For all of you wondering about the status of me and my blog: We are still alive…

The last 2 months have been extremely eventful and beautiful; they were both final stroke and the beginning of a new period of life. It was time to say good-bye to many people, including good friends. And it was time to welcome the future.

I’m back home, back in good old Germany.

Many impressions have to be assimilated and filed for eternity. I neglected the blog, I enjoyed the time as a non-publisher. But I would like to share my incredible insights into the international student atmosphere.

Blogs are made to publish up-to-date information, but I want to look back during the next weeks. At least, I want to upload some pictures from events like:

• The outcome of my self-brewed beer
• The fabulous Sittning (extremely censored edition)
• The Brännboll tournament and the fucking mess in Aldiheim
• The visit of my parents and our travel to Lofoten/Vesterålen/Abisko
• The very last days in Umeå
• The way back home (aka on the road with daddy cool)

Until then, I give you 4 little pics from the last weeks…

Stay tuned!

There hasn’t been much activity on my blog during the last days. And this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to tell. In fact, a lot of interesting events took place and some new projects just started.

I haven’t told you about the first home match of Umeå IK’s women soccer team which they successfully won 7:0.
I haven’t told you about the beach volley contest with my mentor group last Monday where my team perfectly sucked.
I haven’t told you about the pleasure of sunbathing at 13°C after experiencing months of snow.
I haven’t told you about some really nice BBQ sessions at Nydala and in good old Mariehem.
I haven’t told you about the Valborg (Walpurgis Night) where I was camping out in the woods close to the freezing point.
I haven’t told you about the official world championships in Brännboll, for which I formed a team to defeat the world elite.
And I still haven’t told you about holy Norrlands Guld and Umea’s plan to apply for being the European Capital of Culture 2014 (*sic*).

The reason for not writing about all these wonderful topics is my incredibly poor time management: I have to hand in one assignment per week for my Speech and Language Processing class. I normally write that stuff some hours before the due date. Last time, I didn’t even meet the deadline. I haven’t been in Swedish class for 2 weeks now. I asked my teacher in Academic Presentations to postpone my final presentation, because I was running out of time.

So what do I actually do all the time? Well, besides doing all that fun stuff stated above, I spend many hours reading blogs and listening podcasts. It’s a weird contradiction that I was speaking about saving time by managing blogs using RSS in my final presentation, but I myself spend more and more time in the blogosphere. One can discover fantastic things every single day: People who understand the net as a social setting. People who think ahead. People who share and spread knowledge. The web is people, not just dusty documents.

But maybe this is just an excuse for my continuing laziness… Shit.

Well, I don’t really know where to start this time… I have already mentioned HumLAB and Podcasting in my blog, but maybe it’s good to explain these terms in short:

HumLAB is in fact a nicely equipped computer lab at Umea University (under the library, opposite to that hopelessly crowded lab with the old and crappy PCs). HumLAB describes itself as “a vibrant and diverse meeting place for the humanities, culture and information technology”. They host a series of seminars and speeches covering all topics at the interface between IT & society. I think they have a really good reputation in the “scene”. Unfortunately, I have never been to HumLAB before, but I regularly check their English blog.

Podcasting refers to a relatively young fashion of producing and distributing (mostly non-professional) audio shows on the net. Google defines Podcasting as “making audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user’s convenience”. Podcasting is often seen as an alternative to commercial radio. Read more about Podcasting at Wikipedia.

And now it’s time to combine these two things: Today, HumLAB presented a seminar with Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, who’s running a popular blog and podcast called Bicyclemark’s Communiqué. He is one of the pioneers of podcasting. Mark describes himself as a “Portuguese-American, radical, activist-journalist, pretend-academic, university employee, podcaster, blog fanatic”. And today’s topic was of course podcasting.

After giving a general overview about the topic, he became more personal and detailed. He presented some of his favorite podcasts, showed iPodder Lemon on his new iBook and reflected on the future of podcasting. It was really fascinating to realize that the podcasting scene is still such a small and connected group: I knew almost every European podcast he mentioned. And he already knew about the Loudblog project of Gerrit van Aaken (one of the most popular German podcasters), which was launched just 10 days ago.

The seminar was live-streamed and archived; a seminar chat was set up as well. The audience seemed to be familiar with the world of blogging (most people knew RSS), but I can’t assess their interest in podcasting. I think that some questions showed the continuous uncertainty of classifying podcasts into the world of media. Podcasts are asynchronous, podcasts are underground, and podcasts are subscriptions. Podcasting claims to be easy for both the producer and the listener. Podcasting is not about sophisticated content tagging or 24/7 broadcasting. Not yet.

After his presentation, I seized the chance to talk to Mark personally. He is really excited about the development of podcasting in 2005.
Bicyclemark, it was a pleasure meeting you! I’m looking forward to hearing your “Soundseeing” in Stockholm and the next German Phrase of the Week!

More resources:

• Seminar information in the HumLAB blog
• Mark about his talk
• Mark about Sweden
• Jim with a short review
• Stephanie shot a pic

Let’s be interactive! Today I shot the wonderful photo below. Can anyone of you guess what the picture shows? If yes, write a comment! Come on guys, give me at least 3 comments!

BTW: Well, there is no prize for the quiz. I’m sorry…

Yesterday I received a note to pick up a package at the neighborhood post station. It turned out that is was a huge Easter gift parcel from my parents in Germany. Thank you so much!

This posting is a good opportunity to wish you some nice holidays. Relax, calm down and chill out. Once again, I will be off for about a week – I’m going to celebrate Easter in Norway. We will travel to the picturesque Lofoten Islands and spend 3 nights in Stamsund. Then, we go on up north to Swedish Abisko, staying another two nights. Start is tomorrow morning at a quarter to five. That’s gonna be great!

So far, Happy Easter…

Blogs are paid more and more attention. Germany’s most popular news site Spiegel Online compliments in their daily + English (!) category Spiegel Surfs the Net:

When you get bored reading regular media like us, these are great places to waste time without wasting your brain.

Indeed, this is exactly what I have experienced in the last few months. I can spend hours/days/… with reading really interesting stuff. I eventually have to realize that it’s simply impossible to absorb every seemingly juicy blog source. It appears really hard to implement an efficient information filter in my head. Am I a slave of distraction?
But this is actually not a new problem, caused by blogs in particular. Blogs are just the new fashion of publishing information. Attributes: Beyond the scope of mass media, versatile and often straightforward language styles, independent and free in thoughts.

Just one example: I would have never expected that the daily episodes of a German sole trader can be so much of interest to me. His readers get a perfect insight into his profession and the variety of tasks and topics he has to deal with. My respect for this guy has grown dramatically! Still, retailer or even cashier is not the career of my choice, but Der Shopblogger! is a thousand times better than every damn reality show ever.

Also established journals want to use the hype and start blogging: German business paper Handelsblatt launched its blog network Handelsblatt global reporting, where its foreign correspondents write about more personal impressions, encounters and stories. I would really like to know if the reporters required such a platform or if they were forced (or lured by money) to contribute to this fancy medium.
Anyway, the platform also includes the experiences of Swedish correspondent Helmut Steuer. Up to now, he has only published two articles, but I’m looking forward to comparing his point of view to my adventures in northern Sweden.

That’s all I have to say. I hope you don’t mind the German links…

It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m currently performing my second presentation in Academic Presentations. As I did in the first presentation, I decided to give a deeper insight into blogs. This time I focus on software selection and article publishing using WordPress.

To demonstrate this process, I publish this post during my presentation! Hopefully everything works…

I am used to run XAMPP, a free and easy-to-install distribution of Apache, MySQL and PHP, on my computer to develop server-side web applications. I don’t need it regularly, but it’s a handy tool if you’re not so much interested in thousands of config files.

For some weeks now, I am unable to start Apache, which is cancelling with a socket error. Up to now, I didn’t track the problem and did my development directly online (urgh, bad style). Today I uninstalled the whole package and installed the latest version – and still got the same problem. So I had to ask Google (and the XAMPP forums) finally.

The problem was solved very quickly: It turned out that Skype, the VoIP solution of my choice, blocks port 80 (yeah, the common HTTP port). Since I updated Skype, I let it start together with Windows (I use it really often right now), therefore causing the problem. So you either have to stop Skype while using XAMPP, or tell Skype not to listen on port 80.

Troubleshooting with Ralf, problem solved.
Have a nice weekend!

Normally I do not report changes of blog itself. But this time I couldn’t resist:

• New category On Campus added (isn’t this the reason we are abroad? )
• Some new teaser images added (even more exhibitionism)
• Blogroll added (this had to be done finally)
• BlogCounter added (nice complement to logfiles)

To-Do-List:

• Translation and update of the German link page
• English gallery page
• Solving bothering feed problems

BTW: It’s getting cold…

I’m not the only one who enjoys my nickname 2meter3: The Berlin newcomer band on2trees played a gig at Emergenza Festival for up & coming bands - calling themselves 2meter3! What the hell?!

Enlightenment: Florian, an international student who lived in the same building, is the guitar player of on2trees. He sent the URL of my Umea web page to provide his band fellows with pictures about our study exchange. At this time, the band was looking for a temporary name to express the changed cast (another band member is in Spain right now). Without hesitation they decided to become 2meter3. I still don’t know if I have to be honoured or angry because I wasn’t informed in advance. Anyway, it’s a nice story…

Further investigations found another 2meter3 on the web. He seems to be from Holland. Damn! And I thought 2meter3 is elaborate enough to be unique…

Hej ho. Finally entered the world of blogging. And finally entered the world of English publishing.

Actually I thought it’s too late to start a blog. But then, X-Mas and New Year’s Eve were over and I was looking for new challenges. Et voila, here it is!

New year, new chances - hope you guys enjoy my bullshit …

And last but not least:
These documents are dedicated to Sokrates and Erasmus. We love you!