Flickr seems to be concerned with the morality of us Germans: Note: If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so wont be able to turn SafeSearch off. Well, we're glad censorship is more or less history in our country, thank you very much! </a> My Flickr Pro subscription ends in July. If this censorship won't be removed, my subscription is certainly not going to be continued.

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Another kilo has vanished! Should I test if, in fatblogging, weight loss is proportional to entry length? It's almost as if my mind is losing weight with my body: the Günter book made me realize that my weaker self has much more control over myself than is good for me. But since I learned about the dangerous interplay between carbohydrates, fat, Insulin and glycogen, I choose my diet much more carefully. I eat wholemeal bread instead of croissants, low-fat cream cheese instead of camembert, and fruits instead of sweets. It's a really liberating feeling to wrest more and more control from Günter, my weaker self. The 10 Euro for the book were one of my best investments this year. Today, I ran a different route that has a fewer inclination and everything went according to my buildup plan (now three-minute runs with one minute of walking in between). I found a beautiful way along a little brook under trees, only three minutes from our house! It's slightly uphill, but very managable. Since there aren't many people out at 5:30, it's just me and nature. Maybe I should leave the iPod at home.

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Hey, this fatblogging really works! I've lost 2 kilos, just by writing the first entry! This is great. I surely don't want to compromise that success by eating the wrong stuff, so I started to collect information about nutrition. And I experienced a revelation: on my way home, I come past the supermarket we always shop at. When I saw its sign today, some well-known cravings for sweets set in. I hesitated a little, but then gave in and bent off in direction of the shop. Just when I reached its doors, though, I realized that it was my weaker self that was driving me there. And, thanks to a great little book I just read, I now know the name of my weaker self: Günter So I gave Günter the mental finger and turned around to get home for some fat-reduced yogurt with fresh strawberries. My morning run wasn't a full success, though. I had to admit that I'm not in the shape yet to run uphill for minutes. And Freiburg just isn't quite as flat as Philippsburg. Must be tectonics or something. Or maybe just the Black Forest. I'll look for a less challenging route.

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A freely elected totalitarian government is something new, after all. (Su-Shee 2.0, translated from German)

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Many bloggers are overweight. That's no surprise, since sitting in front of the screen all day and living from pizza and coffee has never been regarded as a recipe to lose weight. Now, a new weight loss plan is gaining ground among bloggers: Losing weight by writing about it. Yes, it may seem like a strange concept, but it seems to work with many, so I'm willing to give it a try. It's time I do something to shrink my belly, and it gets me a new topic to blog about. My starting weight is 100kg, and I guess that's about 15kg too much. I guess I'd look at lot better with 85 kilos. Let's see how blogging my weight every few days will help me reach that goal. On another note, I also started running again. It's embarrassing if climbing the stairs to our flat makes me breathe more heavily than a marathon winner. (I won't get into other situations where it's much more enjoyable to be in a good condition.) I'm using the starter plan of MyJogging.de again to get myself into shape: over the course of six weeks, I'll always run for half an hour. But that half hour gets broken into growing intervals, starting at two minutes of running followed by one minute of walking. Trying to run in the evening after coming home from work won't be very successful. It's too hard for me to get going when I'm tired and digesting a lunch. So I decided to get up at 5:30 in the morning and start the day in running shoes, followed by a shower and a nice little breakfast. I don't want to flood my blog with entries, you know, so I'll simply report about my running progress in the fatblogging entries. Mens sana in corpore sano. Let's work on that second part.

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If you've been following my blog for a while then you know that I'm very interested in using Skype on my mobile phone. But so far, they broke all their promises to release a Symbian S60 version of the Skype client. It seems it needed a third party vendor to step in and deliver: Fring Fring is a free communication software for S60 that you install on your phone. It then connects to several services if you enter your account credentials. Apart from Skype, there are also Google Talk, SIP and as the most recent addition, Twitter For Skype, Google Talk and Twitter, Fring also offers a chat function to exchange text messages. The Fring client connects to their servers which in turn make a connection to Skype, Google, Twitter or the SIP contact you want to talk to. So far, Fring works quite nicely on my Nokia E61. The voice quality over Skype is acceptable and by enabling me to also send instant messages from the same application makes Fring my single mobile communication hub. The only thing I'm afraid of is how running Fring will drain the phone's battery. But I'll see about that.

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HulaLena made me go on a trip back to my childhood by asking some questions about Sesame Street h3. What Sesame Street character did you find the coolest? Lefty the Salesman ("Schlehmil"). I found it hilarious how Ernie always thwarted his attempts to sneakily sell an O like it was something forbidden. h3. Whom didn't you like? The grumpy "Herr Bödefeld" from the german insertions. h3. Can you recite a song from Sesame Street? Which one? I know the title song by heart, and both my brother and I still love to recite Hey diddle diddle, the cat has a fiddle, the cow jumps over the moon h3. What tought you Sesame Street? One of the most important things a teacher needs to know I learned from Grover ("Grobi"): you have to really make an effort if you want to teach people things. "Near... (running to the back) Far! (running to the front) Near... (huff huff huff) Far again!" h3. When did you watch Sesame Street the last time? I'm afraid that must be two decades ago. But I still like to watch The Muppets, especially the movies, e.g. "The Muppets Treasure Island" ("Not bad for an amphibian, hm?"). I pass this Stöckchen" on to "Carolin!.html and Kai

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I never used Gentoo myself, but I'm hearing every now and then that Gentoo users tend to switch to Ubuntu once their learning curve flattens and the compile cycles become increasingly annoying. "I want to do work with my system, not on my system", some switchers say. I've been using Kubuntu on my ThinkPad R52 laptop for months now and I'm totally satisfied. There are no complicated or time-consuming procedures to install new software. I just do apt-get install, and that's it. And from the "universe", "multiverse" and "medibuntu" repositories, I can get all the applications I need. The same goes for my web servers. With Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I have everything I need to run web, mail, chat and other services. Thanks to "Long Time Support", I won't have to do an upgrade to a newer distribution version for years. I've been a SuSE Linux user for many years, but now I guess I could become a Ubuntu Linux user for at least as long. And since I passed the "Learning Linux" phase long ago, I may never be inclined to try Gentoo...

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The folks over at WebWorker Daily asked for a picture of my work space. No problem, here's where I work when I'm at home: I also put a larger, annotated picture on Flickr

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Alex, the Chief Happiness Officer, put a great illustration of the rat race we're always tempted to join in his blog. It was a revelation to me that I've been one of these rats during the recent weeks. Steadily getting more work, watching my to-do lists grow, trying to stay organized, failing in some cases, hurrying to correct those situations, losing focus on the important things and getting frustrated from missing the feeling of accomplishment. And all the while losing more and more energy, thus worsening this vicious circle. Now I know why they called that successful racing game "Burnout". I decided to break the circle today. I wanted to concentrate on some topics that I should have finished long ago, without getting disturbed or distracted. That's why I decided to work from home today. Here I have everything I need -- a computer, a cup of tea and tranquility. The ideal environment to focus on the tasks at hand. I started work half an hour early because I didn't have to commute and finished many tasks over the course of the morning that I tried to do all week in vain. But instead of feeling pressure and stress like on the days before, I feel more energized with every entry I'm able to cross out on my to-do list. I'm actually looking forward to the things I get to tackle after having some light lunch. When you don't succeed, trying harder is not always the solution. Often it's trying something different.

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