Later tonight, the webserver this blog (and a bunch of other sites) runs on will be migrated to a new, bigger server.

The main reason is that the old box ran out of RAM quite frequently lately (it is a virtual machine that has a flexible RAM limit). The cause of this was mainly the ever-increasing amount of spam, and in spite of the most recent counter-measures, the little VM wasn't able to cope with it any longer. The new server has a bigger CPU, twice as much RAM guaranteed, and other improved features that make me confident that the change is the right step.

For you, dear readers, this means you may experience a few problems loading our websites while we are performing the migration (sorry) but we'll try to keep it to a minimum. You'll be rewarded with an even faster, nicer, and obviously awesomer fredericiana.com later. Thanks for your patience!

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This is a meme I borrowed from Freya. It's a Google image search meme. Search for your answer for each one, and pick your favorite from the first 3 pages.

Feel free to pick it up if you like, and don't forget to trackback!

While Freya got a bunch of "naked chicks" in her search results (and neglected to include them, much to the dismay of her male readership), I got a bunch of muscular models that share my first name--who I conveniently chose not to display here either (sorry female readership :) ). Here we go:

Your first name:

Your middle name:

Your last name:

Your age:

A place you would like to visit:

Your favorite place to be:

The name of a past love:

Your college degree or concentration:

Your grandmother's first name:

Where you grew up:

Your childhood pet's name:

Your best friend's nickname:

Your first job:

Your favorite food:

Your favorite color:

What you're doing right now:

One of your bad habits:

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Since I filled up my Netflix queue on the weekend and they only ship DVDs on weekdays, my Netflix queue said

We'll send your first available movie on Monday.

all weekend long.

Now I just looked at the queue to see if it shipped, and now it says:

Uhm, Netflix, what's going on? I've heard rumors before that you stretch out DVD shippings in order to reduce the amount of DVDs per month and customer, but do you need to do so with a new customer and his first DVD?

Then again, maybe they haven't survived their huge shipping issues from last week quite yet, in spite of my entire queue saying "Availability: Now".

It depends on your individual definition of "now", after all.

Update: Interesting, Netflix sent me an email apologizing about the bad start of my membership, extending my free trial for a week. Well then.

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When I went to Giant Eagle earlier this week, I got a two DVDs from the Redbox DVD rental machine in front of the store, as I felt like watching a movie and they only charge 1 dollar plus tax a day, which is really cheap. Sadly, one of the DVDs was so badly scratched that my drive wouldn't even read it: After a few unsuccessful tries at spinning up the disc, it spit it right back out -- though my DVD player isn't even usually that picky about what it eats (I'll spare you the reference to Americans and their fast food).

Sure enough, I called customer service (1-800-REDBOX3, in case you were wondering) and they apologized, marked the disc as "to be removed from circulation" and gave me two codes for free rentals in return.

So I took back the discs, and got two new ones -- only to notice that one of them was, yet again, looking like somebody had used it as a coaster:

Though they gave me another replacement code, I decided to try something different to satisfy my urge for movies and TV shows: I signed up for Netflix.

The idea of finding a new movie in the mail box when I come home from work sounded appealing to me. So I already put 20 discs into the queue which, considering I have the 1-DVD-at-a-time-plan, will probably take ages to go through, but we'll see how it goes. Another cool feature is their "watch instantly" collection, but I may blog about that some other time.

I wonder what my readers use to get to their movies? Let me know in the comments.

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After I came back from Whistler, BC, I stopped by in Oregon, where I had the pleasure to be a groomsman at one of my best friends' wedding: Justin married his Karen.

It was a lot of fun, though I didn't imagine it being so complicated to get married in this country that you need to rehearse the day before. ;)

Of course, the other guys wanted to set me up to catch the garter, but I got miraculously saved. Needless to say, this is the 21^st century, so it's on youtube:

From my "exchange student" point of view, I have to say, this gave me much deeper insight into American society than any other event I attended here (and I've been in the US for a while). It is sad most exchange students have to miss out on this.

PS: I've officially worn enough pink that day to last me well through my twenties!

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There used to be a time when twitter.com spammers still made an effort to disguise the fact that they're, well... spammers:

Subtle, really!

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Well, greetings from Whistler, BC! It's raining, but sessions have started so we don't really hang out too much outside at the moment anyway. And while meals are outside, they are luckily in a tent. Phew.

Of course at lunch, I was stirring the salad dressing and promptly a round piece of glass at the bottom of the jar broke out and decided to flood my pants with what I believe was yummy while still in the jar. Always good to have a pair of spare pants.

I added some pictures to ipernity already, so go over there if you'd like to see what I took pictures of. I also wrote some code to import ipernity into summit.mozilla.org, where I hope it'll show up soon.

Enjoy!

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Yay, I am out and about for the Mozilla Summit 2008 in the beautiful Whistler, British Columbia, Canada.

It's going to be an exciting week with a lot of people I know and haven't seen in a long time, and there will be many new people to meet as well. I am looking forward to it!

Whistler itself is a breathtaking place, they say, so I am particularly thrilled that such a great place was picked for the event. I know at least one of my friends is jealous because he'd love to go mountain-biking there!

If you want to see what's going on at the Mozilla Summit, hop on over to summit.mozilla.org, a new mash-up site showing tons of media related to the summit. Soon it'll look much fuller than this:

I'll write again when I'm there :)

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Recently I got caught up in Wikipedia again, this times investigating the computer games of my youth :) One of them was Commander Keen, whose page sent me straight to the Dopefish.

Soon after I felt the urge to put a dopefish on a t-shirt. What do you think of that design?

Or, do you prefer this (possibly less obtrusive) version?

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Now it has happened: As an effect of the urgent need for a weekend, I registered with twitter. Only adding people I could think of easily, I am not "following" 37 people ;)

Of course, my twitter experience started all peachy right off the bat, by first giving me site errors:

  (hey, at least they are pretty)

... and then I noticed something weird about the times they show on every page:

"ungefähr 1 Stunde ago from web..." ... is that... Germenglish? Englerman?

But let's not be discouraged. They probably just started their announced maintenance window four hours early ;)

Anyone else think I forgot to "follow" them on twitter? Leave a comment.

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