Unless you are living under a rock or do not care about computer gaming you have heard about E3. With it come the announcements of by Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Microsoft's new console is called Xbox360, and some information can be found here. I was glad to here that backwards compatibility is a goal for the new console, I feel pretty convident that this is going to work great. Michaele Brundage, a former colleague of mine is working on backwards compatibility as he writes here.

We are still enjoying it a lot, MMORPG are the only way to really cooperative play computer games. WoW does a good job on the game, very easy to get into for the casual gamer, in that respect Blizzard has done the MMORPG industry a huge favour in pushing this genre mainstream. We will see if the industry can take advantage of it. There are some games on the production list, mainly by Turbine (Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of The Rings Online), - which did an excellent job with Asheron's Call - which I'm looking forward to.

On the XBox I'm trying out Oddworld - Stranger's Wrath. I'm actually enjoying this way more then I intially thought. Very well done, nice graphics, a reasonable innovative idea, and beside that, the prize was right. You should check it out. I'm still enjoying a casual Pro-Evolution Soccer game against my some on the XBox, in my view the premium sports game on the XBox (although I'm not an authority in judging sports games). Lots of fun!

I can wait for May 13th, on this date Forza Motorsport is released in Europe for the XBox, this looks like a keeper!

First of all, I'm happy to enjoy a long weekend. I used the official holiday yesterday together with an additional day of vacation to celebrate a 4-day weekend. Pretty neat, some of the addition time I used today to an in-depth lecture of our weekly newspaper 'Die Zeit' - something I normally try to accomplish over the weekend. During the lecture I learned about RIC - Regolamento Internazionale Carozze, beside the strange name - why do I care?

With my changed job in August I have to do some more travel, some of it is done by train. I actually enjoy train travel, much more relaxing then plane travel, more room, quieter, and you end in the center of towns normally, instead at some airport at the outskirt of towns. Since I can normally plan ahead I use the online booking system of 'Die Bahn' which works remarkable well, allows you to print your tickets on your local printer, and even does reserve seats in the trains. Finding your assigned wagon in a train is easy, but I'm was always wondering why it is so damn hard to find your actual seat. I thought it is my one stupidity - but today I was confincent that it is actually a plot by burocrats. This article in Die Zeit explains it - trains have a rather interesting numbering scheme, something like this:

Why would anyone in his sane mind number seats this way?? Part of the answer is: RIC - Regolamento Internazionale Carozze, this paper regulates everything one could imagine to allow trains to work (standardized) and travel between different European countries. I know that cooperation in Europe is difficult, but does it need to be that difficult?

The numbering scheme still looks arbitrary to me, I think the rule is simple - look for your assigned seat number where you wouldn't expect it to be - and remember, there is a reason behind it, somewhere .... perhaps ....

The latest 'non-audible' book I read is Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (see my previous entry). In the end I was glad I finished this book, I thought the overall story is slow moving, uninteresting, and with characters I didn’t like or cared for. You probably can tell that I’m not a big Gibson fan, I read several of his books (i.e. Idoru, Neuromancer, et.al.), but this one is even worse IMHO. In addition to the story I find his writing stile not very readable, can't he even create a complete sentence? There are paragraph full of half-cooked sentences which makes it even harder to read. Sure, you can claim that the author is trying to create a feeling and mood, but the combination of stile and story is too much to me. I’m glad I’m done with this book – I want to read something entertaining and interesting now, no more Gibson for a LONG time!

You probably thought some scientific paper read like true gibberish? You might be right, two MIT students created a program to create research papers automatically, you can check it out here http://www.pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/. Now to the funny part, a paper generated with this tool got accepted at the World Multi-Conference on Systemic, Cybernetics and Informatics, you can read all about it here.

I wonder who reviewed the papers...

Our newspaper had a reference to the 'John-Cage-Orgelprojekt'. Well, its gotta be art ... beginning of the performance on September 5th, 2001 - end of the performance 2639! What do you make out of that?? This is really strange to say the least ... the real performance is even scheduled from the year 1361 to 2639, the first few-hundert years were just scheduled as silence I guess... The location of the performance (church) looks very nice, I should visit it when I'm somewhere close. There is definitely enough time left!

Some minor work on the site you might notice. On the right you will see a link with the current weather conditions here in Germany (taken from my own weather station in the backyard), you can click this picture and will get some more statistical information.

In addition a badge with some pictures from my flickr site, everytime you refresh you should see some other pictures. There is also a link to my complete flickr entries.

Enjoy...