ByteLabs

My diploma thesis has been published as book.

Amongst many other bookstores I found these quite cool:

• Buecher.de has a nice page about it.

• Amazon.com and Amazon.de has it as well.

It took a while but finally the video of Tim Berners Lee lecture about ‘The Semantic Web’ which he held at Edinburgh University last year has been put on the web:

• http://media.inf.ed.ac.uk/lectures/.

Thanks Michael for mailing the link to me.

A little while ago I had the honour to get an invitation to Marios’s birthday party in Edinburgh.

It took a while for the pictures and videos to get online but finally they are here so enjoy and have fun watching them!

Cheers and greetings to Edinburgh!

On Friday morning the doorbell rang and as expected Julie and Catherine arrived from London to stay at our flat here in Edinburgh and do some sightseeing. Well, what I did not suspect was that also Christina has secretely joined them and surprised me with her visit. It really was a big surprise and a very nice one indeed!

We spent a very relaxing weekend, strolled through town, went to the movies and were served delicious food as you can tell by looking at the picture. So thank you guys for your pleasent visit!

On the 16th of May I wrote my last exam for the 05/06 university year. The past 4 to 5 weeks were quite filled up with constant studying but in the end it payed all off and it is a very good feeling to have it all done!

The end of my Edinburgh adventure is also slowly approaching and it is about time to get ready to pack up and leave for good. But who knows, maybe I will be back sooner or later. After all, I have to admit that this year has really been an outstanding one and it was definitely the right decision to come to the University of Edinburgh.

Well, but another adventure already lies ahead – our New York trip! Soon, we – that is Christina and I – will leave from London and visit friends in New York and get to see the ‘Big Apple’. This will surely be very exciting and adventerous and of course there will be some photographic coverage for you to enjoy :-)

Well, this is not a post about a nice and wonderful trip but just something to confirm that I am not dead – just very busy. I have many many exams coming up and plan to make them all and achieve the best possible grade on them – thus all I do right now is study, study, study…. On the 16th of May – juhuu – this situation will drastically improve since that is the day of my last exam :-)

Also make sure to check out the newest layout @ www.fire-graphics.org, it is awesome! Maybe one thing you didn’t know about that page is that it exists for quite a while now, offering graphics, tutorials, layouts etc. for FREE to the web community. Another interesting page is the past layouts page, which gives an overview of the looks and feels of the various fire-graphics layouts.

Early Monday morning (5 o’clock), we got up and had a massive british breakfast to keep us going all day. First we went to the Edinburgh bus station where we took a bus to Glasgow. Then we went to the Glasgow central train station where after some big confusion and error made by the train company we managed to miss our train. Well, it wasn’t so bad after all since the bus company paid for the taxi which got us to Adrossan harbour where we just missed our ferry by 5 minutes :( which meant we had to wait for 2.5 hours for the next one.

But after all we managed to cross the 11.5 mile channel between Arran and Scotland and promptly proceeded to the bus at Brodick which took us to our youth hostel in Lochranza, located at the very north of the island. During our 45 minute bus ride we even saw some seals.

After we arrived at the youth hostel we went for a short trip and discovered things nearby our hostel. Basically we saw and hunted many sheep – by the way sheep hunting is great fun – and discovered seals, deer and many interesting birds.

Afterwards we went back to the hostel to enjoy a large portion of pasta and pesto (our standard evening meal on Arran). We were pretty tired after the first day, and I think I was the first one who fell asleep at 9.30 p.m.

Initially we wanted to climb on the Goatfell but bad weather conditions made us change our minds on Tuesday. So we went around the Cock of Arran which turned out to be great fun and the right thing to do considering the bad weather. There are loads of pictures in the gallery from that trip.

On our last day we made a trip around the island with the bus, went to eat at a nice restaurant in Brodick and then started our journey home back to Edinburgh…(bye bye beautiful island)

Because the weather was really beautiful today, Ines, Michael and I went to Portobello Beach. But don’t let the sunshine fool you – it was actually quite cold. We collected tons of sea shells again and this time we even made some videos with our video camera.

Of course there are many more pictures in the gallery. Let’s just hope that the weather will be as good for our Arran Trip.

Today my sister Ines came to visit me over here in Edinburgh. The first thing we did of course was to fill our bellies with a delicious vegetarian meal. Yes you heard right – I made a meal with NO MEAT.

Afterwards we went down Princess Street and dropped by Starbucks since that was something Ines wanted to do. The one on Princess Street is really nice because it offers a wonderful view of the Edinburgh Castle.

We also made some pictures of todays adventures. On monday we are goig to Arran Island for 3 days – that will certainly be a cool adventure. So stay tuned….

The past few days Christina visited me up here in Edinburgh. It was really nice!!

On the first day we went to The Jazz Bar only to discover that they had a spanish night. But we were not too disappointed since the performance was really OK.

We also spent one day visiting almost all stores on Princess Street and then headed over to Calton Hill, which is located at the very end of Princess Street and offers stunning views over the town of Edinburgh.

On Sunday Christina took me out to eat to The Pizza Express, it was very delicious. And then, on Monday, we finally went to Inverness, in order to go see Loch Ness and Nessie. It was a really pretty trip and we really had luck with the weather too, as you can tell by looking at these pictures and videos.

On Wednesday we went to Portobello Beach again to enjoy a wonderfull beach and strong winds :). In order to round up the wonderful day, we went to the “White Heart Inn” – one of my favourite pubs in Edinburgh – in the evening.