My trust in the intactness of the political system of the EU has just received a tiny little re-inforcement:

Urteil: Keine Rechtsgrundlage für Fluggastdatenweitergabe an USA

This weekend I was on a two-days walking trip on Achill Island and in Northern Mayo (Erris). It was a great weekend, the weather was fabulous, the scenery was stunning, and I now have sore muscles and a bad sunburn on my forehead.

Today, I enjoyed having a day off work and revcovering from the yesterday's extertions, when we walked about 17 km from Belderrig to Portacloy along the mountainous coastline. We, that means Wolfgang and I. Wolfgang contacted me through the Trekking Forum , where I posted looking for fellow-walkers for short walking trips in the West of Ireland. He is from Ulm and here in Ireland for a three-week holiday.

Today's weather was also very fine, and, for the first time this year, I was comfortable with only a t-shirt. I visited the exhibition of the exam presentations of the students of the Galway arts school, which I already visited last year and which had impressed me very much at that time. This year, unfortunately, I could not see the exhibition on the weekend, since I was away and when I went there today, many parts of the exhibition were closed due to ongoing assessments. I saw a few interesting pieces, nevertheless, and took some nice photographs.

Over the weekend and today I took about 150 pictures. I will try to pick a few nice ones and add a new gallery to my website soon. Stay tuned!

Far in the unchartered backwaters of Ireland's west, in an unfashionable part of town...

You can tell that I have been reading the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy again lately, can you not? Well, not exactly reading, but watching last year's movie on DVD and indulging in nostalgic remininiscences of first, early teen experiences with computer games .

What else have I been up to all this time, you ask? So here is a little roundup of the major events in the life of your's truly in the past months:

I found a job at the end of last October as a PHP developer at a small company in Galway called Advance Learning, which is in the business of selling ECDL course ware world-wide. I have been working for them full-time since, and so far it has been a good experience. Which means I am still living in Galway and in the same appartment. From August last year, until last March, I had a German flat-mate, who was here on an Erasmus ("Orgasmus") exchange at the NUIG. Funnily enough, he was from Heidelberg, but he is too young that we could have known each other from the time when I was living there.

I went on a trip to Wicklow with him and some of his student friends, also mostly from Germany, at the end of February. The valley of Glendalough in the Wicklow Mountains has, IMHO, one of the most beautiful landscapes in Ireland. Very different from the rough and dramatic mountains of the west. I did a few weekend trips with my motorbike and, since Easter, with my new car, but only to small sights in the vicinity. I still want to go to Donegal again and maybe visit Belfast for 2-3 days.

In March my father and my younger brother came to visit me in the course of their one-week holiday in Ireland. Unfortunately, the weather did not play along at all, and in consequence first I became ill and then my brother got a serious cold. Naturally, the weather was at it's best the week just before and after their visit...

Apart from that and work, life has been a bit uneventful, save occasional walking trips with the Mountaineering Club and a very short visit home around Easter. Instead, I explore my inner riches, develop my skills as a web programmer and make plans for the summer, where I will go to Lithuania for the LBW (see previous posts). After this event, I may go on a little trip through eastern Europe or maybe to Finland, I have not decided yet exactly.

So far for now; I may do another post about my current programming projects soon. I think, I will turn this blog into a more technical oriented journal anyway. Writing about interesting articles I read, code snippets, tips & tricks etc., you know what I mean. Talk to you soon.

I finally bought a new digital camera, after my last one was stolen, almost a year ago, in Dublin. It is a small Canon Ixus 50 that fits in every pocket. In fact, I keep it in a small, cotton women's sock for protection ;-)

I already have quite a few pictures from my journey back from Germany by car, after Easter. Now I just have to find the time to turn them into nice galleries for the website...

For now, there is only a small, new gallery with some pictures from Spiddal , a small village west of Galway.

I wrote an announcement for this years's LBW for the German Linux news site pro-linux. It appeared yesterday morning and got the usual silly comments from people who jump at the mention of alcohol and automatically assume that this can be nothing serious. Do I mind? Not really, because I know better :-)

Well, after not writing for the blog for the greater part of a year, I am back from the dead. It is maybe fitting that my first new entry is related to LBW, since this was also the topic of my last post before I abandonded my blog.

This year's LBW is going to be in Lithuania and I am planning on attending again. I have already registered my coming and offered to host a workshop on writing Interactive fiction . Unfortunately, nobody could be bothered to register for attendance so far :-( But there are still 3 months to go, so I hope that some people will come along eventually.

In a further attempt to boost interest, I put together a list of links to the Whats, Wheres and Hows of interactive fiction. Since this might be of interest to others as well, I uploaded the list to my website.

I might tell a little bit more about my present situation in life later on...