…don’t worry, this is a scheduled post as I’m offline at a new year’s eve party…nontheless I wanted to be on time to wish all of you a very happy and successfull 2012! :-)
Regards,
Ingoal
Happy new year!
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Category Archives: personal
Another busy weekend…with sports
Due to a minor injury less doing sports and more watching sports. The olympics, german football league starting…and what not. Along the way I worked off my last freelance jobs…so the coming weeks should be a lot less crowded…at least when it comes to working, unless I get the new job I’m applying for, then the “workless” times could be over quite quickly ;)
Sporty weekend
Football preparation for the new season has started two weeks ago and so far I didn’t miss a single training session – so far. Today I missed the first one, a friendly match, as my foot is shining in different colours ranging from green to blue. It wasn’t the best idea to train on friday after suffering the injury on thursday, but oh well. Nontheless a lot of sport going on.
First of all, the Beijing Olympics…so far nothing much going for the german athletes when it comes to winnnig medals, but at least some of the national teams seem to be in good shape (e.g. handball, basketball)…it’ll be fun to watch them compete for the next few days/weeks.
Secondly, the german professional football season is about to start next weekend, so in good old tradition the competition for the german football cup ( “DFB Pokal” ) started this week…so far quite a few good matches and no major upsets…
Alrighty…enough about sports, I’m going to do a little sport myself now…called “couch-surfing” ;)
We’re the champions my friend…
We did it…with a decisive 8-0 victory in the last season game we claimed the league championship, 3 points clear at the top of the table. Champions! Finally…here’s the pennant…
Only 7 more championships until we’re in the german bundesliga…lol… ;-)
Vista shipped
Finally some good news from the “upgrade nightmare” front. Finally, finally, they shipped my upgrade copy of Vista Business on tuesday (so basically just on the day I ranted about them not shipping it, lol, did they read my blog?! ;))…now it should be only a matter of a few days until I hold it in my hands, the excitement :)
Waiting for Vista
Man, this really sucks. Now, I’m usually not the one to jump on the train right away anyway, so it’s basically not the biggest deal, but slowly I’m getting annoyed. Why? Because I ordered a WinXP license with an upgrade coupon back in december when I built my new pc. So far so good. I then sent the upgrade coupon to Modus Link (the company handling the upgrades). That was in the first week of January. Since then I’m waiting and waiting and waiting…
Today, I checked the status again and the upgrade claim has finally been approved. Well, that’s the first step, but the thing still isn’t shipped yet. Are you kidding me? Three months and you’re unable to send me a dvd with a license sticker? Hello?! Absolutely ridiculous! The only upside: by the time I receive my copy I can be absolutely sure that there are drivers for everything in my pc and on a funny note: maybe SP1 will be already out by then ;)
End of the year, time for some upgrades
Well, it’s been a while since I last upgraded my pc…almost 3 years…
So, I decided it’s time for a new one…some funky dual core stuff or something and yup, there are lots of possible configurations.
First decision: Intel or AMD?
I know that Intel’s Core 2 Duos are powerful, fast and sexy…but they’re a little more expensive too…so I thought I’d go with AMD, yet again…(my current system is an AMD Athlon XP, the one before that was an AMD, …)…
Second decision: Fastest/expensive, medium/alrighty, lower end/cheap
I decided to go with middle ground…an AMD x2 3800 it is, the Energy Efficient version of it – that’s perfect for a smaller case and it’ll help me save some energy costs, after all my pc is running most of the time. Combined with a funky mATX board, 1GB of ram (for now), 500GB Samsung SATAII (16MB Cache), DVD-burner, DVD-Rom and a nice mATX case by aplus…
The case arrived today and I’m hoping that the rest will arrive tomorrow (it was sent off by the shop today)…it’s going to be fun to build a pc, haven’t done that in a while…
Ooooh and I almost forgot, I ordered a new copy of Windows XP Pro…117€ including an Express upgrade coupon to Vista business….sounds like a good deal :)
I’ll post some pics once I’m done building…
Lots of catching up to do…
…well, what can I say. I’m madly busy these days. Why? Because I started my internship in early september and so I’m mostly “at work” most of the weekdays (leaving early in the morning, coming home, knackered, in the late evening)…so nothing too spectacular to report, apart from the fact that I’m missing some sleep.
Missed the chance to get some extra sleep on saturday, when I scheduled a business meeting at 9am – what did I think ;) ?! But at least I got some extra sleep and some chillin in today. Missed our footie match (we won 3-2 and are back in the hunt for the championship), but watched another good game.
My father had some VIP tickets to the german first league basketball match Ludwigsburg (10min from where I live) vs Trier. Ludwigsburg was unbeaten so far in the championship race (4 Ws in 4 matches). So we drove there early and met up with my aunt and her son and had a really good time – it’s always nice to watch a game in Ludwigsburg’s “Rundsporthalle” as it’s a rather small building and the vibes are just there. It’s awesome. In the end Ludwigsburg held on to win the match 84-81. So now they’re still unbeaten (5Ws in 5 matches) and are on top of the table. Nice.
Now it’s almost midnight again, so it’s time for me to log off…better catch some sleep before the week begins in less than 7 hours ;)
Sports, sports and sports
Well, we’ve got the Fifa World Cup over here in Germany and everyone sure is excited. Footie is everywhere and you almost can’t escape – not that I wanted to anyway ;)
I was actually in the middle of it last friday. I was in the stadium watching the match Netherlands vs Ivory Coast. What a great match and I can’t even begin to explain the spirit in and around the stadium, unbelievable. Here are some photos taken by my (not so high resolution) mobile phone cam, showing me (in the Eat, Sleep, Code SitePoint Shirt), the stadium and the Premiere broadcasting box which was right there a couple of meters away from us (Premiere is the only PayPerView channel over here in Germany, their expert in the box was Christoph Daum, who is one of our better known coaches – he almost became our national coach a few years back…): 
In related footie notes: After the lost championship, some of us played footie again for the first time. It was supposed to be a fun “hobby tourney”, but it turned out to be a ankle-busting slugfest…so not much joy, but at least a little time with the ball and some time in the sun with mates…could have been worse ;)
Apart from the whole World Cup thing there are the NBA Finals, which I follow closely – after all Dirk Nowitzki and his Dallas Mavericks are in it. Too bad that they slipped in the third game and failed to take that game down. Instead of a 3-0 lead going into game 4, they were only ahead 2-1 and now the Heat have built up there momentum pretty good. Last night they pulled out yet another tight tight win in overtime to take the series lead 3-2. Now it’s up to Dallas to protect their homecourt to take it down in 7. Goooooooooooo Mavs!
Championship lost…again
What a frustrating day. We were, once again, on the verge of winning the championship – an amazing feat considering the fact that we just came into this higher class last year. We played and won our last game on thursday, so no game for us today, but the other team in contention (FV Oberstenfeld) played today. They were down 1-0, pulled level, were down 2-1, pulled level, went ahead 3-2…then Neckarrems pulled level to 3 a piece again, which is the result: 3-3. What does that mean for us? We lost the championship!!! Both them and us won 17 matches, drew 5 matches and lost twice…we even score the same amount of goals (74), but they conceded three less (21 to our 24), so they win the championship….
Side note: if and only if we hadn’t played 2-2 against the bottom team two weeks ago or if we had won with two (we won our match 6-1 on thursday, but the ref only noted a 5-1 win for us)/three more goals on thursday we would have been the champions :-(
Now we will have to play relegation matches again….the first match will be on friday against a fellow second placed Kreisliga B team. The second match will be against the next to last from Kreisliga A, but only if we win the first match…if not, it’ll be a lost season…damn, footie can be cruel sometimes…
Indoor footie tournament reloaded
We’re playing the “Bottwartal Turnier” tomorrow. This should be fun, at least I hope so! This is the one indoor tournament at the beginning of the 2nd part of the season were all footie clubs out of the near surroundings compete for the cup, so no hobby players.
I’ll post an update tomorrow morning…let’s see how it goes…hopefully a little better than last year (we won the first two matches and lost all remaining games)…
Update:: The tourney went quite well, although it was up and down and didn’t seem to end. We started to play shortly after noon and had our last match shortly after 6pm. Our results: LWLWLWL, so three wins, 4 losses…better than last year. On another note: noone was (seriously) injured on our squad which is good news, although there are some minor injuries. A team-mate banged up his knee a little bit, all players have abrasions from the nasty indoor floor and I banged up my right wrist while taking a fall on the slippery floor. It really hurts and I’ll wait till tomorrow to see if the hand /arm is getting better or worse, I hope that it’s “only” a sprain…
Happy new year!
Just wanted to wish all of my readers a Happy New Year! Yeah, I know it’s a little bit early, but I’m about to head to a new year’s eve party, so this will be the last post in 2005. See you all in 2006
TuS Freiberg 1-5 FC Marbach II
The last match before the winter break was not something to remember. We were superior most of the match and went ahead 0-1 through a direct free kick. Then the inevitable happened: our defenders missed a ball and they came right back at us for the 1-1 equalizer. We didn’t play nervous though and were able to come right back at the with 1-2 before the half-time break. After the break we were the more focussed team once again and were able to score another 3 goals to make it 1-5. Bad news though: as one of the Freiberg’s player fell on one of our defenders he was knocked out cold with a skull contusion.
Scoreboard:
Fabian Kirschner, 2 Goals, 1 Assist
Stefan Holter, 1 Goal
Timo Striegel, 2 Goals
After 13 matches we’re in second place and everything is looking good for the rest of the season (play will resume on March 12th 2006):
- FV Oberstenfeld, 30 points
- FC Marbach II, 30 points
- TSV Neckargroeningen, 28points
Roundup 25.11.2005
Busy times, so not many posts in recent days. I’m the the middle of building up my domain-portfolio and I picked up a dedicated server (as mentioned in an earlier post) along the way, which was giving me all sorts of problems. The most urgent problem was the “small amount” of bandwidth included (“only” 200 GB) which were gone pretty quickly. So I had a decision to make: either stick with this server and pay additional fees for the traffic over the limit (probably each and every month) or switch to a bigger server with more bandwith included. I decided to go with the latter and ordered the following beast last week:
- Opteron 146 (2.0 GHz, 64bit, 1000 FSB, 1MB Cache)
- 1GB Ram
- 2x 160GB HDD
- Emergency remote console
- Unlimited bandwidth (or should I say unmetered as there truely is no such thing as an unlimited connection)
Then I was stuck with the next problem: after waiting for a week and seeing the old server hit way over the bandwidth limit I contacted support about the status of the server. Sure enough they are backloged on this particular server and it could be another two weeks until the new server arrived. Groovy, not! So I told support that I was totally NOT satisfied with this and they offered me an interim server (without charge) and I accepted. So now some of the more resource consuming sites (Proxytastic, etc) are located on the interim server (AMD Athlon 64 3200+).
As for new sites:
After the success of Proxytastic.com I decided to add two more similiar sites to the network:
- FreeWebProxy.org using the PHProxy script
- TheCGIProxy.com using the CGI Proxy script
Fantasy footie:
Well, it seems that I’m slowly and steadily catching up with Mr. Price’s SPAM AND CHEESE XI squad…go INVINCIBLES RELOADED!
Mr. Price’s score: 31 pts (411 total)
Ingoal’s score: 35 pts (392 total)
Pandora.com is free
Pandora.com created by the Music Genome Project is a really amazing site. You can listen to music and discover new music you never heard of before in the process. How does it work? Short summary: you enter a song or artist you like and the system will generate a playlist with songs that are similiar based on different aspects of the songs. If you don’t like a song in the playlist you can either skip it or tell the system about it…it’s adaptive. Groovy stuff…for now I’m on the free account…maybe I’ll switch to the subscription mode in the future…I like to test stuff out first though…so the free mode should be fine for now.
Hat tip: Sara