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.

We are back in Japan. This time for a little less than three weeks and we already enjoyed some days of that long awaited period.

The picture above was shot today when I had some time to play around with the camera while I was waiting for the new haircut of my wife to get completed (about 4 hours). It is a small square with some benches, artistic water installations and some shadow (where I had to hide to protect myself of the burning sun). The place is located between the Imperial Palace (right in the opposite direction from the presented view) and the Tokyo Station (which is behind the big buildings).

As we have internet connection right in the room I already have uploaded some photos of the first days which can be found in the photo gallery Tokyo 2007 album.

Our journey has taken us to many places already: Tokyo Disneyland, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Akihabara, Ueno (where we are staying), Saitama, etc. etc. and there is still some time left. Hooray.
The images in the gallery are just a teaser. Many great shots to follow soon.