The following math-gem was sent by a colleague yesterday. Very funny I thought, I thought I share it with you:

Ok – while there is time … The radio just had a report about the Europe premier of ‘War of the Worlds’ in Berlin, with Tom Cruise attending. Didn’t this movie just open a week or two ago in the US? Is it my imagination; are Hollywood movies being market much more quickly in secondary markets outside the US? My recollection is that in the past it took often a couple of month before a movie opened in Europe after the initial viewing in the US, is there some statistics to verify my observation? Can you query IMDB for historic/average information like this? A reason for this could be the internet and the copying of movies … Movies are available on opening weekend (or even before) on the file sharing networks, the quick answer for the industry is to make movies available in as many theaters available as soon as possible …

While I’m writing this I’m already sitting for about 1 hour on the Autobahn, about 2 km away from the exit I have to take to make it to the office. The radio informed that the Autobahn is closed due to an accident and has been transformed to a parking lot with a length of a few kilometers. Police cars and tow trucks already passed a while ago, no other emergency vehicle passed, let’s hope no one got seriously injured.

My Outlook mailbox is synced, but I already took care of all the email before I left home this morning, I already used the time to clean up older email, now I need internet connectivity in my car! There is a lot of work I could do right now if I could connect … perhaps I have to make a bigger effort to get data and documents in an offline store on my machine to be prepared for these occasions.

Couple of day ago I complained about the absence of 'XBox Live Arcade' in Europe. In game related news I read today that 'Tink Tanks' is available for 'XBox Live Arcade' starting today, and now the interesting part - in German language! Why can you download a game in German language if you can't download a German Arcade-version?!

Not true anymore - the German Arcade version is available! Without any big announcement the European version of XBox Live Arcade was made available. Now we need a way to get the CDs without buying a magazine ...

A German web site visualizing the effect of Black Holes and travel with near light speed is http://www.tempolimit-lichtgeschwindigkeit.de/. A englisch version of this site is in process, and can be found here (it doesn't look like the process is moving with light-speed). Very interesting site with nice visuals and background information!

I have to admit, I love simple computer games for a quick fix of distraction and sometimes frustration. There is a real industry for these games on the PC. Companies like RealArcade, MSN Zone, PopCap Games, et.al. make a living out of offering a combination of free and pay-for-play game services. I bought a couple of these games myself, stuff like Zuma, Bejeweled, Dynomite, or Bookworm. These games can be a big distraction and a killer for productivity - I created a few simple rules: No games in the office or on my work-computer, and no games before 6pm or on the weekend.

A collection of these games is available for the XBox with the XBox Live Arcade collection. This allows you to download some of those timewasters to your XBox and play them on your TV. For my taste the individual downloads are not cheap (between $9.99 and $19.99 per game), but I bet I would have fallen for a few of those (I paid about $20 for the above mentioned PC versions of the games also - $10 to $20 is about the trashhold I'm willing to invest quickly on a game).

The question I have is: Why is the "XBox Live Arcade" product only available in the US and Canada? How difficult can it be to 'port' them to the rest of the world? What is the problem ?? Licensing? Converting to the PAL screen resolution?

I want to wast more time senselessly in front of the XBox - get me my XBox Live Arcade collection in Europe!

A couple of weeks ago I made an extended weekend trip with my son to Munich. The weather was great and we had a really good time. We spent some time in the 'Deutsches Museum', visited Dachau, walked a lot through Munich itself, and visited several of Munichs famout 'beer garden'. I uploaded the pictures to my Flickr account. You can take a look at the Munich trip using this link.

Das 'Deutsche Museum' is a good way to spent a lot of time in Munich. A lot of stuff to see, and we took some excellent themed-tours in the museum, very educational, but also very entertaining. Still, there are areas in the museum which look just old and will not appeal to todays (younger) museums guests, some improvement was noticable on the way and probably will deserve another visit. Overall, we learned a lot in the museum and were very well entertained.

We/Microsoft-EMIC has the ability to hire, check out the details here. The location of our office is Aachen (Germany).

If you read this review (careful - it is full of spoilers) of the latest StarWars movie you will see that there are people out there which really enjoyed the movie. Whatever this guy thinks - the 'darkness' of the movie is something which is lost on me. I just don't get it - sure Skywalker is evil now, but I don't really care. Also, how can you come up with a stupid name like 'Order 66', stuff like this makes me crinche - well, I guess 'Order 666' would have been more stupid.

I stand by my verdict, people will have to see it, since the marketing machine and the peer pressure is to big to miss it, but in the end you will leave empty and unimpressed.