What year would it have been if there have not at least a handful mayor events been taking place. The top event of 2008 was – without a question – the birth of our first son. The second mayor change in my life this year took it’s time until the very end. Since last Friday I am no CEO of Pulpmedia anymore. I will continue to be share holder of the company and continue to contribute my manpower to existing and hopefully new web projects. There is not any conflict or combat going on but it just was time for change again. As my contribution to Pulpmedia projects will be of a somehow limited nature there hopefully is enough time to realize my own projects. All about the near future plans on 1/1/2009. Same blog. Same place.

Last Thursday I was really looking forward to spend some days in the north italian region “alto adige”. It was really great but even though Monday was a holiday the week hit in quite unpleasantly on Tuesday.
After moving the last couple of sites from the old server to the new high availability cluster in a 16 hrs shift the stress level kept up pretty high. At least this week only has two more days full of surprises left.
This is one of the few times in my life where I don’t even find time to work on my own online projects.

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?

わたしのにほんごまだよくないです。それでもがんばります。
今日からわたしの日本語のサイトがあります：
http://gaijin.desu.atです。
よんでくださいとコメントかけてをおねがいします。

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.