over the last two days, two famous persons died.

the first, who died on the 4th of march, is gary gygax, one of the inventors of the dungeons & dragons pen & paper role playing game, which had a large impact on a huge amount of people and many games, both for computers or without computers, both online and offline.

the second, who died on the 5th of march, is joseph weizenbaum, one of the founders of computer science and, later, one of the leading critics of artificial intelligence and the relation between computer science and society. one of the things he’s most famous for is eliza, an electronic parody of a therapist which was taken seriously by many people, to weizenbaum’s astonishment.

two personalities who changed the world. rest in peace.

well, after the weather chaos during the last two days, here are some photos.

here we have rain and sunlight combined, then sunshine with dark clouds, and finally snow:

here we have graupel and snow:

the weather is constantly changing, one minute there’s bright sunshine, the other its dark, there’s rain or even graupel hammering from the sky. and sometimes, both at the same time. and this morning, it even was white outside, but that quickly changed, too bad. by now, the rythm of brightness and darkness returned, oscillating back and forth, making it impossible to decide where to put the sun-blind. somehow beautiful, somehow annoying…

remember this photo form here?

today it looks like this:

well, emma was here, or still is. emma‘s the name of a storm, in case you don’t know, or, more precisely, of a low pressure area. well, here’s a picture of some of my hair:

i recently read that there was a study which showed that in germany, the weather is statistical significantly worse on weekends. well, if i compare the last two day’s sky—filled with clouds—to today’s sky—bright light—, i’d say that’s right. well, on the evening, shortly before it became dark (but, well, there was still way more light than on the two previous days), i took a small walk through the neighborhood and shot some photos. here are some of the results.

birds.

i agan managed to catch a flying bird; see the three pictures to the right. i’m not sure whether the one on the left is the same (or of the same kind) as the one on the right…

nature.

zoom.

i also made a few zooms. two of them i think are especially good. the first is this one:

the second is this one:

… my blog really has 100% valid xhtml 1.0 transitional code.

until now, there were some exceptions:

• a wordpress bug which generated invalid xhtml code if you have more than one blogroll category (which will be fixed in the next version; i wrote a quick hack to fix the one i’m using);
• the youtube code snippet was quite a mess, i fixed it using some hints from the w3c validator page and by some tipps by kornel, as wordpress tended to screw up my code by inserting tags and, thus, rendering it invalid; i fixed that by using installing a plugin which allows to format specific posts completely yourself;
• certain small bugs in my posts which were completely my faults (these will probably show up from time to time, but i’m trying to eliminate them asap).

maybe i’ll once try to force wordpress to generate xhtml 1.0 strict code, but that’s probably too much work; probably i can hack something together myself in less time which fits better to my needs and which generates such code :)

instead of hanging around, surfing, chatting, working, idling, waiting for the sun to come out, i did something completely different today, namely helping to chop two trees. which was kind of fun. haven’t done any “real” work for some time, and now i’m feeling quite tired. and happy.

yesterday i stumbled about the gathering‘s latest live dvd, a noise severe, recorded in march 2007 in chile. a few months later, their singer, anneke van giersbergen, quit the band. (which, in my opinion, is the end of the band; if they will continue, they will be something very different…)
the dvd contains a lot of songs from their older albums, like the “debut” mandylion (their first album with anneke and, in my opionion, their best one), nighttime birds, how to measure a planet? (which i don’t like too much) and if_then_else. the first two can be more categorized as atmospheric doom with progmetal and gothic influences, while how to measure a planet? drifts off into a very experimental alternative rock/prog direction; the last, if_then_else, is more into a trip rock.
well, so much about the facts.
i’ve already mentioned several times that mandylion is really good. and i’ll do it again. it’s one of the few albums (next to sentenced‘s frozen) where i like every track, to which i can listen for hours, again and again. so filled with energy, groove, raw power, emotions. so beautiful. (my favorite song is probably leaves, whose music video you can watch here.)
well, mandylion is their best album, i’d say, but they also have other good ones. one which i don’t really know—shame on me!—is nighttime birds, mandylion‘s successor, which seems to be very good, too. and there’s if_then_else, which has several really good tracks, like the melancholic saturnine or a beautiful instrumental called beautiful war.
somehow it’s really a pity that i never managed to see them.

“the day you went away
you had to screw me over
i guess you didn’t know
all the stuff you left me with
is way too much to handle
but i guess you don’t care”

from saturnine by the gathering.

clouds fucked up my plan to watch today’s lunar eclipse. so no pictures from me, just me being tired the whole day… :-(

[...later this day...]
ok, here’s one photo from tonight, though it doesn’t depict the sky:

just found something very cool on blabbermouth: on a guitar workshop, alexi laiho and roope latvala from the finnish melodic death metallers children of bodom played vivaldi on their guitars! more precisely: summer: presto (op. 4, concerto no. 2, mvt. 3) from the four seasons. check it out: