musings of a neurotic mind

when you are in contact with certain people via IM daily so that they become part of your life and suddenly one day they are not online and have not told you beforehand that… it’s strange. i have a very good friend who lives a few hundred kilometers away and we IM daily. it’s a part of my routine, getting up, getting online, saying “morgaehn” to him and starting my “workday”. he is always there for me, especially when i am writing i can ask him questions about the new german spelling and stuff. apart from that he’s a real pillar of support. it happened in the past that he was offline for a week (vacation) or for a few days (hardware failure) but either he told me beforehand or phoned me telling his computer won’t boot up. so what i want to say: if he is offline without an explanation something bad has happened.
i knew he would be offline this friday because he had some work to do at university. no need to worry, he’ll be online in the evening. well, when i went offline yesterday (around 10 pm) he hasn’t shown up. maybe he missed a bus or the train was late. however, since he didn’t turn up by afternoon today i knew something was wrong. i was right. i gave him a call and his grandma told me that he had a seizure yesterday and is now in hospital! OMG! now that’s bad news indeed. i hope he’ll get well soon because the summer semester at university has just started…

i’ve been wondering: is there something wrong with my blog since i upgraded to wp 1.5? i haven’t been getting any comments lately… are you guys still reading me? or are you simply busy?

well, yesterday was the day i have been waiting for 2.5 years: i went to the copyshop and had my phd thesis printed. i need to hand in five copies and i cannot print 228 pages with my humble ink jet printer. this needs to look professional hence my trip to the copyshop. well, although i knew the shop is sort of “self-service” i didn’t expect to spend almost the entire afternoon there. why? i needed to print the 22 pages containing the screenshots of the movies with the color laser printer and leave them out when printing the text-only portions. that resulted in a huge “sorting pages” orgy. however, after 3.5 hours of happy pages sorting and checking if they are all in the right order i was finally done. and sort of proud, you know, that are fruits of my work from the past 2.5 years. it’s a good feeling for sure.

it’s been sort of a busy week. not that busy as the recent one with the harddisk failure, but still… i “spiced up” the conclusion a bit, adding some aspects and making it smoother to read. well, i am going to have it bound and printed next week. finally!

yeah, i have to admit it, i have been playing some WoW this week as well. it’s quite an ambivalent experience now. sometimes you feel great, almost invincible after having slayed several mobs and sometimes you really hate the game, like when you die at the last elite mob before getting to the boss in an “instance” (special elite dungeon). oh well, it’s just a game…

life is back to normal now after all the frenzy regarding my defective harddisk. and i guess my alter ego, my char in azeroth has settled down a bit as well. the first ten or fifteen levels are always a bit hectic because you want to do as much quests as far as possible to level up quickly. having played the beta turned out to be quite useful because i do not have to look for the NPC or mobs — i already know where they are. that means by playing one or two hours a day i still make good progress.

on a complete different note, i am going to bring my thesis to the copyshop next week and have it printed. i am making the finishing touches (mostly formatting issues) this week and will spice up the conclusion a little bit on the weekend, as my supervisor suggested. well, at least i can really see the end of this project coming…

yet another step ahead in the evolution of the best blog publishing system around. wordpress 1.5 was released this week and now i updated my blog to it as well. the update process itself was smooth as silk. however, they changed something in the template system and i will have to convert my custom theme to it.

yep, i am back in azeroth. it’s strangely relaxing to spend a few hours there, roaming the landscape, enjoying the scenery and also fighting some mobs…
so i divide my time now making the finishing touches (i.e. formatting and stuff) on my thesis and playing World of Warcraft…

being paranoid as always i got a second new harddisk drive to avoid further impending desasters. i need to make some final formatting of my PhD thesis before i have it printed. plus — you may have guessed it — World of Warcraft is expected to arrive at my doorstep these days. so i got the system up and running on the two brand new harddisks today. it’s good to restore a fresh “image” of windows xp from time to time anyway…
np: Edguy - Painting on the Wall (Live at Paris)

seems like life is generally quite busy right now. i did not plan to drive to klagenfurt (again) to fetch my “approved” phd thesis from the secretary’s office until tuesday or wednesday. but life’s full of surprises (or so they say) and as a result i found myself in the car heading towards klagenfurt this afternoon… for those of you waiting for the pictures from last week to show up on flickr: i am working on it, so please bear with me!

well, here’s just a short status update: thanks to my backups on CD/DVD i was able to restore most of the data lost on the defective hdd. getting a new harddisk drive was - however - a lot more difficult. thanks to some lack of communication (or plain lazyness) i had to make several phonecalls to trace the package containing my new drive and drive in the end to a “depot” to get it… but i got it and that’s what matters. yesterday was the busiest friday in months! now that things have calmed down a bit i am starting to realize that i sort of miss my “life” in Azeroth… i would be nice to spend an hour or so there…

today something rather unfortunate happened when i turned on the computer: my second hard disk drive had died. it didn’t crash or made strange noises, nope, it died silently and is no longer recognized neither by the BIOS nor the maxtor diagnosis tool. well, that sucks of course because the drive contained all my personal data like documents, images, mp3s and other stuff. luckily i did my last backup at christmas so not too much is actually lost and — being paranoid as always — my phd thesis is save and sound on the server overseas. somehow i anticipated that to happen because the drive in question was manufactured in 2002. it’s not the first and not the last time a hdd failed.