Timo Heuers Weblog

I will be travelling to Offenburg at the end of April for attending BarCampOffenburg. Offenburg is really close to the French-German border. So I decided to attend BarCamp on Saturday (the whole day) and half of Sunday. Sunday morning I’ll be going to Strasbourg and pass the border by train (30 minutes from Offenburg).

I want to ask for suggestions. What is worth seeing and worth visiting in Strasbourg, France? Maybe you know some insider tips?

I published a comment at planet sab - a friend’s blog - about why I don’t use Friendfeed and social life aggregators. Also read his thoughts about Friendfeed.
I tried to explain my opinion as well as possible. That’s what I wrote (with some corrected mistakes):

I don’t use it, by the way. I remember me registering but can’t find any emails from them. But even if, I wouldn’t use it. I think it’s just more needless information. I don’t want to know, if someone listened to something on Last.fm. People who are alway listen to music when they are on PC generate too much entries about their music taste. Don’t want to know that! I don’t want to know, what they blogged about — I subsribed to enough RSS feeds which show me.

I know, Web 2.0 is about losing privacy, but a place where every of my online activities is aggregated is not the right place for me, sorry. Maybe the Lidl bosses should just add the Friendfeeds of their employees (if they had one, of course). Would be cheaper than spying.

I tried to fill Jaiku with Twitter messages, Last.fm songs and blog posts. And of course I got and still get clicks on new posts. But I don’t want my online life on a single place — especially when it’s public for everyone (don’t know if you can hide it, but than there is again no need for me to register).

Note: I even know people with a stalker!

Any comments?

I am now a subscriber of taz for some days and I more and more like this left-winged alternative paper. Their style of writing is funny but also serious enough.

To teach you something about what’s going on in Germany today (I promoise, today will be the only day I’m doing this…), I have to start with the Transrapid, a German promosing high-technology in the railway sector. The Bundesland “State of Bavaria” ordered one of this Transrapids (trains) for a new railway line between Munich airport and central station. But the contract was cancelled today because the costs went into ad infinitum (from 1.6 billion to 3.1 billion) and Bavaria cancelled the contract.

The second red hot topic in Germany is the Lidl treatment of staff. You will find some more inforation here:

In March 2008 the German news magazine Der Stern came up with a cover story reporting systematic surveillance of Lidl workers, including most intimate details of their private affairs.

Yesterday we went to my grandma on the mother’s side and had some muffins. She just got discharged from hospital, so she is a little bit out of sorts.

Today we are invited to my paternal grandma: some meatloaf, eating cake, drinking coffee - you know.

Oh, and she has the gold bunny — just like every year:

I am watching more and more movies on iTunes with my US account. I think renting movies, watching and giving them back has never been easier for me. I tried to rent movies in a “classic” video library, but they are more expensive and it’s more difficult for me to bring them back. And there is no good video library nearly.

I pay approx. 2,60 euros per movie and 2 euros for a TV episode.

The main argument for me to rent movies in English is to improve my language skills. You may have noticed that I have some problems with sentence constructions and deeper knowledge in English. I want to improve and I think this is a good way to do so.

I love NCIS and I learned a lot from them. I bought eight episodes on iTunes and some more on DVD and want to get even more. And I rented “Ratatouille” as my first movie and just finished “Evan Almighty” yesterday. Both of them were nice, I can really recommend it!

To finish this article I promise to watch more movies in English. The iTunes rentals as well as some of my DVDs — I have a big collection of movies at home.

I bought a Flickr Pro account some days ago and started uploading all my photos to Flickr. The main reason to switch and pay money for stuff like creating unlimited sets / collections and storage was the FlickrExport for iPhoto, which I am using a lot since I semi-switched (still own a Desktop PC with Win) to Mac OS X. I am tagging a lot on iPhoto so I needed something, where also the tags are exported. When I was using Cologne-based sevenload before, I had to tag the pictures again. This was dawle! So I decided to switch with all of the important photos. I have a bunch of photos on my Desktop PC which are not tagged by iPhoto, so I tagged them on Flickr. Was fun. I already renamed them and gave them a name that sounds better than 100_002 or so.

You will find the photos here. I did not only upload photos about my conference appearences. There are sets about my day trip to Rødby, Denmark (where I ate the best french fries in my life, by the way) or Gargnano, Italy.

This week I spent some hours in East-German city Leipzig for Lunch 2.0. After we ate, talked and shared thoughts, Stefan Oßwald and I were discovering this interesting city. Here are some of the pictures I took:

When the Lunch 2.0 was over, we went to some of Leipzig’s sights, for example the Volkerschlachtdenkmal, which is the largest monument in Europe:

Some more pictures are at my sevenload set.

I will be in Leipzig again in May for BarCamp.

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