Gotta be the snowiest week since I moved to Frankfurt. Click to enlarge the photo.

Well, this site now runs on Wordpress 2.0. If there are any problems please let me know. I also took the time to move the Jeppe High School post over from my old site…. I dragged that out way too long anyway.

184As I promised I went out and took some photos. Unfortunately, I finally fell asleep and only got out at 10:30 (and you can thank my downstairs neighbours, who decided that this was a good moment to start drilling holes in their walls). I walked around the river area for about an hour; I had at at least one more place I wanted to visit but my camera gave up on me. I’m thinking it didn’t like the cold, wet weather.

175And it’s really cold, because it’s a little windy. I felt it on the bridge, when i took the photo of the river. I was feeling like a block of ice. Brrr.

Sorry about the horrible layout of the photos. I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.0 and two of my plugins don’t work anymore :-) One is eMail notification, the other is the little gallery plugin. I’ll update this post when the Gallery is fixed (or I find a new, better photo gallery plugin.)

197_Update, September 8th 2006:_ I am finally using a real photo album.

I can’t sleep. It’s snowing like crazy. Beautiful. I’ll definitely see if I can take some photos in the morningtime.

And by that, I mean in a few hours.

Who would’ve thought – it’s snowing, and has been for some hours. Absolutely no traffic outside. Everything is white – the ground still shows through in some places; the snow is not all that heavy. But it’s continuous and if it keeps snowing for the rest of the night it’ll be very beautiful tomorrow. I already plugged my camera’s batteries into the charger and set my alarm clock to an ungodly early time. I’m determined to go out and take some photos tomorrow morning before it all melts again.

So, everybody who likes the stereotype, this is a white christmas for you guys. :p

615I was browsing about at random last night and I came across a mention of the fictional character of John Sinclair. For those of you who don’t know – probably most, especially if you don’t live in Germany – John Sinclair is a “ghost hunter” character of a German horror pulp magazine series.

I remembered the series from when I was a kid. I never read any of it myself, but I do remember the cover, the “John Sinclair” logo, and I think some kids in my school read it. So, it being a boring time of the year, I decided to launch the good old peer to peer clients, and see if I can find a sample issue. And lo and behold, I was surprisingly successful. The download didn’t even take very long, I guess not many people are queuing up.

I read a few pages, and the quality of the writing is what you expect – pretty horrible (no pun intended). But what amazed me was how many of the works were available. I quickly did a search on Google, and came up with some very interesting information.

John Sinclair is written by one Jason Dark, a pen name of Helmut Rellergerd. Supposedly, he has written most of the John Sinclair books himself, with some exceptions especially during the early days when the editors did not believe that he could keep up with a weekly publishing schedule.

What’s so amazing is that since the first John Sinclair book, over 1400 books have been published. The common format is a 90-100 pages weekly magazine, but there are also longer novels (which may or may not be included in the 1400 books figure, I think they are). Rellergerds schedule is to write 30 pages per day, on an old mechanical typewriter. He has never visited any of the locations his stories are set at, and he gets most of his inspiration from various books dealing with the occult.

I am pretty convinced I could create stories of the same “quality”, the big question is, would I want to? The articles I found quoted Rellergerd as being paid 2500 DM (1250 Euro) per book in 1998, which adds up for a decent monthly salary, although the frantic pace is probably a killer.

The motivation cannot be artistic in nature either, although the books do sell (a quote of 200 million copies sold in the past 25 years), and there is some strange fascination of such huge series.

At any rate, I found these numbers quite impressive. And who knows, maybe some day I will lock myself away for a vacation and see if I can manage 30 pages a day, and if so, how horrible (again, no pun intended) my results will be.

I don’t celebrate Christian pseudo-religious holidays, but merry xmas anyway folks; I hope you stomachs are filled and your loot is plentiful. And thanks for not bothering me with this commercialized holiday.

As suddenly as the wave of strange ICQ contacts began, it has ended again. I haven’t had new contacts in a while. Now, if someone can finally explain what exactly happened there, I’d be grateful.

By the way, the ICQ feature “Authorization required” seems to be client-side only in some way. When I installed the official client to check for any changes, I used the opportunity to restrict adding me to people’s contact lists. But later, people were still able to add me. So either my change had no effect, or GAIM somehow resets the setting.

As you can see, I have updated the Green Rhodes Theme on this site. I have cleaned it up considerably. It’s not yet done… but it’s much closer to something that I’d dare release to the public.

It’s not quite feature complete yet, but if you find anything that is an obvious bug, please post a comment or contact me directly.

A US federal court has decided that Intelligent Design may not be taught in school. Judge John Jones ruled that “Intelligent Design” violates the constitutional separation of church and state. Some choice quotes as reported by the BBC:

“It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.” he said.

“We find that the secular purposes claimed by the board amount to a pretext for the board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom.”

Nice to have some good news for a change.