Blognation is growing further. After hiring Nicole Simon and Marcus Spath as their German startup correspondents, the site now also covers the Irish Web 2.0 entrepreneurs In his inaugural post, Damien Mulley lists some of the most interesting Web 2.0 companies in Ireland with their products, such as PollDaddy TouristR Pixenate PutPlace Segala Seems like Ireland is, in terms of startup ideas, a rich country. I'll certainly keep an eye on Blognation Ireland as a preparation for the time I may have to look for a job over there.

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I've been in love with computer animation since my VIC-20 in 1984. "A Gentlemen's Duel" is a bit more sophisticated than the animations of that time, and a lot funnier: [youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIPGXc7EjF4])

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You don't need to do the math: I've lost 7 kg so far. The secret of my recent weight loss: mountain hiking burns lots, lots, lots of calories! Just make sure you refill at least as much is needed to keep upright. :-) Carolin and I loved the hiking so much that we decided to do some more over the summer. We're living right in Black Forest after all, so it really isn't hard to find a slopy way to use our new hiking boots for some hours. We won't climb summits, but we'll enjoy nature, spend time together and burn away unnecessary weight. For the first time after the mountain tour, I went running this morning. I had to take a short break after 15 minutes, but I'm sure to be in shape to keep running for half an hour soon, even in the hillside. If my knees don't act up. Update: I just found RunningMap and immediately documented my route So, everything is fine on the health front. Bye bye, belly fat!

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First, there was Twitter And it became the first networking tool I really used intensively. But it also became my micro blogging platform that has a negative impact on my blogging frequency to this day. Then, the Facebook hype started. I knew Facebook since I started having contacts in Ireland because Facebook and Bebo are the biggest social platforms for students there. But because my college times are 10 years gone, my interest soon vanished. Over the recent weeks, it was rekindled, though, with Facebook taking the world of non-students by storm. Heavily connected to the world of German early adopters via Twitter, I watched everyone proclaiming their Facebook account. Still, I resisted. Did I really need another distraction, especially if this new social time waster is a walled garden that doesn't allow peeks from the outside? Furthermore, on XING, I already am a member of a business networking platform. Well, I couldn't stand the virtual peer pressure any more. I now have a Facebook account and started build my friends list. Of course, I found a way to rationalize this step: Facebook will be my international networking platform where I can foster my contacts all over the world. This way, it will be a fine complement to Twitter. As the Ninja says: I'm looking forward to friending you soon! Yee-Ya!

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Today is Sysadmin Appreciation Day, the day where you're especially invited to tell your IT crowd where they're doing a good job. I'm embarassed that I forgot it myself, so I'm not in the position to criticize all the colleagues at my workplace that forgot it, too. Of course, I made an entry in my calendar, and dear customer department (you know who you are), you better do, too. Also, if you need some inspiration on how to show your appreciation of our hard work, find some useful hints here. For the german users that have a catholic education: Find the melody to sing the headline of the article on Heise Online in "Gotteslob", no. 258.

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This is great! The scale now displays 95 kg. It's in the upper area of 95 kg, but let's not be overexact. I wasn't exactly 100 kg when I started fatblogging, so I can claim to have lost 5 kg of body weight so far. I have to admit that I dreaded weighing myself this time, because I hadn't been that strong lately when it came to sweets. But seeing that I reached 95 nonetheless, I feel extra idiotic because I could have achieved even more weight loss by not caving in to my cravings. Apart from sabotaging my fatblogging success, I managed quite well to separate the intake of carbohydrates from the one of fat. I really haven't changed my diet drastically, I just try to rule out food that combines fat and sugar/starch. This doesn't affect my breakfast, because I use to have sweet breakfast with bread, honey and jam. I don't like eating sausages or bacon this early anyway. By having my muesli with fat-reduced yogurt, I bend the rules a bit; I think I can afford that. For lunch, I have to be a bit more careful. Our company restaurant usually mixes noodles or potatoes with meat and a sauce made of oil and starch -- totally off-limits. If there's noodles with vegetables, I ask to leave the sauce. Today, at the Chinese restaurant, I chose the buffet lunch, which gave me the opportunity to take some meat with vegetables and hot sauce but no rice. So, in summary, there are two alternatives: first, carbohydrates from rice, potatoes or noodles with vegetables and, on the other hand, fat from meat, sauce etc. with vegetables. With a bit of looking around, those aren't too hard to find. My running progress is steady. Today, I ran my route for the last time divided into three parts of 9 minutes running and 2 minutes walking. Next time, there will be only two halves with 14 minutes of running and a short walking break in between. That's actually the last phase before running 30 minutes in one go! Unfortunately, the weather has been really bad in the morning most of the days lately. If there's just slight drizzle like this morning, I don't mind. But I don't like risking my health by running in the pouring rain. I hope that the sun will fulfill its summer duty reliably again soon, as I'm slowly getting into summer shape!

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I've been a Genesis fan for at least 20 years now, unfortunately I wasn't there in the early years when Peter was still with Phil, Mike and Tony. I've never had, or at least taken, the chance to go to a concert, but I've watched the video footage of several of their tours. When my friend Jürgen made me aware that Genesis was coming to Hannover in June, I immediately got tickets. So last Saturday, I took the train to Hannover to meet Jürgen at his sister's place. Isabel, who is also my ex-girlfriend, lives in Hannover -- a convenient coincidence. Unfortunately, Carolin wasn't able to find a lift. Paying more than 200 for the train ride would have been over the top, so she decided reluctantly to sell the ticket and stay at home. When I left on Saturday morning, I didn't mind her staying home very much, because we had had a bit of an argument at breakfast. After meeting up with Isabel and Jürgen and having some ice cream at one of Hannover's best ice cream parlors, he and I made our way to the AWD Arena, Hannover's football stadium where the concert took place. There were people all around the place that helped you find your way, very nice. We had been sitting on our seats (yes, I seem to be in the age where one appreciates not having to stand for 4 hours in a row) for about an hour when the band finally came on stage -- and the rain started to pour down. We had a glass ceiling above us, but the people on the field who had no rain coat, no tarp and no umbrella must have got awfully wet. Genesis started with the theme song of their tour, "Turn It On Again", and I was immediately amazed of the sound and their stage technology. Before, only the two elliptical screens on the far left and right of the stage had been used for video, but now I realized that the whole stage background wall was one huge video screen! Even before saying his first words to the crowd (or should I say "to the Krauts"?), Phil Collins made everyone smile by sporting a sweater of Hannover 96, the local soccer team. He held his introduction in German, which heightened the spirits of the soaking wet audience another bit. One could tell he wasn't happy with the weather, either. But after their third song or so, the clouds disappeared and the sun came out again. From this point on, our mood got better and better, everyone was having fun. Oh, and talking about the people -- this was one of the rare events apart from family reunions where I didn't raise the age average. In fact, there were only a few teenagers in the audience; probably most of them accompanied their parents (and thus created the opposite situation of a Robbie Williams concert). It was funny to watch a father in the row before me getting more excited than his seventeen year old son beside him and his wife. When they brought on "Hold On My Heart", I realized that I was missing Carolin and how stupid our morning argument had been. So I just called her number on my cell phone and let her listen to the whole song. It was too loud to talk, but there was no need for words, anyway. Genesis played a nice mix of songs, from classics like "Home By The Sea" over "Land of Confusion" to the encore "We Can't Dance". Experiencing their older songs live for the first time made me realize that Phil Collins just isn't Peter Gabriel. Peter simply has another vibe around himself, and Phil's interpretation, while really not bad, seemed to me almost like cover versions. This feeling was especially strong over their last song "Carpet Crawlers" which they ended their gig with after more than 2 hours of nonetheless great music. I enjoyed the concert very much and I'm glad that I had the opportunity to witness Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks, completed by Daryl Stuermer and Chester Thompson, turning it on again. Update: Jürgen sent me a link to this video slide show with photo impressions from the concert. Thanks!

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When I started using my iPod for running, I bought the Sennheiser OMX 70 headphones because they're made especially for athletes. They have adjustable clip-on earphones and are sweat- and water-resistant. But over time, I discovered two problems. First, they're not as rugged as they should be. A few weeks ago, one of the cables got twisted and tore open right at the earphone. And yesterday, the grip of the plug got loose. I already had a replacement, because there's a second issue I had with the OMX 70: because the earbuds hang outside over the ears, not inside the ears, they don't irritate them -- but they irritate the people around me on the train if I turn the volume up too much. And I hate being an annoyance that people have to ask to please turn down my music. That's why I bought the AKG Acoustics K 324 P in-ear headphones. They were advertised as having a great sound and effectively blocking outside noise. And that's true. When I made my first steps outside with them on, I almost walked into a car because I couldn't hear it coming. (I normally rely quite heavily on my hearing when I'm in traffic.) If you press them slightly into your ear canal (and there are three different sets of rubber buds to fit many ears), outside noise gets almost completely blocked, and on the other hand, the music only goes into your head, not into the environment. And when I apply a bit more pressure, I even get the feeling that there's a kind of suction that keeps the earbuds tight in the ear. There could even be an effect on battery life, because while with the Sennheisers I had to fullly turn up the iPod when I was listening to a podcast in traffic, the AKG earbuds get really loud already at the half setting. After the first day of using the K 324 P as an Environmental Stupidity Shield on the train and in the office, I can really recommend them. Let's hope they last longer than their predecessors.

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When it was time to upgrade my work laptop to a newer Linux distribution some months ago, I decided to install Kubuntu 6.06. I've been using the "Dapper Drake" release on my web servers for more than half a year now and never had any problems. The combination of Debian tools and Ubuntu application repositories is awesome. When I realized on Friday that some applications only come in packages for newer Ubuntu versions, I decided to ditch the Long Term Support release and try to upgrade to Kubuntu "Edgy Eft" 6.10. At first, I wasn't sure if I'd regret starting an upgrade on an Friday afternoon, but soon gave in to the challenge. Having a really big pipe at work has its advantages. After issuing the apt-get dist-upgrade, it took exactly 3 minutes and 31 seconds to download the 1002MB of upgrade packages. Installing them took about an hour and went without a flaw, but when the system finally rebooted, I got a mild shock that my encrypted home volume (that I didn't take the time to backup, of course) didn't get mounted. A little web search revealed that the kernel options "quiet" and "splash" prevented the passphrase necessary to decrypt the data from being displayed. Removing both options from /boot/grub/menu.lst took away the pretty boot splash screen but the problem, too. My desktop looks a a whole lot more shiny now. I could finally install Firefox 2 from the official repositories, and when it first encountered a Flash applet, I was surprised to be able to download and activate the plugin successfully with just one mouse click. I was used to having to do a manual download and installation. As easily, I replaced GAIM with its successor Pidgin, so my online life has an up-to-date foundation again. WiFi and Bluetooth continued working without a change. This upgrade went even faster and more smoothly than I had expected. You just have to love Ubuntu Linux. Knowing myself, it probably won't be long until I make the next step up to "Feisty Fawn".

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I still don't fully get that fatblogging concept yet, but at least it really seems to work: I'm now down to 96kg. And that's all I expect, so I wonder if I should waste my time trying to find out if it's fatblogging frequency, entry length or another factor that makes me lose weight. We'll see if the secret will eventually be lifted. On the jogging front, I'm now at five 5-minute running segments, each followed by a minute of walking. I'm doing quite well -- although I have to run slightly uphill, I often miss the breaks, running 6 or more minutes. Following the advice in my running guide, if I feel like doing more, I run longer than the half hour in the plan, instead of increasing my speed. The weather is great at the moment and it feels really good to do my early morning route under the rising sun, in fresh air and the quietness of just nature and me. Nutrition-wise, there are rare phases when I just can't resist buying my beloved fruit gums. But many times, I realize it's just my weaker self trying to take control, and I fight it successfully. Separating carbohydrates from fat sometimes is a challenge, since neither our company restaurant nor the restaurants in the neighborhood offer many dishes that don't mix noodles, dough or potatoes with oil or fat. My best bet always are salads (sometimes with turkey breast or other meat, but I always leave the bread untouched) or completely vegetarian dishes. Since those can be delicious, too, I don't mind the diet change. So, everything is fine on the weight loss and fitness front. And hopefully, the motivation I gain from this success will result in a self-energizing circle!

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