Now, that everything's done, I, for the first time in my life, don't have any real goals. For those of you, who don't know me: I NEED TO HAVE GOALS! So it's a bit confusing right now. But I'd say, that's merely because I graduated from university and haven't really realized, what's done now (but, according to the last days of party hardy, it's gotta be huge :-) ).

This is like the first time, where there's nothing else to do but getting older and older and try to avoid problems, build a house, buy a dog, become a daddy, stay contented ... all the things, everybody else does. The problem is: I'm not used to that.

The next week (one week off, by the way :-) ) will bring me a job and hopefully a vision of the next steps for me...but for now, there's nothing else to do, than just do nothing. But somehow that's really hard to get along with...

Coming up next: no more boring private stuff but for instance an in-depth review and experiments with my new mobile phone, I bought myself as a motivation for passing the exams :-)

I recently finished my Diploma-Thesis on "Indicators towards a successful market penetration of mobile services". I was a little astonished, when Chris T. stated, he'd write his one in LaTeX (he's a good guy, but not experienced with LaTeX) and LyX but after all, I also thought it might be a good idea to write with and learn LaTeX a little. So I got myself MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter and started.

After some days of hard work getting my document look like I wanted it to look, I really was enthusiastic about that decission. I ended up with some little problems in my document, but they were just so minimal I could disregard them. I think, it could have saved some time but I also think it SHOULD be a little easier. Especially with tables or URL-hyphenation. Anyways - my first expedition into LaTeX was interesting, annoying and in fact not really faster than I would have been with Word. Sad but true.

Next. My mobile phone really was crap. Nobody could really talk to me on the phone since they couldn't understand what I was saying. I spend nights on research but I ended up - YES - finding an adequate smartphone but - NO - couldn't find an adequate carrier with adequate data-packages. So I waited and waited and waited and waited and ... finally couldn't wait anymore.

So...I went to a local shop and got the cheapest mobile available - a Samsung SGH-C270. Unlocked for € 25.-, including a € 5.- prepaid SIM-Card. Sounds not so bad, but - after all - is so bad. Then, I wanted to migrate my (old) mobiles contacts to my new mobile. I tried to I bought a USB-Cable and tried to connect - NOT possible, since Samsung seems to distinguish a lot from model to model. So I thought - get the new SIM into the new phone, send your contacts from your old phone with your 1000 SMS-flat-fee-packet, one by one, to the new phone. I started and: failed. Because the SGH-C270 cannot handle vCards. Some hours ago, I ordered another data cable one via eBay, hopefully this will work or I fear, I'll go crazy and send this VERY-UNsmartphone to hell.

Next disappointment: Google, again. Alongside trying to migrate my phone-contacts, I uploaded all my contacts to Google Contacts. It's very easy and you can also migrate these contacts birthdays to Google Calendar easily (what encouraged me to delete my Google Calendar Birthday-Calendar, since it was redundant). BUT: you cannot share this new, LINKED calendar to your Google API-Connection like e.g. in your Website.

So I thought, I should not connect to Google Calendar in order to retrieve my contacts birthdays, but to Google Contacts itself. I ended up having a very COMPLICATED and very UNperformant script doing this for me, still not able to sort these dates.

This is 2009, I guess. We should be able to say "Okay, ...

• I have Google Contacts. I want to retrieve the next 14-days birthdays in just ONE query.
• I have a new phone. I want to up- and download my contacts.
• I want to have a LaTeX-table over two pages without spending nights on research.

Why can't I?".

So we decided to buy one of these "Throw-Away-Cameras" and finally got the pictures off it. Not that they are very good pictures, but they present our maybe sole visit to ancient greece - Olympia.

I just uploaded them to my Picasa account - You can find them by navigating here or click "Photography" and then choose the album "Kato Achaia (Urlaub)".

I am very glad about gaining that much experience in those days. Today, I think I am better prepared working with computers than those people, that got themselves computers during the end-1990s. Why do I say so? Because I spent so much time "repairing" computers owned by people who just thought "Everybody has one. I need one too.". Plus: I know shurtcuts and can work a little faster, since I still don't really like that mouse next to me.

So, now that you know a little about my history, I'll try to allude you to the present where my little, 11-year-old brother attends hichschool and it seems that EDP is really reaching schools. He, remember: 11-year-old, has to do powerpoint-presentations during his speeches in school. They write email. A whole lot of. And: they have a locked section in their school's website, where they work with different WebApps. Okay, they provide GoogleApps, but in fact, my little brother is able to create a small and personal website with pictures, links and stuff.

I was rather early creating websites by starting in 1999. I was 15 then.

Why did I have to make that post? Sure, I am proud of that kid but my second brother, just gotten 17, didn't really have such education in highschool. They did something called ECDL. I don't have ECDL, but I think most of you know about it's worth. I really hope, schools will carry on using computers and software to make kids used to working with computers.

It seems like, schools find computers important for the pupils lives. BUT - when will they finally see, that also a driving-license is important? Hard for me to say that, but - uaaarrrgggghhh - we should copy this one from america.

I just played around a little with Demos of YUI and extJS and it turned out to be very fast. For Example: I got up Feed Viewer 3 in 1.6 seconds! Amazing. Also my website's loading-time decreased by something around 1 second, eventhough I don't really use that much JavaScript there.

I got to play around a little more, but for now I really like it. Let's wait for the final release!