Finally, after almost 10 months of continuing work with no holiday, I'm going on vacation for a little more than a week. I will return on Friday next week. Until then, happy trails!

I was recently looking for the chart placement of a bunch of songs I liked back in the 1980s. This page has been invaluable for my research, although it looks a little bit dated and doesn't live up to the promise to have all the charts from 1970 to 2001. Anyway, if you are looking for your favorite songs of the 1980s, it's worth a look.

I have a bunch of PC systems round here but for the past two years or so I worked almost exclusively on my Dell notebook. I haven't upgraded any of my desktop systems since. In fact, the last time I upgraded any of them must have been four years or even longer ago. But now, with the dawn of new, power-demanding video games like COD5 and others, I had to make a decision: Buy a new, powerful notebook or upgrade a desktop PC. I decided to do the latter...

I picked the system that once was my main machine and started looking for a combination of suitable components. I needed to find a balance between power, costs, energy consumption and noise emission. Especially noise emission is critical. I really hate it when PCs sound like vacuum cleaners. All in all this task isn't as simple as it sounds.

Long story short, I ended up with the following components:

• ASUS P5Q Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU
• Arctic Cooling Freezer CPU Cooler
• Corsair XMS2-6400 DDR RAM 4GB
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro P7 power supply
• Gainward 512MB 9800GTX+ PCIe graphics card

So far I'm pretty satisfied with my choice. The system runs stable and is very quiet. It has enough power to run all current games at highest details with excellent frame rates. The costs were approximately 500 EUR, which I would say is quite reasonable. I should note that I used my existing FDD/HDD/DVD drives, so there was no need for new ones.

Now, time to play some COD5 :-)

I've catched a very bad cold that forced me to bed for over a week. It got a little better in recent days, but I still suffer badly from its effects :-(

I wish you all a very Happy New Year! Immer munter bleiben!

Yes, I love those funny cat videos :-)

Just in case anybody wonders: The song played in this video is "Auld Lang Syne", a Scottish poem that dates back to 1788. The song is well known in many English-speaking countries and traditionally sung to celebrate the start of a new year.

Update 2009-01-04

While routinely checking my site for web standards compliance I learned that inserting Youtube videos with the standard code they provide breaks the validation. Stylehack as written an interesting article on this issue and how to get around it.