Hehe, today I received the first mailbag of my life. You read right, a really BIG yellow mailbag (see Photo #1).
I was a little confused what it might be, and after reading the label (see Photo #2) it was clear that it had to be some books from an Amazon Marketplace seller (alibris). I do a lot of business with them as they sell superb hardcover books for cheap prices – I tend to read original material, hence most books are english and those books are really expensive over here, especially if you want the hardcover edition.

To my surprise all that was inside was a single package (see Photo #3). Alrighty, it contained quite a large book (see Photo #4), but nontheless: a whole mailbag for that?! But anyway, what do I care, I only payed 3 Euro shipping costs :mrgreen:

Photo #1
Photo #2
Photo #3
Photo #4
All Photos resized to 1024×768 and 204-283kb in size.

Just like Neil I received my first Google cheque (or check) a few days ago. I was more than happy to receive some money, which is covering at least part of my hosting costs, without doing anything for it.

But my hapiness is a little deadbeat now that my bank has cashed the cheque. Just like Neil wrote in his recent post: if you’re not located in the US you will certainly be surprised about the amount that is ultimatively credited to your account. As of AdSense’s terms of service I’m not to disclose how much I earned, but as I’ve got a cheque you can figure out the lower boundary of the amount. Let me put it that way: the currency conversion and the bank fees for foreign cheques has just cut the amount by 16% :cry:

Now that really sucks, but hey, as I ain’t got an account with an american bank there’s nothing much I can do…

After my old mobile phone died in October (see here), I finally decided which way to go. As I said back then there were two phones which I would want, the Motorola V3 (Razr) or the Nokia 6230. The V3 is just too expensive (still 379€), so I went with the Nokia 6230 (which I was able to get for a discounted price of 49€ now – instead of the 129€ prior to January 1st).

I know that the battery life of it isn’t all that great, but I’ve got a masterplan for that – upgrade the standard battery (850mAh) with a high-capacity one (1200 mAh). That should give it an extra boost and a decent battery life (of greater than 1 day).

Apart from that little downside it has got everything you could ask for: Bluetooth, groovy colour display, etc. Now I can’t wait for it to arrive, hopefully it’ll be here in 1-2days – expect to hear a review then :wink:

:santa: Merry Christmas everyone :santa:

Spend most of the day yesterday laying a wooden floor in a mate’s room. After 3 hours of “relaxing sleep” (yeah right!) we met up at 9am yesterday. After a little chit-chat, coffee and cigarettes we started to get busy and after some startup problems we were able to get it done (7:30pm all was done). Groovy stuff as the floor is really looking great! :mrgreen:

On the downside I’m stuck with two swollen knees, but hey, it could be worse…at least the party location for december 25th is set now :-)

Oh my, what a weekend:

• We had our little christmas dinner on friday (FC Marbach 2nd team). So we all enjoyed ourselves with some nice food and a lot of drinking. Managed to get home by 5 am.
• Went to the christmas market of Steinheim and had quite a few glasses of mulled wine, then we went to a house warming party and had some Blutwurz schnaps (around 50% alcohol). Managed to get home by 1am.
• Went to the christmas market of Marbach today and had some glasses of mulled wine. Managed to get home as early as 7pm.

So, it was a real busy and boozy weekend, hence the lack of updates. Now it’s really time to get some rest and start out fresh tomorrow – I guess I’m getting old ;-)

I can’t believe it. Just left a building in Marbach after a marathon meeting concerning WikiFUN.de and to my surprise my car was covered in snow!
Hello?! It’s early November! Hopefully it will take a while until the next snow is falling – nontheless I need to get my winter tires for my car ready :-(

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 ;-)

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…

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.

Wow. I just came back from a house-warming party which took place in a mate’s new flat in Karlsruhe (90km from where I live). We partied hard till nearly 5am and I was really surprised that it took the cops so long to crash the party – it was as loud as in a club and I guess you could here the party from five blocks away.

After the cops told us to settle down a little and close the doors and windows it was really time to get some sleep – or at least to try. I didn’t get any as there were people snoring, opening the door, shouting around, closing the door all around me. So I tried to at least relax a little, which I did, although it wasn’t all that comfortable on the wooden floor, until 9am.

After a little water to the face and brushing my teeth it was time to check out the flat and oooooh boy, you really saw that this was one hell of a party (I guess there were around 80people at the party with around 1/3 partying till well after 5am) – some puke here, some puke there, loads of broken beer bottle, cigarettes everywhere and you could hardly get your feet off the floor (did some spill “a little” something everywhere?! – yup!). So we took off to a small pub to get some breakfast and after some coffee and sitting outside in the sun I wasn’t feeling tired at all. That change right as we drove back. So I’m starting to get really tired atm, so I guess I’ll close the laptop after this post and try to get some rest/sleep right here on the couch :-)

I’m currently having major difficulties with my mail at dreamhost, the service has been up and down all day and I can’t get into webmail. Support ticket submitted, no response yet although I guess they’re aware of the situation and are on it (currently open tickets >500, open tickets when I submitted mine: >300).

Update: server issue resolved, support ticket removed… :-)

Oh no. Alright, it’s autumn and all, but why now? It’s two weeks till project deadline (S.E.S.S.) and now I’ve caught a bad case of a cold with sore throat and all :-(

Nontheless my To-Do-List is still nearly endless so I need to get all my strength together this afternoon and get some things done. Wish me luck.

Alrighty, after a short night I took some time to get everything up and running this morning. You can see the results of my efforts here, here and here). It was indeed not dreamhost’s fault that the site wouldn’t show up, it was mine (D’oh) – to make a long story short: I used my second shell user to upload all the stuff and unfortunately home of user1 != home of user2, so I basically just uploaded it to the wrong folder (web was configured to use /home/user1/fcm2.info/ as www-root…and I uploaded the stuff to /home/user2/fcm2.info/ ). So thumbs up…everything up and running in less than an hour including 3 DBs, 3 subdomains and their respective dns-updates :-)

Conclusion so far:

• The speed of the server I’m on is awesome…
• It’s good to have shell access once again (the content move was quite easy this way, ssh to new server, connect to old server via ftp and download all the stuff, done)
• The Control panel is really something you need to get used to, I’d still rather have CPanel, but I guess I can live with it
• What am I complaining about anyway? 1 Year hosting including a top-level domain for 0.77$/month (first year)…w00t ;-)