Still here
This is the 6th posting in this year now. My output so far is quite below of what I expected from myself. While I blame stress and lack of time for that until the beginning of July, there should have been some time for an update since then. So the only thing preventing postings has been my own lazyness... Ah well...
Ok, what's changed or noteworthy in the last months? Maybe the most important thing for me personally is that I've purchased a new (used) car. I've been passively looking for potential new cars for quite some time now although I've been very pleased and happy with my car so far. But this time the costs for the required servicing and repairs approached almost 2k Euros without a guarantee that the costs will be lower for the next service intervals. So I decided to take the lemon, say goodbye to my old loyal and reliable companion and pick up something with lower regular costs. Welcome my new car, a blue Fiat Grande Punto 1.3 JTD Emotion with 90 HP. It's in excellent shape and I hope it'll be an as good escort as my previous Fiat which carried me over 180k km in the the almost exactly past 6 years.
The next noteworthy news is that this year I'm a contestant in the Zw�lfkampf which is organized by some friends. It is a series of twelve games where an overall winner is calculated over tracks of 4, 8 or all 12 games. The main event on Sep. 24/25th is preceded by some "sideevent" games in which I made a not too bad impression but they don't count for the finale ;)
Communication is the next topic. Back in May I purchased a new smartphone, the LG Optimus Speed (or P990 or LGOS/LG2X). While It worked for some weeks without a hitch at one day it began to show a very special defect where I could not place or receive calls when I'm registered in the 3G network of my provider. I borrowed some other SIM cards from different providers but the problem only exists with the network of mine. Since I'm denied service for it at my provider (it doesn't have this phone in its portfolio) I have to handle everything myself. Currently (yes, it's August now!) it's on its 4th trip to the LG service from which I hope it will eventually return completely replaced. The previous three times the device was only "serviced" and at one occassion the mainboard (without baseband module) and the camera module (wtf?) were replaced. Of course without effect. At the moment my seller and I are just hoping that LG just relents to sending me a new phone instead of useless servicing of the defect one.
On to the university stuff. Not much to report here, since the last exam in July and last hand-in also in July I pretty much left everything in a standby mode. But I'm warming up already as the next key-dates are approaching and there is still a bit of work to do, exams to prepare for and documents to hand in.
Some holiday-related stuff now. I took two weeks summer holiday at the end of July. Originally I planned to use that time to firstly do the car stuff and to finish building some concrete walls for a terrace behind the house. The car business took sadly longer than expected as my first seller let me down and sold the car to somebody other. I could get my hands on another one as you already read above and retrospectively this was a lucky coincidence as my first candidate car was not in an as good shape and more expensive. The wall works also could not be finished in these two weeks because the bricks we ordered took longer to deliver than planned and also it rained the whole two weeks but for two days.
And finally the work news. Project work in the company is running as usual with maybe some changes for me personally in the near future. But as it's not complete determined, this is all I'd like to say so far. After my holiday I returned in a modified team with three new people and it's still changing as soon one of our colleagues will change to another team and tomorrow we'll receive assistance with another new team member. Yeah, bit of change ;)
Well, that's it for now. I hope that I can raise my posting interval in the future again but I wouldn't bet on that as it didn't work in the past six months....
P.S.: Ah yes, I'm on Google+ too meanwhile. This time with my real name, those who know me are of course invited at any time to show me their presence ;)