The official news has already been spread in February, but I it was today that I learned, that my favorite lan party organizers have finally given up to organize their great series of lan party events. Sad news, but it was the inevitable consequence of the ever decreasing number of attendees of the events. The heydays of lan parties are over, sad but true. Luckily they still meet for some loosely organized private lan parties and I'm pretty sure it wasn't the last time I've met them.

Today is Corpus Christi, a religious feast, so we didn’t work here in South Germany. But since the weather was pretty bad (cold and rainy), I spent my day at the computer, upgrading my Cygwin environment and reworking content of my personal wiki knowledge base (which is badly in need to be uncluttered).

I’ve also upgraded my site to the latest version of Habari today. As last time, everything went very smoothly. As far as I have seen, there were mostly bugs fixed and not so much new features implemented. But I might be wrong here, since I haven’t followed the development during the past three months. I’ll have deeper look at it later.

I’ve been very busy during the last few months, as you might have noticed from the lack of posts here. Earlier this year a colleague left our company and I was the only one who was qualified to take over his responsibilities. So I ended up doing his job in addition to mine, doubling my workload. Additionally I was attending an advanced training course, reducing my spare time even further.

Finally, in May, a new colleague took over and I was able to return to my normal job schedule. Shortly after that I also successfully finished my training. Phew! That was a hard time!

It’s Valentine’s Day, but since I’m not into this kind of stuff, I spent my time today on updating my site to the latest Habari release. The update process went smoothly and there weren’t adaptations to make. However, while I had a closer look after the upgrade, I found a few issues in my site’s theme and fixed a bunch of glitches in the comment system, the template class functions and few minor things in the main CSS set. Everything should run fine now.

Yesterday I made as small excursion to the Drupal CMS, just out of curiosity. I haven’t looked at it for a few years now, although I constantly run into it, as many high traffic sites such as java.net use it as their publishing platform. To get a grip on it, I ported my current site template to Drupal. Basically it isn’t very hard to create a template, although I had to apply a few tricks to make my template work the way I wanted it. Once Drupal’s concept is understood, it’s pretty straightforward to use it. In order to avoid fiddling with its internals, you might also make use of the vast amount of plugins and themes for Drupal. After all, I’m considering to use it for my next major web project. And before you ask: I have no intention to move away from Habari for my personal site.

Apart from fiddling with web related stuff this weekend, I also finished setting up a new home network at my parent’s house. Everything works fine, Mom and Dad are happy :-)

I highly doubt that you even have noticed that I have left Twitter a while ago. After all, I couldn’t find any gain in using it.

Roughly over a year ago I joined the hype and created an account at Twitter. While 140 characters doesn’t seem that much for posting relevant stuff, it is as sufficient for rudimentary messages as SMS is. After I had initially tweeted a whole lot of random nonsense for a while, pauses between tweets grew bigger and eventually stopped at all after a few weeks.

To some extent it was because I am just too busy (or maybe also too lazy) to keep followers updated about whatever (just see the frequency of my blog posts to see what I’m talking about). But mainly it was because I’m not the one who wants or needs to broadcast every aspect of life publicly.

Twitter might have its uses, e.g. for real-time updates on current events, like elections, sports events and so on. But, seriously, nobody wants to know what you had for breakfast, what beer you are currently drinking, or that you are about to go to the toilet. The inanity of some tweets is surprising.

Personally speaking, I found Twitter is not adding anything useful to my life, rather being another drain of time, no matter if used actively or passively. This has, after all, led me to the decision to stop using it all. I’ll keep my account at Twitter, just in case, but I have officially said “Good Bye” to Twitter.

Phew, the last post was over a month ago,so it's really about time for an update...

My holiday on the isle of Fuerteventura last month was really AWESOME. Excellent weather, great hotel, beautiful beach, relaxing! Exactly what I've expected from it. If you ever have the chance to go there, do it! It's a wonderful island, especially if you're into kite surfing or wind surfing or if you just like extended beach walks.

After my return, I spent a few days off here at home to get some rather unspectacular work done. Unfortunately I'm now almost out of days of holiday for the rest of this year and it looks like I'll have to work until Xmas without another day off :-(

Happily, my current workload is at an level I'd consider as "bearable". But you know, this can change dramatically just every other day (as I've learned from experience).

One thing I noticed recently is, that my blog currently attracts high volumes of blog spam. While this isn't much of a problem for Habari to handle, it's still somewhat irritating. At present I see about 10-20 spam entries every 3-4 days, which - I think - is still at a 'normal' level. Anyway, I'd rather have that much 'real' comments :-)

Ok, that's all for now. And this time it won't take another month until the next post :-)