Timo Heuers Weblog

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.

If you are coming to CeBIT and not a XING member, just comment here and we’ll send you more information soon.
If you are a member, attend through our XING Event. https://www.xing.com/app/events?op=detail;id=186174

The second German Girl Geek Dinner, organized by the (probably) most geeky girl in Germany, called Nicole Simon, will take place February 12th in Hamburg. Special guest will be Ian Forrester, who is working for BBC. He is in Hamburg for Social Media Forum.

If you want to attend, you can comment the blog posting or attend through the XING event. The special thing with Girl Geek Dinners is: if you are female, you can attend without obstacles/barriers, but if you are male, you’ll need to be invited to the event by a girl.

By the way, I can’t attend. School sucks, I know. Just some months left and I’ll be free!

If you are attending CeBIT next month, I have a special recommendation for you: StartupWeekend.

Cem Basman wants to found a company in one week. Not enough, he also wants to go public and to put to the NYSE (yes, New York Stock Exchange!) in this week. Cem is one of this types of guys, which earn much of respect, because of their great ideas and how they going to realize it (and I know, Cem will realize the plan of going to NYSE with this startup founded in just one week).

First StartupWeekend in Germany took place in Hamburg last year. The idea is to found, create and (trying) to be in beta in one weekend! That needs a lot of people, of course. First thing is to collect possible ideas for the new startup. Second step is to vote for the best idea and then they are going to realize the idea in one weekend!

I am sad, I didn’t attend the Hamburg StartupWeekend, by the way.

Now Cem and his companion Jason were invited to do the second one in Hannover at CeBIT. Of course they agreed and blogged about it. But there are also some negative comments writing that Cem’s goal is to go public to the stock exchange. Is that really the beginning of a new bubble? I don’t think so. It’s just an idea which enthuast people want to realize. It’s a dream, nut the beginning of bubble 2.0.

Will be there, if they need someone with some journalistic knowledge, contacts and some experiences in PR (not much, I know, but I am improving),

It’s true, Microsoft will be acquiring Yahoo! (one of Google’s strongest competitors) to be the number one in the online sector. German online magazine SPIEGEL Online says, the money amount for Yahoo! will be 31 dollar per stock, which will be 44,6 billion dollar at all.

I am not amused about the deal, because I think, Microsoft’s power will be too strong after they ate Yahoo. We know Google and what they are able to do if they want. We know Microsoft and I guess they can be much more evil than we think.

I attended WordCamp in Hamburg, Germany last weekend. Was really cool, I made lots of new contacts and met some friends. Nicole Simon, who is a famous female German blogger (she’s also famous because of her English blog) hold a session about multilingualism and how to blog multi lingual with WordPress. She talked much about do’s and doent’s.

I blogged a summary in German which I made with my MacBook while listening to Nicole. She said, she’ll be focused on the English language in 2008 — both, blogging and twittering.

Most of Germans are “integrated” into the German blogosphere and know the tools the Germans use (Rivva instead of Techmeme, XING and not LinkedIn) and so it’s difficult to learn and use new services. You have to start at zero!

Nicole’s tips to improve English: listening to podcasts, watching TV shows, reading blogs, following and reading some English Twitter and listening to audio books!

If you want to know more about it, Loic Le Meur posted some tips two years ago.