BBC News collected this funny overview of news in 2006.

I like #43, #48 while #58 is scary ;). Oh, and #64 could be interesting for Canadians, I heard about several incidents with bears.

We found this bottle of “Hohnsteiner Trinkbranntwein” in an old cupboard behind tons of old computer stuff at our chair. The findings at this university are really interesting. This stuff was produced in the former GDR and is therewith at least 15 years old. But we think that it’s much much older – at least 20 years. It was obviously presented to one of our predecessing assistants (the price had been removed); I’m wondering who passed an exam “eventually” ;-). Anyway, we used it (aehem tried to) to prepare ourselfes for a clubbing night :). This stuff tastes like a mixture between gasoline and medicine – awful. We mixed it with cola (yes, this unhealthy fructose poison) and it worked fine. Our good old GDR stuff is still working – kind of.

PS: the stuff is gone now – I killed the remainder and another bottle of Vodka with some russian friends yesterday, and we realized that it tastes so much better when it’s cooled 🙂

Especially in Germany! I just realized that some nice little laws have been passed without much involvement of the public. I had to read it in a swiss blog where the author was worried about his “Germanic neighbors”. Let’s see – a central shared database (shared between police, toll, military police, BND (our secret service) and many more agencies) has been ratified by CDU/SPD at December 1st. It’s interesting, that this file seems to ignore the separation between all those agencies that is stated in our constitution. Who said to respect the constitution – just ignore it and see what happens.

The contents of this file are also pretty interesting. It’s actually called “anti-terror-file” (of course) and contains all necessary information about all citizens to prevent terrorism (of course), as e.g., (see wikipedia for details):

1. membership in terroristic organizations
2. ownership of weapons
3. telecommunication and internet data
4. bank account information and bank locks
5. education, job information, place of work
6. family situation, religion
7. lost ids or passports
8. travel information

Pretty interesting – huh? It scares me that somebody tries to collect all this data about me – and it is even more scary that they do this officially (and force e.g., travel agencies to provide this information)!

A second interesting, and pretty much Orwell-like news, is that our nice minister of the interior plans to introduce “virtual home raids“. This means that the police should be allowed to break into home PCs and steal data. Interesting enough, this is only an addition to another law that has been passed which actually allows a federal agency (Bundesverfassungsschutz) to access data in harddrives on virtually every PC (including home systems) without notifying the owner. Somebody sued against this law, we’ll see how it goes.

I’m actually currently more worried about the databases then about terrorism in Germany (do you remember the last “terrorist activity” here?).

When I first saw one of those key-less entry pads, I wondered how secure they are :). Now I know – no security at all. It’s like the really stupid IR-controlled keylock I had at my Renault Clio that could be opened by every “universal remote control”. But I’ve only seen those key-less pads in the US yet.

I decided spontaneously to cook something nice today to celebrate the third Advent. This time, I tried another one of a very good friend’s recipies. It was splendid – thanks! The results are banned to my blog:

The first stage – the chicken simmering in its own liquid 😉

Stage 2 – after adding all ingredients *hmmm*

The very last stage – serving. It was gone shortly after that!

Hi, this is my first post – I added a photo gallery with images from Helsinki (okok, I’ve been there a couple of years ago, but it worked as a test-gallery). We’ll see how this blogging stuff goes 😉