFC (near field communication) conference and was amazed by the possibilities this technology has to offer. That could really be a way to connect both worlds in a manner that will make me benefit from the online connectivity in a more satisfying way. Of course the internet still is holding a lot of useful ressources and services for me too. At the moment there is just the feeling that I want to spend more time with real people around than in online channels.

No matter if it will be NFC or any other kind of new technology… I am just curious about the future of the technological part of our lives.

My experience so far:

• MySpace: Perfect. They have a fully automated process of deleting the account permanently. After verifying the wish for deletion via email myspace says it will take up to 48 hours until my account is gone.
• Facebook: Seem pretty straight forward too. The automated process says that my account is in deactivated state for another 14 days. If I do not login in the meantime it will be removed permanently automatically.
• Xing: I guess the deletion process would be quite easy for non-premium-members. In my case I had to contact the support team. My premium account still lasts until the end of april. But I want my life back now. Let’s see when I get feedback.
• LinkedIn: I always hated the clumsy interface and I even hate the process of account deletion even more. The only way to delete the account is to send an email to the support team. Funny thing is that I got an error when sending the support form. I tried a second time and the system said there was already a message from my email address within the process queue. So I guess my first request got delivered although there was an error message. We’ll see.

To find the “delete account” option on the platforms I mostly used google to get hints faster on how to do it. For every platform there are good pages online giving the right directions.

Before deleting your account be sure to remove all your personal information. On some platforms it seems as if not all your information gets automatically purged. Especially LinkedIn seems to be kind of funny. I don’t know if it is true but it is rumoured that they remove your login but keep your data publicly. So please remove everything personal and change what is not removable to something different.

Especially on LinkedIn again there were several things I was not able to remove. Maybe you can remove everything somehow but with my constant struggle with the interface I decided to overwrite some entries. Luckily removing the connections to other people is pretty easy. On Xing for e.g. you have to remove all your connections manually. Removing about 150 links eventually takes up to 3 minutes.

I am still keeping my twitter account. I really like the concept of the global shoutbox and I am using it’s content on some mashups. Also all my instant messaging accounts are still valid. I expect to gain an additional one to two hours per day which I will redistribute to my own online projects and my real life.

After a long period of sleepless nights and long hours of working on the launch I am now officially allowed to serve customers.

Haven’t seen too many other work environments outside offices yet but I guess most of the tables are enough if they consist in a small notebook and some paper chaos. More is really not needed anymore.

Nowadays anything can be done from any single workstation. Even from a tiny little eeePC 700 you can open VPN connections and work remotely on any connected computer. Of course it is easier if you are also preferring to work in command line mode but anything is possible today.

The aspect I love of the new possibilities is that you can work from anywhere at any time you want. You can stay at home with your family and see your kids grow up and you can bring your work even with you on remote islands somewhere in east asia.

And there is also the big downside. As a system administrator / web developer you really should learn how to “disconnect”. Being 100% online and available all the time wears down your health pretty quickly. I remember the days when you tried to make your environment as connected as possible. Connecting dozens of different clients to be available for your customers all the time. Phone, mobile phone, instant messaging, email, social networks now finding together in Unified Communications is pretty easy to setup in the year 2008. Now it is time to learn on how to escape from this again.

If you are interested I would like to invite you to examine my home office environment.

At the moment all of the few minutes left are going into my new blog in japanese gaijin.desu.at and my daily webjourneys at gfrast.com. I have many new features for those sites trapped mentally already and I hope I can release them within the next month. As for this site do not expect too many news. But hey… that was the situation already for the last month.. no?