Greetings from Munich

I haven't posted for a few years, wow. It did not seem that long. Anyway, I moved to Munich and work at a small E-Learning company. Job title is Content Manager, meaning, I write stuff, produce flash movies about it and add this content to our learning web portal. Apart from that, I have started to coordinate efforts to translate our current main product to english together with a colleague of mine.

Main reason, I am posting today is because among other things we teach Office 2007. I am writing about how to create blog entries using Word 2007. So I gotta try that, of course.

Hm, I may have fun blogging again. So maybe, I 'll see you soon.

Small Animation (1,5MB)

I want to give you a small animation in Poser 5.

My M.A. (history) is about a soldier from the 30 Years War who left a diary. In my PhD I will elaborate on the subject.

Anyway, this Quick Time clip is part of the intro sequence in my DVD. Apparently the soldier had taken notes for all these years but he rewrote the whole book while he was stationed in Memmingen between 1647 and 1649. By that time he had been a soldier for at least 24 years. That's why I gave him grey hair.

The clip is originally 1024x768 but for sake of loadability (is there such a word?) I reduced the resolution to half the size. Well, this animation is not very professionally done, I only wanted to include a 3d impression into my intro.

The DVD includes about an hour of video footage, mainly created by myself, music and an interactive version of the diary (meaning one can read the pages because I scanned them). For people not familiar with the old orthography and handwriting of the 17th century in general one can click a play-button and let the text be read by me.

The main scientific achievment is that I found out the name of the author. First few and last few pages are missing so it wasn't clear who the author was. Doing some research in archives which were not destroyed by one of the numerous wars in Germany since 1648 I found what I was looking for.

I think the DVD could have the potential to be published and sold but I can't do that... because I don't own all the copyrights.

I will deal with this problem in my PhD. I want to study the possibilities of using self produced multimedia resources in education, especially in history classes in secondary school.

My intention in giving this long, long explanation was to let you know that this 3d animation is not state-of-the-art because I had to deal with so many other fields when doing a project of this magnitude all by myself.

BTW, I will start my PhD later this year.

No motivation to post about new things

Recently, I have had no drive to express myself on the net. I still don't.
I am just posting this so that you know that I intend to post again (and regularly I might add) but not now.
 
The thing I am looking forward to at the moment is the one week vacation with my girl friend in early August. Probably I will post more often after that.
 
For the time being I want to share with you what I chose for holiday reading.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos De Laclos. You probably know the story because the teen movie Cruel Intentions starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Reese Witherspoon is based on that book. I read that this film of 1999 was already the fourth adaption of the classic novel.
 
It was published in 1782 and is about morale of the aristocracy in pre-revolution France, so to speak.
Since I watched the American-high-school-version I wanted to read the original as well.
 
I highly recommend the book.

The Great Wet Wedding

My younger brother tied the knot today with Julia. The had been engaged for years. Today was the official state ceremony. Tomorrow they will marry in church fashion.

Unfortunately the weather is bad. It is a mix of rain and sunshine. I am pretty moved by the whole thing, however. How long will it be till I am married? I guess it will not be before 2007. Maybe even later. In three years I 'll be 30. Still not that old. So, there is no reason to rush anything. :-)

By now, I can't offer any pics from the wedding. I have some pics from bachelor's night, however.
Not all of them are very presentable, though.
My bro was dressed up in a weird costume (somehow like little red ridinghood) and had to collect kisses from the girls we met while touring through one of Berlin's top tourist areas in the city center, the Oranienburger Straße.


The next one was fun. She was from Sweden:


Somehow she distracted our cameraman...


I am the one with the bright red tie.


At the end of the day, some of us needed a rest...


Some more than others:

Discussion on Anti-Americanism

A very heated discussion on Anti-Americanism has been going on for some time on LivingInEurope.net

If you are interested in that sort of thing have a look. It might take an hour or so to read through the thread.
I commented as well, most recently towards reasons for Germany's mediocre army and lack of war-enthausiasm.

Keeping track of user traffic

From now on there will be no illusions about how many people read my blog because I included some code to analyse user traffic.

I use statcounter. It is free and very powerful. Time will show if there is any downside to it. They say they don't sell any private information, neither of me nor of my users. They say they earn money from ads shown to me on their site when I check the statistics and from nothing else.

There is an option to let anyone see my statistics but I don't plan to use that option. Unless there is a way to limit the results shown. For example, I would show from which countries users access my site but not from which town or IP. Haven't figured these things out yet.

A good thing is that my own visits on my blog won't be counted because a cookie is blocking that function for my browser. I guess since I probably only have very few readers my own visits would distort the results a lot.

Change of style

I changed the look of my blog.

seems like no comments from old post can be transfered.

Am sorry for that.

Reason for my posting delay

My gf has been in town for a few days. That is why I only commented on some issues but didn't upload a major post.

I am attending a class in school about modern political theories. I don't need a grade or anything but it is interesting stuff. Today the prof explained something about the plan for the semester including some remarks on Robert Kagan. Something like: "Kagan tries to shape foreign policy according to Hobbes. But he doesn't. We are going to see that he didn't read Hobbes well enough."

This and some other remarks made the opening session of the class very interesting. I am curious about how it will develop. The class material will be online in a yahoo group. I will post the link, but just a few minutes ago it wasn't working. I 'll post it later.

I am back and have a story to tell

After nearly a year of not posting, I decided to start again.

An interesting thing happened to me a few years back. I got an email by someone pretending to be a decendant of the late Nigerian dictatorship who needed me in order to get to his money (which had been exploited from the people beforehand). The amount was several hundred million bucks and I should receive 30 million or something like that for my help.

Well, I am not a greedy person. And it seemed VERY far fetched. So I decided to inform Nigeria instead. I forwarded the email to them. I figured in this case the worst that might happen is that it is a joke and they would get a worthless email. So what?

I never heard from them or the pretender again. But today I found an article in a german computer magazine. The article is not online, unfortunately.

What I learned from it is basically this. The people who send these emails are not your typical spammers. They are crooks, frauds. If you agree to their initial proposal they will tell you that officials need to be bribed, travel costs need to be payed in advance and almost anything that will delay the payment of your 20-30 million bucks. According to national (German) statistics about 1.5 Million € are being gained by the crooks in this fashion each year!. Only in Germany. But it is a worldwide phenomenon. Internationally it is known as the 419scam. This is referring to article 419 in the Nigerian criminal code. The article about fraud.

So, the article I read today is a report about scam baiters. Meaning: people who try to scam the scammers. People who try to fool the ones that try to fool us. The baiters try to make fun of the criminals. They pretend to agree to their terms. And ask for a meeting. They will ask for a picture so they could recognize each other at the airport. Usually they ask for a very silly picture. Like: "Please balance a loaf of bread on your head." or "Hold up a sign saying 'Iama Dildo' " And they do that. And their pics can be found on the websites i give below. Here is an example, though.


The scam baiters claim to do a public service. Because if the scammers waste time with them they have less time to fool others. On top of that, people who receive scam emails might check the names of the scammers in google and get to one of the scam baiting websites.

Well, check it out.
Links to several scam baiting websites have been given in the article and I will include them here.


www.419eater.com
www.africanscam.co.uk
www.419fun.com

Poser 5

Recently, I got a hand on Poser 5, a 3D-character-animantion tool by Curious Labs. It is amazing. With my slow machine animations take way too long to render. Here are some pics:

A standard male character

The following pics ought to resemble me. But i cannot get the hair right. :-(

back to my studies

Hello,

phew, I feel a lot better now, cos the two issues that I was really concerned with for the last days and weeks have been reduced to one, my studies. The other issue was resolved: I am back together with my (ex)-girlfriend Anne. Just mentioning this, because I touched on the subject in an earlier post.

Still I understand this site as a place for political debate, so I will try to stick to that (however, I appreciate your encouragement to post on everything I like. And I will do that by posting on political issues). Not today though, the weather is just too fine to stay inside.

Hi People,

sorry for posting so irregularly. I have been very busy. Especially examwise. You know, my masters thesis needs to be finished... also my ex girl friend and I may or may not get together again. Anyway, lots of things to do. I'll post something as soon as I can.
Actually, my studies and my love life were not intended to be talked about here. I just wanted to use this way to address political issues. I guess, I will stick to that. So, no more posts on studies or girl friends will appear here from my part. :-) Just wanted to tell you why I am not posting.

Bye

Happy Easter everybody!

Hope you all will have a great time.

Hi everyone,
I haven't had the time to post during the last week. I am very busy with lots of things right now. You know, University, my choir and other stuff.
I will try to post something "meaningful" later this week.

Yesterday, I wasn't posting anything new. I was still occupied by a discussion on my previous post.
Well, for now I have decided to wait with more new issues. There are too many confusing news around. One side says it achieved this-and-that-. The other side denies it. I hope that early next week there will be more clarity in Iraq making it easier to post on more issues.

One of many examples for this confusion in judging the news can be found in an article from a German newspaper. In it Mr. William Wallace is quoted (the commander of US ground forces in Iraq):

"The enemy whom we fight is a little different from the enemy we opposed in our wargames."

But of course, US Central Command denies that. Maybe next week news will be clearer.

I just started my weblog today. I am still very inexperienced with the technology. I hope you can live with all the shortcomings and errors that will be around here for some time.
Well, the longer I do it the better this log is going to get (hopefully)