enjoy the Ski trip panorama images

And again time seems to pass by faster than ever before. Already in the middle of January I am happy to announce that my mindmap of 2008 is almost done and many nice projects are in the pipe. In the first months I’ll focus on updating and extending old projects. But you surely can expect two or three smaller projects to be announced and published before Euro2008 starts.

If 2008 continues like it started I am looking forward to see more of it. After a short trip to Switzerland right before New Year we came back just in time to watch the famous Four Hills Tournament (Ski Jumping). As there were heavy winds the contest in Bergisel (Innsbruck, Austria) was cancelled for the first time in history and rescheduled for the next day in Bischofshofen, Austria. Thomas Morgenstern (current worldcup leader) finished second in this competition. The atmosphere was overwhelming. Although Gregor Schlierenzauer was able to set a new Hill Record (145 m) during qualification he finished 5th. Overall Thomas and Gregor are still leading the world cup with Janne Ahonen chasing them closely.

Another fun event was the Audi Driving Experience in Saalbach, Austria. Driving the 265PS A4 3.2 in the ice arena surely is fun. Hardly any chance to go faster than 60 to 70 km/h though. Even with spike tires it takes forever to come to a halt.

The next big event is scheduled for June. When we are visiting the previously mentioned Euro2008.
Another “once in a lifetime” higlight is scheduled for 29th of August. Announcement will follow soon I guess.

Workwise I found time to finally switch the blog database to pure UTF-8 (which was not easy at all). Still some bad characters in old entries but I’ll just leave them like they are. Also the gallery got a facelift and many new functions. Now an album can have any amount of subalbums. The structure is still a bit mixed up as I still have to move the travelling albums from root into the travelling album.
The blog now also supports login via OpenID. If you don’t have an OpenID yet stay tuned fot the soon to appear OpenID provider platform announcement. Also code.pulpmedia.at will get some new clothes soon.

Now it’s time to head for some sleep… we’re moving our main servers contents to a new HA (High Availability) cluster tomorrow night. Wish us luck.

No more posts until 2008. And please let me finish this year without my own words.

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence. »

#330261

<i8b4uUnderground> d-_-b
<BonyNoMore> how u make that inverted b?
<BonyNoMore> wait
<BonyNoMore> never mind »

10 Attributes of Really Lazy People

1. Inability to put forth the effort required to complete any task. »

Time is like hell. Already close to the end of the year and no new post since our trip to Japan. So here is an update covering many aspects of my daily life and just in case (if I do not have enough time to write another post before 2008) I already wish you a happy new year.

Winter has finally found Austria (although it is more raining than snowing at the moment in Linz). Today we went to get some fresh cake and coffee at the Hochkar. Sadly no time to ski but maybe in January or February. You can find some impressions of the Hochkar at the end of this post.

So what I am doing that consumes so much time? Mainly it’s just our company (pulpmedia). We are trying to expand our business to new fields and this is somehow exhausting. Besides that some new platforms are in progress I also take some minutes per day to keep my old projects up to date which is not that easy. At the end of the year I want to launch a small pulpmedia platform which gives back some web code to the community as we are using some of open source stuff too in our projects. Restructuring of Japaninfo.at should not take that long any more and hafenscher.net only needs some wordpress fixes (e.g. tagging which is now native in WP). The amazon service library of the japanese community library is currently rewritten from scratch and will be published on the new pulpmedia platform soon. The page also will be transferred to another server and some non-japanese library communities will be set up.

Who-t’s MPX - Multi-Pointer X Server will be merged into the X project soon and I just can’t wait until GTK, Qt, etc. supporting Blob events. Will surely make Linux machines with touch display much more usable.

What else? Let me see. The soccer EM is coming soon and it seems as Austrias group is not the toughest. Hahaha. Just kidding: Austria is going to lose badly but hey… at least we are taking part. Perhaps some magic miracle is going to happen. I’ll be there to support my team. Today I thought of one nice platform for the EM2008… let’s see if I can find some other people interested in launching it.

Still no plans for new year but we’ll be in Switzerland from Christmas eve until the day before new year. I guess we’ll make up a plan spontaneously this year. Until then there are still plenty of Christmas parties to attend to and maybe the one or another drink too. Oh… that reminds me… should get going preparing a short speech for this years company Christmas party. Lucky me has the honor of presenting a resume of 2007. In total I am very happy and the last days of the year 2007 are still very exciting. Still many things to expect and to experience. Maybe we are able to do another round of our fabulous Poker nights at the company. That is the only game where my score is above average this year. I hate losing the billiard game.

How was your year 2007?

Images taken at Hochkar (ca. 1500m, mountain top at ca. 1800m), Austria