Castles and Ruins
March 27, 2008 - Miscellaneous, Photography
Spent the easter holidays together with my girlfriend at her parents place in Rhineland-Palatinate or Rheinland-Pfalz as a proper German would call it. As Rhineland-Palatinate is Germany’s leading producer of wine we consumed a whole multi-colored galaxy of them. If I remember correctly that is, my memory might not be 100%ly correct on this.
All in all it was pretty nice and lots of fun albeit a bit exhausting with almost all relatives of my girlfriend around. I don’t think it would’ve been different with my relatives, though.
To escape the family for a couple of hours and to make the trip a tad more interesting we visited a couple of castles and ruins nearby although the weather wasn’t really encouraging: Cold, cloudy, rainy, snowy, everything but warm and sunny.
I uploaded some photos of the castles and ruins we visited to my gallery for anyone interested.
Books
March 26, 2008 - Books
Just realized that I haven’t written about my reading habits for a long time and that the Currently Reading section in the navigation was totally outdated with Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. I hope to be writing about a couple of the books I’ve been reading lately soon, for now just a few lines on Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages and an update to Currently Reading.
As already mentioned back in August I wasn’t so sure about reading Umberto Eco’s philosophical works and came to the conclusion that my scepticism proved me right, at least with this book. I didn’t even finish it as it was way too much input for me. Too many names and too many references I had to look up to keep track of what he’s talking about made it not really enjoyable. I’m sure that it’s interesting and enjoyable with solid knowledge of medieval art and artists but mine doesn’t seem to be solid enough.
Photography
March 12, 2008 - Photography
As already mentioned a couple of days ago I uploaded some of photos to my new photo gallery. For now it’s only some photos from mine and my girlfriend’s last summer vacation in Prague but I intend to add more in the future as I have them available.
That is not dead which can eternal lie…
March 10, 2008 - Games, Level Design
… and even with strange æons Quake will not die.
Kell, necros and Preach finally released Quoth 2 with loads of Quake goodness. New monsters, items and environmental features make up a nice release which was long overdue. Only checked into it for a couple of minutes as of yet but while doing so realized that there are some unfinished maps on my HDD, might be worth mapping a bit again. Especially with Willem releasing ToeTag there’s no good excuse not to map on my Mac anymore.
The Quoth 2 release fits the release of SleepwalkR’s SDL port of Fitzquake quite nicely. New content with Quoth and the most brilliant engine finally available on the Mac (and Linux) - it’s unbelievable how much love the good old Quake still gets. Huzzah!
Digital Versatile Discs
March 9, 2008 - Movies
Realized that I haven’t updated my DVD Collection for quite some time so I did that now.
To manage and display the DVDs I installed a small gallery tool for WordPress called NextGEN Gallery. It’s for from being as full featured as other galleries out there but it’s darn easy to use, integrates into WordPress nicely and does exactly what I need - after changing a couple of lines of code that is. I’m probably going to use the gallery for some photos later on, similar to Bal’s photo gallery just that I’m missing cool photos right now.
Last but not least I added the subdomain dvd.gomjabbar.de which simply gives you a list of all the DVDs I own in plain text. I hope this will be useful when standing in front of a couple of DVDs and not knowing whether or not I already own the ones I intend to buy. Next time it’s just a matter of grabbing the mobile phone, pointing it to dvd.gomjabbar.de, browsing the list and eventually buying loads of movie goodness.
World Domination: The Game
March 7, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games
The Washington Post had a pretty nice article on Diplomacy back in November 2004 which I was just pointed to. It’s really worth a read if you’re interested in learning more about the game or already know it.
I especially liked the following statement which is simply too true:
I would trust him with the payoff mortgage on my house — in cash. But I wouldn’t trust him to stay out of Belgium.
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