Roundup…

Thursday:

  • Sox time again! After the Red Sox last year, the White Sox did it this year. They won the World Series 4-0 over the Houston Astros to win their first World Series in 88 years! Congrats!
  • I visited the Systems World in Munich. Quite interesting especially some digital office solutions (ELO, etc). On another note: I saw the new Audi Q7 there. Oooh this one looks sweet, but is “sligthly” out of my price range…
  • No Poker for the second day in a row…after being on the road for most of the day I just didn’t feel like playing…

Friday:

  • After getting some more sleep than on thursday I used the afternoon to play some tournaments again. I declare Q-Q to be my downfall…from now on I’m going to lay it down preflop as this is the hand that has kicked me out of a tournament three times now :-(
  • In the evening I went to footie training (the first week I’ve been able to train twice in quite a while), which was fun as we did less running and more playing.

FC Marbach II 0-3 TSV Neckargroeningen

The first bump in the road, so to speak. After being undefeated in the first 6 matches, we were finally defeated today. It seemed that our opponents were not really much better than we were, but they were motivated and wanted to win badly – and who can blame them, they were almost secured as champions last season before failing to claim the championship due to a draw in the last match of the season.

We’re still on top of the table (16points), but both Oberstenfeld (15 points) and Neckargroeningen (15 points and one game less played) are on our heels…

Busy weekend

Oooh what a weekend. Went out to play Golf for the first time ever on friday and it was really fun! I could really like it. We went to the GolfClub Niederreutin which is so beautiful you couldn’t even imagine. As we were mostly beginners (some mates have played before, some haven’t) we went straight to the driving range and tried to get our swing going – tbh it does seem so easy when you look at the Golf Pros on the telly, but believe me it isn’t. Nontheless we didn’t do all that bad and were able to even hit some good shots with the Woods (W1/W3/W5) in the end. To finish up our golf experience we visited the chipping/putting area and had a little fun there. All in all a really good experience – I guess this won’t be the only time we were playing ;-)

After the Golf experience we headed off to play a little private poker round which started at midnight and lasted until around 10am on saturday morning – I split the main pot with my mate Armin in the end…so noone was really disappointed.

After that it was time for a little brunch and some chillin’ on the couch…about 2pm it was finally time to take a nap – and after a good nights sleep the weekend is almost over again. Time to regroup and head off into the first week after the semester:

Exams are coming up in September/October, so still enough time to get the learning on it’s way…besides that it’s time to start our “Fachstudie” (a team of 3 students are analyzing something over the course of 3 months) – we’re covering the topic “BPEL4WS vs. WS-CDL in different scenarios”. This should really be fun and a good way to deepen our knowledge about Web Service Technolgy!

Looking for hosting?

A mate just informed me that the Dreamhost promotion code “777” is still valid for new customers. So if you need hosting and would like a full featured account (2.4GB space, 120GB traffic, shell-access, …) head over to Dreamhost and sign-up for the crazy-domain-insane package (yearly payment) and enter the promotion code 777 and you’ll receive the first year of hosting including 1 top-level domain for $9.24 after the major rebate…please use the Dreamhost-button on the right hand menu or this referral-link – that way I’ll get “some” referral money :-)

Recent absence

Yes, I’m still alive – didn’t have much time to post something though. With an exam coming up on friday I’m trying to study as hard as possible and spend as little time online as possible. I’m really looking forward for this thing to be over as my head is full, full, full of knowledge waiting to burst out. Hopefully everything will be fine, I guess you can’t do more than prepare properly – I’ll find out on friday and keep you updated (I guess Saturday)…

So, here’s a quick round-up of things:

  • Fantasy footie Weeks 27 and 28 (34 points/929 points total – 10 points/939 points total)
  • It seems that after three weeks of canceled matches we’re going to play on sunday – thank god, it’s really hard to get into gear when you’ve been training for around 8 weeks (after the winter break) without a single real match (we’ve played some friendly matches, but that’s just not the real deal)
  • I’ll be around more after the exam as mentioned above. One exception though: Sat April 2nd – Sat April 16th…VACATION :mrgreen: (more about that soonish)

KSV Besigheim 1-2 FC Marbach II

Oooh yeah! Now that was a game.

We took the lead 1-0 after a nice effort by one of our strikers. After that we had numerous chances to go ahead even higher, but we blew them all. Then we had a penalty and the chance to make it 2-0 (and eventually seal the victory), but we blew that as well. In return KSV Besigheim took their one chance and leveled 1-1. With 22 minutes to good it took us some minutes to get our game back together and after missing another two to three great chances our efforts were rewarded with a second penalty – which we were able to capitilise on: 1-2!!! :-)

We were able to hold on to that missing some other chances to make the score even clearer. After this good effort we are now still on top of the league (23pts) with a four point lead over both KSV Besigheim and Dersim Ludwigsburg (with the game Dersim Ludwigsburg – KSV Besigheim still in the balance – it had to be postponed after the referee forgot to show up last week). Now everything is in our own hands with three games left until the winter break. We don’t have another game for the next two weeks so we’ve got enough time to relax a little and prepare for the next match which will be against TSV Ludwigsburg on November 28th.

US Presenditial Election

Oooh boy, how close can a race be (in terms of electoral votes). Current standing is:

  • George W. Bush: 254
  • John Kerry: 252

Unfortunately I can’t watch TV coverage as I’m stuck here at Uni, but the CNN online coverage will keep me uptodate. I didn’t think that Dubya really had a chance of winning a second bid to the White House, but it starts to seem that voters will prove me wrong :-(

Week 9

Oooh that hurts!

Ingoal’s score: 18 pts – total: 287 pts
Mr.Price’s score: 26 pts – total: 338 pts

Still early in the season, but it’s starting to look like next year’s game will be free for Mr. Price (yeah right ;-) , time for a huge comeback!!!) :-)

Project update

Well, well…how fast can a year go by? Very fast. I almost cannot believe that one year has already passed again and that the project is coming to it’s end (official project deadline is this sunday, october 31st).

So how did we do?
Due to one thing and another (parallel project for the first half of this project, developers dropping out, general workload, etc) we won’t have the desired system up and running. This is a bugger, although I (and most of the developers) can say: we put up our best effort, it just wasn’t meant to be – always look on the bright side I guess ;-)

So what now?
As this week is the official end of the project, it seems that we’re finishing up in the “unofficial time” until the project presentation. Seeing that this is a uni project, this is quite common. Now we’re left with the hard job to

  • analyse the whole system/concept
  • document the functionality of everything that is up and running so far
  • analyse what isn’t implemented yet and document how we intended to do it
  • collect and archive all documents + the source code
  • write a final report
  • hand in final report
  • prepare the presentation of the project
  • present the project
  • party a little that it’s over
  • wait for the grade

What’s next?
After 1.5 years of nonstop (uni) project work it’s time to relax a little as I really feel “burned out”. So I decided to make this semester (which has already started on October 18th 2004) a more quite one – as I already participated in all the lectures that I want to write an exam about I guess I won’t visit any lectures. I will relax some weeks first (maybe 2-4, we’ll see), where relax will probably just mean that I won’t do anything related to the uni and that I will catch up with numerous other (private) projects and close out some To-Do point on my list. Here’s what comes to mind:

  • Generate content and put up my new business site (I’ve already done the design and setup the framework (Mambo Server) – a snapshot can be found here. This will replace my current (old and crappy) site: dvserviceih.de
  • Rebuild and reinstall first pc and install third pc – third pc you might ask, yup I’ve got three pcs at home (+ one laptop). It’s time to reinstall my first (or main) pc due to the fact that my Windows XP installation has reached it’s lifecycle (resulting in numerous explorer-crashes and the like). In the process I will replace one of the hdds with a bigger one (60GB -> 160GB) and will take that spare 60GB hdd to good use in my third pc (which was running knoppix from cd so far), where it will be home of a linux distribution (I’m still unsure what distro it will be, but I guess I’ll go for Debian 3.1).
  • Work through pile of “old” customer requests, e.g. fixing some pcs etc
  • etc
  • Not to forget one major To-Do point: sleep long, have fun, play games, go out with friends,… ;-)

Then I will, at least try, to prepare me for the next exams (I intend to write at least 2 major ones this time, which will result in me having to learn stuff from up to 12 lectures) – longterm this time, not in adhoc last-minute round-the-clock sessions ;-)

Posted in Uni

Spreadfirefox

Now that Chu Yeow reached his goal I thought maybe some of you would still like to contribute and well, you could do it using my donation link, that way I might get a firefox t-shirt, too – although I doubt it due to the fact that there are only 3 days left, but hey…you can never know if you never try ;-)

Mobile Phone update

Well, well…now I’m stuck, the Motorola V3 isn’t in stock with my service provider yet and, even worse, it isn’t even on the list of new mobiles arriving :-(

Now what? Should I go with the Nokia 6230 and stick with it or should I get that and sell it and buy the V3 of an independent vendor? Really need to think this through and calc a little…

R.I.P. 8310

After years of good service my mobile phone (or cellular or “handy” like we call them over here in germay) the lovely Nokia 8310 gave up on me. It just turned itself off and I can’t get it to start up again. That’s a real bugger as all stuff on the phone itself (so all the stuff not saved on the SIM-card) seems to be down the drain :-( – this includes all my appointments I saved in the calendar, some numbers that had no room on the SIM anymore and a load of SMS’.

Ah well, a fond farewell to it. Now I need to get into gear to get a new one which leads me to my newest problem:
I wanted to buy the brand new Motorola V3 a.k.a. “Razr”, but unfortunately it’s not in stock anywhere :-(

Now I’m stuck: should I go with my second choice (first choice prior to the Razor) the lovely Nokia 6230 which has all the features you would ever need, but which has got one major disadvantage: with medium to heavy use the battery won’t last much longer than 1 day! :-(

Need to think this over…I’ll keep you updated.