You may or may not have heard of it, but Ber­lin (well, Europe, let’s not be too selfish) has been hit by a pretty bad storm. The storm was called “Kyrill” (don’t know its last name though).

Any­way, it was that bad that I crashed for the night at the friends place I was vis­it­ing that night — as, when I was about to leave, the radio said that it would be sui­cide to leave the house right now.

I took a few nice pho­tos that night, but — as my Mac­Book Pro is still in repair — I can’t post­pro­cess them the way I would like to and hence don’t want to upload them yet. Besides, there are soooo many other pic­tures on my cam­era that are groun­ded too… Come on Gravis, fix my damn laptop! Actu­ally, come on Apple, deliver the bloody screen panel that’s hold­ing them up! AAaaaarrrrrrrr!

If you pin your hopes on someone, you often wind up full of holes… [wind, get it? ;-) ]

Oh boy, so many papers to shift through… Not only that, but two more books, a sem­inar to pre­pare and a paper I would like to con­trib­ute to the 2007 Rob­oCup…

Plus there is so many things to do every day in Ber­lin. The city never sleeps, the oppor­tun­it­ies for some cool night time under­tak­ing never cease to be pop up… So many people to meet, so many con­certs to go to, so many pubs to stop by. Oh, how I love that city.

If only I didn’t have to get up half past seven the next morn­ing. But that’s part of grow­ing up I guess. More things to do, less time for it, more responsab­ilites, less room for trivial stuff. But why not, I like it. That’s what we’ve all been work­ing towards, right?

It’s always hum­bling to remem­ber that any­time you think you’ve got­ten away with some­thing, you really haven’t.

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.

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.

To get a bit of a change from the (in cases) slightly dry day to day work in the office, I’ve joined two choirs a wee while back — a church choir and a gos­pel choir. I just love them and can’t wait for Tues­days and Wed­nes­days to get my voice going again (I’m singing bass, for those who are curi­ous).

Last Sunday, we had a con­cert in my local church. We sang a “Kantate” by Johann Sebastian Bach, and the “His­toria der Geburt Jesu” by Hein­rich Schchütz, which I both liked a lot.

To my surp­ise, our church (isn’t it impress­ive that even for the curch there is a wiki­pe­dia art­icle?!) was pretty much full! Wow. They must have some­how known in advance that I was singing ;-) Nah, not really, I guess…

Dad always thought laughter was the best medi­cine, which I guess is why sev­eral of us died of tuberculosis.