Oh well. New moon again. Did the time of month draw me to posting once again or vice versa (did I subconsciously decide to post because I knew what's today)... or pure coindicence? You decide

So what's new? Not that much I guess, nothing important that is. Sadly. The main article of this week's Der Spiegel comes to my mind again - "land of smile". Seems that the mood of the German population has indeed markedly increased since the last elections in September '05.

Not that there's any plausible reason for it. For all the problems still are out there.

The only thing that's changed is: After that great coalition has formed and the former enemies now work together (more or less) in the Bundestag, no one wants to disrupt the peace with such a disgusting thing like facts. The mood here has improved because the old problems are no longer addressed. Before, one could easily rant about the opposition's inability to solve them. Now, the opposition is your ally.

Welcome to the land of willful denial.

In other news, I've finally started to work on my planned homepage again. Some two pages have been completed - one is a disclaimer clarifying my position with respect to those monotheists out there who aren't literalist madmen, the other deals with the standard debating (or rather, debate-avoiding) tactics of the common single-digit-IQ fundie. Now all I have to do is decide on an overall design of the site-to-be. It will probably be a very simple one - the content should matter, not the form.

Anyway, I feel that I should include some pages about the mad side of islam too, or at least some remarks in my current works "this goes for islam too". Considering all the fuzz lately about those cartoons in little Denmark I think it would be unfair to continue ranting primarily about the jebus cult - the mohamed cult deserves a slap too. Or at least the braindead fundies on both sides do.

Having a look at the fun side of life, I currently enjoy both the nice DVD recorder (w/ hard disk) I bought shortly after Yuletide, and the nice SciFi show that appeared on German TV recently. I'm referring, of course, to the new version of Battlestar Galactica. Granted that I've seen but four episodes so far (not counting the pilot), but what I saw so far was quite cool. I guess I'll archive that show for quite some eps to come.

And I finally prepared my online Go player's life seriously. After I looked at two internet Go servers quite some time ago, I dropped the idea of online gaming regarding that game. Until I received multiple recommendations to check out the Kiseido Go Server (aka KGS). I'm impressed. Granted that it needs a proprietary client program, but it's cool. Now all I have to do is jump right in.

Oh right... as I take another sip of some good stuff (Tullamore Dew... aaaah, Divine!), I think I should mention that I started participating in alpha testing a fantasy MMORPG recently. Considering that it's totally free, and the makers intend to keep it free, it's quite cool already. A nice background story, and what has been completed so far looks good. The only annoying thing is that currently the NPCs only understand a very limited, specific vocabulary.

And there's a Linux version of it too. As soon as I found out finally how to make the Linux client of the game actually start (currently it drops me back to the bash shell immediately without any error message...), I guess I'll finally start some serious gaming using my favorite OS...

(Aaaah, favorite OS... let's see. At work, recently a new record has been set. Some days ago, around 12:26pm, we closed an incident covering a server share having run out of memory (5 GB of free space available). That same day, 01:30pm, the next "out of server space" incident was opened. So much for "just how long will 5 Gigs of memory last in an environment with some thousands of users?"

Of course, with some decent Linux servers, a quota mechanism would have been in place for quite some time now... but no, we just need to stick with the Redmond horror... )

Ah, one last thing. Maybe, just maybe, I'll soon be posting from... somewhere else. It's been said that our branch of the company (IT professional services, in contrast to IT automotive services which will keep hugging VW closely) starts looking toward other countries for expansion opportunities. Gee, I wonder whether there'll be some jobs available in Ireland, or Norway. To just say goodbye to this land of willfully ignorant morons where politics are concerned does have its appeal, provided that I can live wherever I land and hopefully can provide for my wife too. Whatever opportunity presents itself, I can count on being among the first people asked whether they'd go there, considering my skills in the English language...