Kirchweih

People just go crazy here during "Kirchweih". Alas: we have survive another year.

Village Party

Katharina is enjoying the "Kirchweih" (an annual party in the village square) - at least during the day. It gets pretty noisy at night. The village kids thought it especially fun to kick over benches and tables around 2 in the morning, sending everything on them crashing to the ground. At least everything is cleaned up already, in time for festivities to begin again today around lunchtime.

Twhirl and Friendfeed

Twhirl isn't letting me see twitter updates (apparently not twhirl's fault, but to do with twitter's API). But I just recently discovered that twhirl adds the same sweet UI to FriendFeed and I am finding myself using it for FF almost exclusively now. Something about viewing those crisp and colorful flickr fotos on black or dark grey and the scalably translucent feel...

Twhirl runs in the background and informs me when whenever there is activity at any of my friends' sites or status updates. Way better than browsing through FriendFeed's web timeline, also because the "me" button actually gives me the whole discussion as opposed to just my own posts.

I suppose that's all gibberish to those who have not yet played around with the above-mentioned services. I suggest: get with the program!

Germany during an international soccer game

Semi-final game this evening between Germany and Turkey (European Championship). That basically means that the streets will be as dead as during Superbowl Sunday in the U.S. only to fill after the game with drunk and (if happy) cheering Germans honking their horns and cruising the streets with their German-flag adorned cars.

Today's situation is complicated (perhaps) by the fact that there is a huge population of Turks living in Germany. If everything goes over as well as during the World Cup two years ago, things should be fine, though. We shall see...

Dinner for our seminar guests is alreay underway (can't miss the start of the game!).

Sandpit in the garden

I've been busy digging a sandpit in the garden for the kids to play in. Now there's just a big square hole in the garden; I have yetto get the stone plates to put around the sides and, of course, the sand itself.

Why can't it (still) be Wednesday?

Wednesday was such a great day off that I'm regretting it isn't Wednesday every day. I suppose it wouldn't be as much fun, then. The picture is of Charly, who decided the kids' blanket was his picnic blanket (yes, he did try to get into the pic-a-nic basket, but his efforts were thwarted).

At any rate: I am in dire need of another day off or at least some rest. I will try to get latter with one ear perked in case the phone rings. I'm on watch.

What a great "day off"

Great, great day off. Time to "sleep in" until oh-eight-hundred and then a few hours in the big city (Würzburg). Some time spent in the castle garden, then playing around with the fresh firefox3, a little music off the web and perhaps the russia vs. sweden game on tv. Indigo Girls via web page. Man, it's been a long time. Haven't been back to the U.S. in over ten years. Saw the Indigo Girls last in Louisville, Kentucky (of all places).

Katharina is enjoying her new bicycle! Picture above: first "steps" with the pedalless bike in Würzburg (castle "Festung" can be seen in the background).

Thunderbird and Lightning

After (finally) switching to Thunderbird and IMAP E-Mail, I also installed Mozilla's Lightning (calendar app). The awesome thing about this is google calendar integration (after installing the google calendar provider plugin for Thunderbird). This means desktop integration of calendar events right in my native e-mail app (like Outlook but w/o M$).

Also played around with evernote (again) and google docs. Great opportunities for document sharing and collaboration here. I guess computing actually *is* moving to the cloud, now. Now I just need a fast internet connection. I live in a bandwith-underprivileged region of the world. And bandwidth is fast-becoming the main factor for a cit'y business attractivity.

I'm liking mars edit (for posting blog entries from my desktop) more and more. I think I'll upgrade and pay the price.

Switch to IMAP

Finally switched to an IMAP server from POP3 for my e-mails. It's one of those things where you ask yourself: why didn't I do this ages ago??

I guess there are tons of things out there you just have to motivate yourself to dare to try something new which greatly improve quality of life and work. That's one of the reasons I read so many techy blogs (fave of course being lifehacker).

3G iPhone

Salivating over reports of the new iPhone expected to hit the free world on July 11th... I'll just have to wait and see if it's affordable here in Germany (data packages?). Sure looks like pure candy, though.

Back to earth: setting up my Mom with a new desk and laptop in our downstairs office. A little worried about the laptop... might splurge for a really low-end desktop or mini computer instead (a PC equivalent of the Mac Mini?).

First steps

Having been gone for two days (seminar last week) put a big dent in my available time. Now I'm struggling to catch up on office work and working ahead to justify taking Wednesday off to go somewhere with the family.

Isa is taking her first steps on her own and is extremely proud of each one she manages without help.

Sunday Wrap Up

A friend of ours (my next-door neighbor of almost 30 years ago) is visiting. It just so happened that he had a gun sight from a WWII German Panther tank in the trunk of his Porsche so we headed over to the local military museum to see if it could be sold. Success.

We hit a Biergarten after that with the wife and kids and then the castle garden for another beer before I had to head in with the kids going to bed and all.

Sunday evening always means being exhausted beyond belief. But it's better to be exhausted and off than exhausted with a pile of work left to do.

The work week starts in a few hours...