Happy New Year every­one, I’m off to paaaaaaaaaaaaarty ! First going to a friends friends place in town, then we’re off to the Haupt­bahnhof — there is a large open area pretty much in the middle of the city and rather close to the Branden­bur­ger Tor for the big fire­works :-)

Any­ways, I’ll catch you guys next year,

party hard and stay tuned

Floz :-)

By day, enlighten; by night, endarken.

Floz went to the movies again, woo-​hoo :-)

I’m not going to bore you with Christ­mas or the presents I got (although I might com­ment on some of them at some other stage ;-)) — lack­ing any­thing bet­ter to do tonight I went to the movies with a friend, and we saw “Babel”.

It’s from the Mex­ican dir­ector Ale­jandro González Iñár­ritu of whom I’ve already seen two other impress­ive and cap­tiv­at­ing movies, “Amores Per­ros” and “21 Gramos”.

“Babel” is pretty much in the same style, fas­cin­at­ing and some­times very intense pic­tures, inter­est­ing char­ac­ters and an enthralling mood (you can read about the plot else­where ;-))… Two big thumbs up from me — go out and watch it!

A duck walked into a bar and quacked his head.

With this nice little Christ­mas scene that I took this after­noon I would like to wish you all a Merry, Merry Christ­mas.

Enjoy a few quite days with your fam­ily and loved ones, let go of the stress once and relax … Also, hope you get some nice presents and at least a hug from every­one that loves you.

Speak­ing of love, that is without any doubt the greatest gift for me this year … More on that later. Any­way, so have a good one, talk to you soon,

Florian :-)

A wise man will make more oppor­tun­it­ies than he finds.

Finally I’m get­ting around to telling you about my new work place. As you might know, after gradu­at­ing I’ve star­ted to work at the Tech­nis­che Uni­versität Ber­lin.

My first task was to redo the hor­rible, old web­site of the insti­tute. It’s import­ant to have a good web pres­ence, as many spon­sors usu­ally first take a look at the web page to learn a little bit about the place — and if that web page is already untidy, ugly or out of date, then it obvi­ously leaves a rather sloppy first impres­sion. Based on the Medi­aWiki soft­ware, this is what it looks like now :-)

Any­way, I though I finally show you a photo of my new office. The dude on the left is my lovely office mate Raa­fat, and Egyp­tian Ph.D. stu­dent who’s just arrive. The photo was taken with my new cam­era by the way, which I’m super excited about… I’ll tell you more about it later.

I became a pro­fes­sional fish­er­man, but dis­covered that I couldn’t live on my net income.

So Sat­urday was that big com­munal birth­day party… Com­munal as in there were sev­eral people cel­eb­rat­ing their anniversary.

After a big cook­ing ses­sion — kindely sup­por­ted by Sarah and Julia, my two guests from Mag­de­burg (where I went to uni, yonks ago) — fixing large amounts of pasta salads and chili con carne, we went to the party in Moabit (a fairly cent­ral dis­trict of Ber­lin).

It was a bit slow to take off (but the reason was that we went there rel­at­ively early to help with the usual party pre­par­tions), but then it became pretty crowded :-) As the even­ing went on, people even star­ted dan­cing!

Shame on my Aussi friends — none of you showed up! Come on! ;-) Thanks any­way to my dear guests from out­side of Ber­lin for com­ing!

Fam­ous last words: Gee, that’s a cute tattoo.

Oh boy, and here we go, another year in my life has passed — actu­ally, the first quarter – cen­tury…!

To cel­eb­rate this event (I won’t tell you exactly when I will turn 25, you should know that ;-)) I’ll join in some massive birth­day party of a bunch friends that all have their birth­day this week as well.

So if you’re read­ing this, click on the link to the invit­a­tion and I hope to see you there (only the Aus­sie may excuse them­selves ;-))

If you are given an open-​book exam, you will for­get your book.