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Tomorrow morning I'll put some more miles on my car as we are heading south to the Games Convention in Leipzig.
We'll leave at 5AM which should put us into Leipzig before 10AM. I haven't been there before but as we got some business/VIP/whatever tickets I thought we'll give it a try.

Roadtrip
We left Kiel at shortly after 5AM and made it to Leipzig Airport in way less then 4 hours (zipping through Germany at an average of 140kmh) but the last few kilometers plain sucked. A minor stretch of dense traffic made the kiddies go nuts and crash each others cars. We've seen four accidents on less than a kilometer worth of Autobahn. That part added another 20 to 30 minutes to the inbound travel time.






If you look at the cars and people involved you'll see all the young people the Games Convention attracts.

The Fair and The Games
There wasn't anything that we didn't expect in terms of layout and presentation: huge halls with lots of booths. Some of the 18-and-older-only places were pretty crowded but nonetheless I was able to play the Gran Turismo Prologue demo (although there was only one track), Colin McRae DiRT and some more new/upcoming games.




The number of (to me) unknown games was pretty large. I didn't think I really missed any of the PC shooters and stuff but then there's the games with new ideas and stuff. Nintento WiiFit is a new concept that involves a piece of hardware you should stand on during exercise. I'll give it a week after the release until somebody hooks the Bluetooth device up to his Linux box and uses it as foot paddle to control his machine ;)
A company named Rockstar Games presented table tennis game for the Wii. The company name doesn't match their game I believe.




Singstar, Guitar Hero, Rockband
After Singstar and Guitar Hero turned out to be viable business models more of these games showed up at this years convention and the old brands had to update their concepts. While I'm not a Singstar guy Guitar Hero might be something that I'd give a try. As a company you don't have to present anything special. Just get Mola Adebisi to host a Guitar Hero contest and your booth will be crowded.

Autoscooter
During the day - among other gadgets - we snagged a few coins for the Autoscooter and put them to a good use.




The evening
On the way back we took a short diversion through Hamburg and got ourselves a big
bucket of Chicken Wings over at KFC at the Reeperbahn before heading to my place
to watch 300 on DVD.







Mathias and Jonas finished off the bucket of Chicken just in time before the pizza arrived (sic) but we all were too tired to see how Sparta does in the movie.

The 24th incarnation of the Chaos Communication Congress is set to take place in Berlin just as usual. The Call for Participation is out and the title alone points one change out: It's not about presentations alone any more, it's about stuff related to topics like culture, society and making. Hacking is still part of it but I personally love to see people hacking on hardware and creating new stuff. The best presentations in the last time were at least related to hardware topics (i.e. Andrea subverting the TMC based navigation systems).

The site doesn't specifically list the BCC (Congress Center) off the Alex as this years venue but I believe this could be a good time to book a room at the Park INN or a nearby hotel now.

Using my frequent flyer miles and trying to squeeze the few extra miles out of everyday things I can do some trips that I would never do without the frequent flyer miles.

When browsing through the Award Flight Terms of Service and mileage requirements I found a nice case that I could use to my advantage. Leaving from Korea I could go most of the way to the International dateline for cheap.

Award inventory is rare so I just went ahead and looked for something that sounded right. Reading more on the possible flight connections and places to visit I found that I could use the famous Island Hopper flight by Continental Micronesia to do some sightseeing. Getting to the destination became a major part of the trip.

Both the Lonely Planet South Pacific & Micronesia as well as people I talked to state that the Marshall Islands are far from a mainstream tourist destination but as others wrote before (compare to A Map For Saturday) it's one of the things I just have to do.

My itinerary over at Delta boils down to this:



As you can see it's all in Business Class (yay) but the MAJ-GUM trip. I'm on the waitlist there but it appears to be one of the hardest flights to get. On the way along the small atolls the Island Hopper will land on numerous islands which makes the complete trip more complex.



As of now I paid 35 Euro to put in the reservation and once I'll do the trip I'll have to pay 30,000 of my hard-earned miles. If I had to pay with real money this would be more than $2000.

The movie A Map For Saturday immediately grabbed my attention when I first read about it more than a month ago on some blog. The backpacker documentation shows the way of life of a solo traveller who - guess what - travelled the world for more than a year and recorded other travellers stories on the way. Just my kind of documentary.

Hoping to catch the movie in Berlin during the Globians Film Festival two weeks ago I drove to Berlin but didn't manage to do the detour to Potsdam due to various reasons and the late start of the movie.
Now that the Filmfest Hamburg is coming up I hope that the movie will be shown there although there is no sign yet. I still did not order the DVD but if you like to do me a favour (i.e. because you are using the wormulon.net/123.org services *hint*) the DVD can be ordered at the website ;)

Back in the times when the 40GB third generation iPod was the hottest thing to own I got myself one and never regretted it. I used to carry around 35GB worth of music back and forth between the US and Germany listening to music throughout entire flights. The battery lasted around eight hours which was more than enough to fill the entertainment void Lufthansa and Air France created by not offering personal in-flight entertainment.

Around two to three years after buying it I still was a happy owner but the battery started to show some wear. At some point it didn't last for a single flight and when I took it on my last Asia trip it let me down about an hour into the trip. I decided to get a new one but when talking to a sales guy at the local Apple store derivative I opted to get the battery replaced instead of getting a new iPod.

As you can see below the replacement went well. Apple did not replace the battery but supplied me with a refurbished or new device. The serial is different and the back doesn't have a single scratch - yet. Currently the iPod is charging in its dock and I am looking forward for more years of mobile music.

I am in the market for a new cell phone contract subsidized by my employer. I'm a happy user of an unbranded silver Sony Ericsson K800i and could not find any interesting phone available. Among others my line of work got me early access to the Nokia N80, N95 and E65 phone some time ago. The N95 feature set is great but I prefer the E65 form factor and really liked it when I tried it months ago.

As the phones themselves would still cost me a few bucks I thought about getting a PCMCIA card and a pure data contract instead. My laptop comes with a UMTS option that could just use one of those SIM cards. I read up on various contracts and figured that I would either have to shell out 40 Euro a month to get a flatrate like contract or limit myself to something like 30 Megabytes a month. 30MB? I belive just polling mail over the Cisco VPN would easily eat that up.

As I'm on the road outside Germany quite often I thought about a solution that works outside Germany as the cell phone contracts are limited to my home country. T-Mobile offers a world wide wireless LAN based service named HotSpot which could just fit my need.

Would a T-Mobile HotSpot flatrate work for me?

First of all the flatrate at 15 Euro equals two and a half hours of usage per month. If I had a WiFi enabled handset (i.e. the E65) I'd use it quite often. On the downside the small print of the contract states that the flatrate only applies to Germany - certain terms and conditions apply and would make me pay another 6 Euro per hour on the road. Other limitations I found made clear that the HotSpot flatrate is not an option for me.

So the international usage requirement nullified both my cell phone provider as well as the extra HotSpot option as providers for easy Internet connectivity.

One of the predominant places I use (and pay!) for Internet access is in airports and hotels. Airport lounges tend to have Internet access. Actually it's easier to get free Internet access - be it WiFi or terminals provided free of charge - in Asia than it is in Europe.

Most airports in Asia have free Internet access but Lufthansa in Germany simply provides T-Mobile HotSpot access points and makes customers pay for the service. Skyteam lounges on the other hand (Delta, Korean Air, Continental) tend to have free access. The overall T-Mobile HotSpot coverage on airports is quite nice and makes it the most interesting program to join. Starbucks also sports T-Mobile HotSpot based access.

When staying at hotels you are usually limited to the service the hotel provided. Most of the time it is overpriced DSL access at up to 30 Euro a day. Usually neither my cell phone (lacking international data connection roaming) nor T-Mobile work at those points.

Hoping for Internet access provided free of charge by the hotel is one option and for some people utilizing unprotected networks is a valid one too, but there is no globally valid option. A mix between free and paid service is FON. Unfortunately I never found FON based access around the places I stay. I could just set an access point up at home and then access FON hotspots worldwide for free. I'll probably do that although I don't really believe that I could take advantage of that.

In a nutshell: Whom do I have to pay 10 Euro a month to get some Internet access around the globe? I'd be happy to pay more for a high volume plan, though.

From the sad-but-true department: Last month I paid more money for slow Internet access on the road than I paid for my 6Mbps at home.

During a discussion I wanted to check how much a First Class Flight to Hawaii would be?


That makes those 11,000 Euro on Swiss look like a bargain. If you want to search for yourself head over to Kayak.com as it includes searching privatejetspecialist.com.

I started the day with some home maintenance/improvement. I had to spend 80 Euro on a new sprinkler head for my shower. Most likely my landlord won't pay for that.
At noon I was craving for some tuna as I wanted to try my cajun spices. I wasn't sure whether my regular Famila supermarket would have fresh tuna but I opted to just try it instead of driving to Plaza or the expensive and crowded Citti Markt. Unfortunately I had to go with chicken breast instead of tuna ... bummer. I'll do the tuna steak combo later.



This is what my Sony-Ericsson K800i produces if you look at the image closely. I believe the spices make it a worst case scenario for the compression. Looks kinda painted or post-processed.



On my bike trip I finally found a Greenpeace statement that I agree with; but then we most likely have different solutions for the problem ;)



A few major arteries were shut down saturday afternoon to accomodate for the Kiel Triathlon. I had a few minutes to spare and drove further into town and snapped a few pictures on the way.

Once a month I delete the old pictures from my cell phone and this time it covers the whole last month.











In total I've been to work for three or four days resulting in quite a backlog of paperwork to read. Still I'm already thinking about doing some more travelling, but so far I passed on the 25,000 miles award travel offer to India by Lufthansa as well as the current cheap flights inside Europe.