After I heard the F-5 fighter jets yesterday twice in the city I decided to got to the banks of the Elbe to see, if I can fetch a look. It was a sunny day, so I was in no hurry. But after 45 minutes waiting I decided to leave, without spotting the planes. On the news I discovered that the plan was stripped-down due to some complaints. Maybe tomorrow I'll have some luck

But the time was not wasted at all. I took some pictures of boats sailing to the St. Pauli Landungsbrücken. Some guys deployed their mobile DJ station also, so I enjoyed some chilly electro beats too.

After nine years and five month it wouldn't be nice of me to leave without a notice and there a quite a lot a very nice people. But in a couple of days I have to consider me as alumni. But this has benefits too. On System Administrator Appreciation Day there will be plenty of topics to talk about.

So what to do in the next couple of days? Now I am sitting here at home on my computer and blogging. But this won't last until the 2 February when I am starting my new job at scoyo. I am pretty exited and not even in a mood for a vacation. On top of it, the January in my old job was strange because nobody had real work for me to do. Okay that's not quite correct, but if you are used to have a very full inbox and a very noisy telephone, it is quite strange if the telephone doesn't ring anymore.

So I decided to push things a little bit at a small project which I started a couple of month ago. It's making quite some progress at this moment, and I am pretty confident that I have some stuff for more blog entries.

Parallel I am working on my Actionscript and Flex skills. It's quite nice but I am desperately looking for an example or application which really challenges me. It's quite a little bit academic at the moment.

After nine years and four month at SinnerSchrader I am pretty nervous how this will be. It was my first employment after I graduated at the Fachhochschule Wedel. Hell I will really miss some of the boys and girls! But I am still convinced that this is the time for me to move on.

One of these "new skills" I am preparing is Adobe Flex, which is a framework to create rich clients for the internet based on the Adobe Flashplayer.
Quite an intresting and well designed piece of Software. This is still my first impression I'm pretty sure I will discover some very ugly facets later. I already ran about some bugs with the HTTPService which prevented my from setting the "User-Agent" header on a HTTP GET request. Damn I am demanding I know
But the WoW Armory refused to return pure XML until I pretend to be the Firefox 2.x Browser. WoW Armory is also a pretty interesting piece of software. It offers the facilities to query WoW Characters, Guilds or Items via the Web. If you are using a Firefox browser the WoW Armory returns only a XML which will be rendered with a XSLT style sheet. All the other Browser will get an "interesting" HTML page. Maybe I am blogging about this later.

One last thing left to do for 2009:

Wie man so schön in Deutschland sagt: Einen Guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!

Last weekend I took three days off, bought my copy of World of Warcraft - Wrath of the Lich King and locked up the door. After a very long Weekend my Character Whitewolf is now level 78 (50% to level 79).

This is pretty much at the maximum I expected. Level 75 would have been a satisfactory achievement but 78(.5) is quite outstanding. Especially if you take into account, that I restarted playing World of Warcraft just 10 to 12 weeks ago.

My special congratulations to out fast leveling guys which made couple of realm first Level 80 achievements (Gnome, Night Elf, Human, Draenei, Warlock and Hunter) - So grats to DasOpossum, Pepi, Hamzu and Hikaru. But great thanks and respect to all of my guild mates which are doing a great job leveling their characters and preparing to raid again. As far as I know the first 10 person raid instances have already been cleared.

Special thanks to Dashina for leveling most of the time with me

Greetings to all the Blizzard folks, you made an awesome new expansion! Keep improving the quest mechanics. There are very cool quests now. But also improve the moral standards of your quests. Torturing prisoners or stealing babies of some poor creatures is not a role model for young people in my opinion.

I am leaving now for work and trying to get level 80 this week, wish me luck

But I already spent a little time on playing around with Tapestry 5 on my little project. Quit a nice piece of software, but quite some hurdles to get into it. The trivial examples work quite well but I still have some troubles getting my ideas working. But I guess my years of experience are standing in my way now, because I am quite aware of what I am wanting to achieve ...

Maybe this week I have some time to investigate Tapestry 5 more in detail.

The weather is fine and I was lazy in the last week - too many web 2.0 stuff , so I am now taking a run around my hometown Finkenwerder which is a district of the nice city of Hamburg.

Aber um es etwas interessanter zu machen werde ich das Ganze wohl in englischer Sprache abfassen. Da ist die Zielgruppe einfach größer, werden halt vornehmlich technische Themen werden. But I guess there may be some german posts as well ...