Surfin’ USA

Happy new year

I hope everyone had nice holidays and got into the new year alright. Teiko and I travelled to Seattle over christmas, where we met with her family. Among other things, we explored the city, went shopping and ate a lot of good food, good times. I took a few pictures, maybe one or two will eventually show up here, too.
For New year’s we kept it relatively quiet: We had some drinks and ‘celebrated’ with a nice meat fondue, it was very nice.

Sadly, the holidays are over and now it’s back to work again for everyone. And there’s lots of things waiting to be done, so I’d better get started soon.

Moving on

Today I moved out of my dorm room, after I had finished my internship the day before. The last four months in in Aachen have been a terrific experience, both at work and elsewhere. My project at Inform GmbH was interesting and challenging — I’ve learned a great deal in those four months — and moreover my co-workers were very nice. Apart from work, I’ve had lots of fun with old friends and met many new, cool people; I will especially miss the guys and gals from my corridor and some other friends from my dorm — thanks for the wonderful time, I hope we can keep in touch!

I am now back at my parents’ place for a couple of days to prepare my journey to California, where I will pursue graduate studies at the School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, hoping to obtain a PhD eventually. I have quite a number of things to take care of before September 10th, which is when my journey across the Atlantic takes place. Most importantly, I’ll have to go through my belongings, which are currently piled up in the basement, and see what to take with me, what to keep here and what to dump. As I usually have a hard time throwing old stuff away, this promises to be a tough task…

Maybe I’ll get around to posting some pictures from my time in Aachen this weekend, but for the time being I’m afraid that getting my things sorted out here has top priority.

Congratulations once more!

This weekend my friend Martin and his girlfriend Tsveti got married in my hometown Rheinberg. Congratulations and all the best for the two of you! So far this was just the "official act", so no big party and only a couple of friends came to congratulate them. But rest assured that we are still going to celebrate this special and very happy event adequately.

By the way, it seems be be the latest trend among my friends to get married…

Party pics

On the last two weekends I hosted/attended two nice parties and I figured I’d share some of the nice nice pics that resulted from it.

The first party, on July 15th, was a joint birthday/graduation/farewell party that I co-hosted with my two good friends Jens and Lars (”Uschi”). We invited several of our friends back from the high school days, some of which I hadn’t seen for quite a while. Moreover my two good friends Kicki and Dain managed to come down from Gothenburg for the weekend, it was great seeing them again as well — thanks a lot guys!

The second party one week later was the farewell party of our pastor and my good friend Jörg, who accepted a new job in another part of Germany and will move away by the end of the month. He is also a passionate musician (as were many of the party guests), so we spent most of the night jamming away one last time, as we had done countless times before — what great fun that was once more…!
Anyway, best of luck for Jörg and his family in their new home, we’ll keep in touch.

Congratulations Tina and Robert!

Well, meanwhile I’m back in Germany, just in time to watch and celebrate Germany’s late victory against Poland — what a match! Anyway, before I write something about the spain trip I want to catch up on an event taking place before my vacation, June 3rd to be precise: my cousin and, more importanly, close friend Robert married his long-time girlfriend Tina, a very good friend of mine as well.

It was a very nice wedding ceremony and party afterwards, and I was honored to be their best man. Naturally a lot of pictures were taken, for a more extensive coverage visit Robert’s website, where you can also leave your wishes for the newlyweds. From my side I’d like to take the opportunity and once more wish them all the best for their shared future, I’m sure you’ll have a long and happy marriage!

Congratulations !

My very good friend Olli back in Germany is, as of this Sunday morning 9:05, the proud father of Klara! Congratulations to him and his girlfriend Saskia, Klara’s mother, I am very happy for you three!
Klara is 54 cm ‘tall’ and weighs enormous 4180 g. The actual birth was quite an act but everyone is fine and the two parents are the happiest people in the world.
Naturally Oliver has a lot of other things to take care of now (most importantly being with his family), so he asked me to put these two pictures of little Klara here on my website, which I gladly do. Isn’t she cute? (Update: Olli sent me two more pictures)

Comments moderated

For some days now my blog has been flooded with spam comments, partly containing inappropriate language. As of now, all of them have been filtered and held back by the blog software so they didn’t actually show up on the site. But eventually some will get through. And especially after some recent court decisions in Germany I don’t want to take this risk at the moment.
Thus I’ve decided to force all comments to require approval by me for the time being — this implies that it might take some time until your comments appear on the webpage. Sorry for the incovenience, I hope it will only be temporary.

Comments language

I could have pointed that out earlier, but just to stress it I’ll post it separately: Of course, as they used to do on my old, German site, my friends from Germany can post their comments in German as well as in English — or even in other languages, if they prefer

Välkommen !

After having some sort of online diary (in German) for the first year of my stay in Sweden I have decided to “move it to the next level”. My main motivation was to switch to English so my non-German mates from around the world can follow what’s going on over here as well. Moreover, by employing this complete open-source system, managing entries, comments, pictures, etc. is simplified a lot! I’m still experimenting with the layout and design (there’s a whole lot of options), hence things might still change in the future…

Anyway, I’d like to say a hearty welcome to everyone, stay tuned for updates.