Wie passend (angesichts der jüngsten Kritik an den Amerikanischen Waffengesetzen): Ein Buch namens "Armed America", Portraits von Amerikanern mit ihren Waffen.

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XO-1, the OLPC laptopAufgrund der ganz hervorragenden Arbeit meiner (ehemaligen) Kollegen Justin und Mike für das One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Projekt hat Real Networks (die Hersteller des "Real Player") dem OSU Open Source Lab eine Finanzspritze von 500.000 US-Dollar gegeben.

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I linked to this blog before, but now there are 15 common American prejudices about Germany on there that you might want to read.

It's funny how right the author is. And don't worry, you shouldn't feel bad if you get disillusioned about some totally bogus things -- because quite a handful of them are also dead on. And haven't you always wanted to know which ones are which?

By the way: Happy Easter holiday everybody. Don't feel too bad that we also have Monday off here :)

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Frohe Ostern allerseits. Passt aber auf, dass Ihr Euch beim Eiersuchen nicht verletzt:

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United Boeing 767 at San Francisco AirportDa bin ich wieder, zurück in Deutschland! Der Flug war nur ein wenig verspätet, hat mich aber sicher ans Ziel gebracht. (Ein paar Fotos gibts hier, und diesmal ist das Flugzeug rechts wirklich eines, in dem ich geflogen bin!)

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Alright, my bags are packed and I am about to leave... tomorrow morning. Rumor has it it's snowy in Germany which feels kind of unreal considering how sunny the Bay Area is at the moment.

Lufthansa AirbusJust so I know what's expecting me in Germany (in case I forgot), Jean Pierre sent me a link to 20 things to keep in mind when visiting Germany, a quite funny list of things you might (well, you will) stumble across when you make it to my home country.

Things I am looking forward to? The food. The beer, obviously. Spring and summer. Some of my classes. Making more music again (my trumpet really does want to get played more often than recently!). German folk festivals. That the price on the shelves is actually what I have to pay. The metric system. Buildings with walls that actually deserve the name. Public transportation that works. The autobahn and people who know how to drive stick (no offense ;) ).

Things I am not looking forward to? The cold weather! Some of my classes! Gas prices. Closed stores on Sundays. Bad customer service, at times. Kind of a shortage on the "free wifi" front. Dubbed TV shows. 19 % sales tax.

As you see, I am all set -- except for that "proud to be an American" t-shirt morgamic wanted to get me, of course :) Cheers!

(The picture is CC-licensed by caribb on flickr, and it's purely symbolic: my plane(s) are not even going to be Airbuses)

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I really like this recent Mozilla poster:

Mozilla: Don’t hurt the web

(As far as I know) it first came up as a concept (see below) at the Firefox on-site meeting in Mountain View in November 2006, and because it's pretty irresistibly cute, we really couldn't let it catch dust in a drawer :)

Fligtar caught the presentation slide at the Firefox summit:

Don’t hurt the web, concept

Good job, Dave and the rest of the marketing team!

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Wenn es darum geht, die Zukunft vorherzusagen, wollen Zeitungen ja stets die ersten sein, und lehnen sich dabei schon mal gerne weiter aus dem Fenster als ihnen zuträglich wäre.

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Friday is approaching fast. It'll be my last day as an intern with the Mozilla Corporation!

Mozilla MascotIt was a fun and exciting time, and I learned a lot. Six months long, I was working full-time on the Remora (addons.mozilla.org version 3) project, and during my journey through the complete software development lifecycle I got to tackle quite a few tricky issues that turned out to require new and unique solutions that I really enjoyed inventing and implementing (to use morgamic's recent words: "things you can't google for"), and I am proud that part of all this now carries my signature (if you are interested, at the moment, that's something like 60.000 lines of code svn blames on me).

Yet for now, I have to go back to school and finish up my degree: After all, I want to become a "Diplom-Informationswirt" (that is, a Master's Degree in Information Engineering and Management), and that'll take me pretty much another four semesters.

I want to thank my fellow AMO web devs (morgamic, clouserw, shaver, sancus, fligtar and Cameron) for their (ongoing) work on the project, their efforts to get me integrated into the project and Mozilla in no time, and their constant valuable input on my work. Thanks to schrep, Mitchell, John and cbeard who did their very best to help me get the most out of my internship. Thanks to all the other employees who sparked my inspiration and expanded my horizons time and again in interesting conversations, presentations, etc. Thanks to dolske and faaborg who I never regretted to share a "cube" with. And last but not least to the countless others all over the Mozilla community who I got in contact with (and there were a lot!).

That being said, I'm not out of your hair yet ;)! Even after my return to the college campus, I'll stay on the Mozilla webdev team, and I'll keep contributing to Remora and other projects to come; only I'll be on IRC at slightly different times of day...

See you in Europe!

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Im Blog "Wortistik" geht es um deutsche Wortneuschöpfungen, und so wurde dort jüngst der "Klima-Nazi" aus einem Spiegel-Online-Artikel von Daniel Haas ("Elch-Test für Klima-Nazis) erwähnt.

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