Just a short post to send out greetings from the Rutenfest 2011. Here's a nice shot i took from the top of a Ferris wheel:

The image quality sucks thanks to my old Nokia phone *mmpf*

I'm available to help on your open source project. If you think my skillset below matches your requirements, feel free to contact me. I don't have any special preferences regarding the size or kind of your project, but preferably it should be of interest to a broader audience or address real world problems. Also, your time schedule should be somewhat flexible.

I can provide:

• Programming: C/C++, Python, Perl, SQL & database design, et al.
• Testing: Usability and stress tests
• Translations: German ↔ English
• Documentation
• Web design

Those of you who have been around here from time to time might be well aware of the lack of updates I've made over the last couple of months. This was not only caused by my chronic lack of time, but also my diffuse focus on topics.

I have always seen this website mainly as my personal playground, not wasting much thought on content or audience. Also, I'm reluctant to re-post so called 'popular stuff' that has been seen elsewhere on the web. All this has resulted in a bunch of infrequent posts I've published here, containing mainly uninteresting stuff.

I still suffer from the chronic lack of time, but I feel I should refocus the purpose of this site. So it's time to rethink, I guess...

Now, I have a very wide variety of interests and my field of attention changes over time. This comes in handy in real life, enabling me to participate in all kind of conversations. Unfortunately it is not suitable for writing articles on a blog, where you have to stay on focus of at most a handful of topics. But where to put the focus on?

Well, I'm not totally clear about this yet, but I have a bunch of ideas. What I'm already sure about is, that I won't narrow down to a single topic. Also, there won't be a redesign of the site (as I did so often in the past) and it will be continued in the form of a blog (though I was thinking about changing it into a wiki lately).

The quintessence is, that there needs to be some kind of change in order to turn this blog back into something useful. Maybe I should just let evolve it...

I've to admit that I've shamelessly neglected my blog lately. Here's a short roll-up on what happened lately...

In my last post from June I already wrote about the many fill-ins I had to make at work lately. Unfortunately this hasn't changed. After a substitution for another colleague right before my vacation in September, I was recently informed that I have to step in again for a total of 9 weeks! In fact I’m already starting week two of this substitution.

The problem is that all tasks in the jobs I’m currently stepping in are crucial for the company’s operation and require full attention. At the same time I have to keep the IT running and to provide a basic level of support  to our users. All in all it is totaling up to an enormous workload, not leaving much room for other activities. And my blog is one of the things that suffer from this situation.

I’ll try to re-arrange my schedule during the next days and maybe I can spare some time to write a more comprehensive update on my other activities.

Yet again I got into the situation to fill in for a colleague who had to undergo a surgery. Yet again it means that I've to handle double the workload and yet again I feel I'm totally out of time. Although I try not to spend too much time at the office and to get out of there as close to the stroke as I can, the situation is so demanding that I'm pretty tired after work and I hardly can motivate myself to do something else than to goof off. I don't know for how long I'll have to fill in this time, but I guess it will be a couple of weeks (depending on how fast my colleague recovers).

After looking on my recording of time worked since the beginning of 2010, I have the feeling that all these substitutions become rampant. But wailing won't help, I guess. So let's get through and hope that it won't last too long. At least my upcoming vacation in July is a ray of hope :-)