General

I have been blogging at this location for quite a while. My first entry here was made on September 25, 2005. But I have been blogging before. But soon all this will be deleted. I am planning to shutdown this domain and everything located here.

But no worries, I moved my blog already to its new location: http://springmeier.org/blog.

So please update your bookmarks, references and feed readers.

And yes, the new blog does not look as pretty as this one, but I am redoing the design from scratch. But oh well, I shall improve it over the time.

PS: I am looking for a new room to rent in Tuebingen. Let me know if you know something.

Today I spent some time to get an overview over my personal finance. Basically I wanted to find out where I have all my money and how much of it goes how frequently where. Years ago, it was easy to tell: Either the money was in my wallet or in my savings account. Then I got older and got a checking account as well. Then a long term savings contract. Oh, shall not forget my credit card. Then another savings account for keep the monthly deposits for the university fees separate. And then there are bunch of web services that are a lot easier to use (or only to use) when you deposit money with them: VoIP telephony, printing stamps... In short: I needed to have an overview to structure my income and to see from what account which payments are deducted.

Afew hours later, I was finally finished (layouting can take quite a while). I even have a nice flowchart to visualize is all. It got 24 items on it.

But after all, I am still a poor student. At least now I know where my money is (not).

If anyone would like to have one, I have a few extra organ donation cards here. Just contact me if you want one.

Wearing this shirt is however optional.

Almost a year ago, I reached post 200. Now I am counting 400 posts here. No, I am not going to start quality vs. quantity debate here. :p

Last weekend I made an effort to throw away some of my shirts. At times, I am quite bad at throwing things away, but I had t-shirts that I did not wear for ages - not even at home on a lazy day. Some of these shirts were up to 10 years old and just kept for sentimental value. Oh well, photographed them to have a reminder and then threw them out.



After that, I put all my shirts back... and guess what: Still not enough space left to keep them all in one place. Shall throw out some more in the upcoming weeks.

Just sold an article on Ebay for about 10 Euro. The weird thing is: I tried to sell this one three times already before I went to Taiwan. No one wanted it for even 1 Euro at that time. Oh well, I shall not complain.

A lot was going the last few days, so here is a small wrap up. After finding out that mail was apparently deliberately not being delivered to me, I called up the service of the postal comapny and registered my complaint with them. But there would be no feedback to me unless I complain a second, only then a written statement will be issued. So I have been thinking a lot about hoe many letters might have gone missing and who I should be contacting about all this. Really a headache. At least today I got the documents from C.-Bank. And I know of two other non-commercial mailings that should be here tomorrow or the day after. On the one hand I do not want to miss these, but on the other hand if one of them is not being delivered, I would have a reason to get a written statement from the postal service. It kind of bugs me that there is will not be an official reply about the reasons of the initial returned letters.

The night before yesterday I also had been sleeping very little, only about two hours and I had to return to Bosch again for my first day of work. Luckily this day was still a bit slow settling back in can getting aquainted with my new and old responsibilities. At least now I get a discounted lunch there.

Then in order to unclutter my life a little more, I try everyday to put two things online on eBay and try to sell them there. I have a lot things accumulated and a lot of books that I haven't looked at for years. And even if I get just one Euro out of these things, I will be happy. Especially all the books that are difficult to sell. But I suppose the books that still have some value are better sold on Amazon. On eBay only the auctions that start at 1 Euro are free to set up, so you run the risk to sell your book for only 1 Euro. On Amazon you can set any price and it is a lot easier to set up than eBay, but they do charge a higher commission for their services. So if you have the time and do not want to risk selling your stuff too cheap, it is better to choose Amazon.

And since it is cold, wet, cold and slippery outside and thanks to my foot, going for a run to exercise is a bit risky for me these days. I have become an even greater sloth. Well, in order to something about, I am trying the training schedules from
Hundredpushups.com and Twohundredsitups.com. Maybe I can stick to this and put a badge or two on my blog in about 6 weeks. Wish my room had a little more space though. Besides the bed, there is not much space to get down and do the exercises...

Oh well, time to sleep, got classes this weekend again.

Sometimes it just happens that a letter cannot be delivered. But over the last weeks, I got more and more feedback that not all letters were delivered to me, but instead returned to the sender. At first it was a document from the DAAD, which then was simply sent to Muenster. The I have been waiting for messages that I requested from O2, but I put the blame on their customer service which I am not happy about. Then I got a call from C.-Bank that documents could not be delivered to me but were returned instead. And today I see in my account-statement that D.-Bank has been trying to find out my new address and is charging me 14 Euro for that. Even though that they have my phone and email on file and could have simply asked. No, they did not find out my new address. And then there is the postcard of a friend from Taiwan which has yet to reach me.

Wonder how many other letters/stuff I did not get. At least it is somewhat comforting that these mailings were returned and not dumped or stolen.

Not happy.

Many many years ago, yes indeed, by now it is a long time ago, I have been working in Disney World in Florida. While the job itself was rather boring, I always enjoyed the daily parade called "Tapestry of Nations" and it was always a good break to do crowd control to get away form the boring routine in the shops where I was selling merchandise otherwise.

Sadly, it was not the time of digital cameras and camcorders back then, but slowly some people are even digitizing their old videos and put them online.

Tapestry of Nations

Of course these videos cannot really capture the whole atmosphere of the performances back then. But at least for those that have been working or performing there, they bring back a lot of memories and good moods.

Besides the parade, there was also big fireworks show called "Illuminations - Reflections of Earth". Since then each and every New Year's firework has been kinda spoiled for me.

Illuminations - Part 1

Illuminations - Part 2

Over the last two months I could observe an unusual high number of visitors to my blog from the USA. It turned out that the my picture of my florida driver's license made it on the first page of the related google picture search. Even though i blurred out the license number before, I felt a bit uneasy about displaying my name together with my old address there. Maybe I am just a bit paranoid, maybe it is better to be more cautious. At least now it is a little more anonymous.