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I'm moving my website to another webhoster and they are still fighting to get my Cocoon running. So far, I will put a static snapshot of my site online. But this site will be back, updated and fully functional, as soon as possible.

I've been so creative! Well, at least I put some of my coolest photos on my deviantart page. All of these photos are also somewhere here on my page, but I've put a nice extra frame around and left them at a higher resolution. What do think about them?

I've updated the picture sections about my trip to Turkey, Syria and Lebanon with Sebastian. Check the May and June sections to see the pictures and read a little about the places and encounters.

Now, we arrived in Damascus. Here are the first pictures from Syria. Syria is great. The people are very nice and hospitable. We met many backpackers and the country is just awesome to travel.

I'm in Istanbul with Sebastian. Here are the first pictures. More stories soon.

I became a member on the deviantart website. Don't know if that'll do any good, but I like to browse there for new wallpapers or nice photos myself. And now I thought that I'd put some stuff on it. For the community spirit...

So, you can see my diviantart page here.

I didn't win anything in the Agfanet Photo Award! Well, about 19.000 photos were submitted and I never claimed mine to be any professional. Some of the awarded photos are very cool, but, to be honest, I find others also really boring. Three of the photos awarded show a closeup dandelion flower and most look like boring catalog photos. But if that's what they were looking for... in the end, the only thing that matters is that you enjoy what your are doing!

Did I mention that the Man in Seat 61 published one of my pictures on his site? The photo shows Sebastian after waking up on the train as driving towards Marrakech. Here you can see the photo in my gallery taken in December 2003.

Mark Smith, the Man in Seat 61 is doing a great work with his webpage. He documented popular ferry and train routes all over the world and by now has become the resource on the internet to find over-land and over-see travel information like time tables, prices, inside travel advice and photos. On my next train journeys I will check each time I pass seat 61. Maybe I'll meet him there once. Keep up with your great work, Mark!

This weekend, I had the opportunity to present the results of our project group ComponentTools on the conference Informatiktage (Computer Science Days) which took place in the small castle Birlinghoven near Bonn. This conference is hosted every year by the German Society of Computer Science (Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI) to bring together the next generation of computer scientists, researchers and business representatives.

I was a little nervous, but I think it went quite well and I could communicate the ideas and achievements of our project. Here you can see some pictures. See more here (will be updated shortly).

Me presenting ComponentTools Me presenting ComponentTools Blooming tree in front of castle

Besides many other interesting (or not so interesting) presentations of other student projects, there were some talks about rather general, partly society critical topics. For example, Prof. Dr. Klaus Brunnstein had a talk about The Means of IT-Security in the Information Society (original title: Die Bedeutung der IT-Sicherheit für die Informationsgesellschaft). A rather comical and, in my opinion, very limited way to see the world was presented by Prof. Dr. Gunter Dueck. He had a dinner talk about Keeping Computer Scientists in an Appropriate Environment (original title: Informatiker in artgerechter Haltung).

Now, I'm taking part in the Agfanet Photo Award which has the topic "Close Ups".

I never really considered myself a photographer, but I realize that I'm taking lots of photos and some turn out to be really nice. So, why not?! I've hit the "upload"-Button for the following photos you see below. Some I modified a bit to have them a little more balanced. What do you think? Is there any chance for me?

Photos committed to the Agfanet contest

Bird Footsteps My Opinel in the desert Grasshopper

I don't even think that the Opinel photo is close up enough to count as "Close Up". Anyway, I'll keep you updated if there's any results.

So, this is my first entry this year...

I have done some updates and modifications on this page. Firstly, there are the new pictures updated from my trip to Spain in January. I was celebrating New Year's there with my family and visited some friends in Galicia.

Secondly, as you might have noticed when you browsed the pictures, there's now a convinient picture viewer. Now, you don't have to open every picture one by one anymore, but you can easily browse back and forth through a collection of pictures. Also, you can adjust the size of the pictures to fit the needs of your screen. All recent photos are now available in a higher resoulution and quality. I hardly know people that use a dial-up connection anymore, I hope that this page is not becoming too slow for you now.

I've been a littly busy in University this year. Among other things, there was a seminar about optimization and security in XML based data streams and data bases. In the work section you can find my contributed paper and presentation slides.