Tourist's view on Hamburg in 4 days

I've been to Hamburg quite often because I know several people there, but I always missed the chance to do the usual tourist stuff there. So this time, we booked a hotel, bought a tourist guide, and made a tourist trip to Hamburg. It was really great. We had really good weather and spend most of the time outside.
First day we took the train to Blankenese and walked back to Hamburg. Okay, from Övelgönne on we took the ferry boad back to Landungsbrücken.
Second day we visited the Miniaturwunderland (that's a must for everyone who likes model railways), walked through the new Hafencity and the Speicherstadt, climbed the stairs of the "Michel" and had a boat trip in the harbour.
I can really recommend Hamburg, it's worth spending some days there. The northern people of germany are very different and I like their style ;)
Finnally some pictures... enjoy...

Anthony B

...concert in the live station, Dortmund, was the highlite of the weekend. Anthony B and the band rocked the crowd with massive sound. I think his dance style is quite cool, he can throw legs and arms in unbelievable ways ;)
We got a good look at the stage from upstairs and enjoyed the sunday evening...

Convergence

I'm a fan of Sony Ericsson devices as you might have noticed ;) I also like the DLNA media server integration of my Link Station and my PS3. Now the guys from Sony Ericsson did me a favour with their C905 device. It has WiFi and a build in DLNA compliant media server. When it connects to your WLAN, it will instantly show up in the Crossbar of the PS3 and you can view the pictures taken with 8.1 megapixel camera directly on your TV screen. Cool! Really, really cool.

Summerjam 08

...took place last weekend in cologne bay. we put up our tent next to the lake, stored some beer, a shisha and barbecue stuff there and had 3 very relaxing days on the jam. It was a great and peaceful atmosphere and not as crowded as last year. Even the lineup was not absolutely first class, the music, the sound and the performance was excellent. Stephen Marley, Patrice, Jah Cure and many more...
In my view, Summerjam is the best festival to go to, it's 100% easy going and relaxing with excellent music and jamaica feeling :)
Check out some pictures below or some youtube clips here.

p@rty 3.0

As last year, conny, marcel and I organized a party for family and friends. I still think that the location of a good party is a very important piece, so we spent some time to spot the right one. This year we decided to rock-a-boat on the rhine river. So we set up our equipment on the top deck of the nautilus boat and had a lot of fun until the early morning. Thanks everybody for showing up there, and let's see where we will rock next year ;)

Motion sensor fun

I played around with the accelerometer in my Sony Ericsson W910i phone which is accessible for JME applications via JSR 256. I took the physic engine from Marcin Ploska and extended it with accelerometer support. See the results here:

W910i review

I can name a SE W910i my own for some weeks now and I really like that device. I would like to show some pretty nice features I like most. First, the RSS ticker on the idle screen. Really usefull if you have a data flat fee. You can add the news or flickr (or NoseRub) feeds you like and the phone will display the latest news in a carrousel like ticker on the idle screen like this:
Nice. I really like to make more use of the idle screen, so I used the ability of the W910i to create an idle screen midlet, which you can do on many of the latest SE-Phones (most JP-7 and all JP-8 phones). My first midlet just displayed pictures from my picasa web album on the idle screen like. A bit boring over time. Now I use JSR 184 to map those pictures to a cube and do some nice 3D-transition effects like this:


I also checked out the SenseMe function, but I'm a bit disappointed especially by the horrible Windows application from Sony Ericsson. Not useable at all. The Media Player is pretty nice, it rotates the pictures and videos depending of the orientation of your phone. Cool.
Overall a cool phone with only few negative aspects: No GPS, a bit unstable firmware and a plastic cover. Hopefully the announced W760 will overcome those issues ;)

Illumina 07

This weekend we visited the "Illumina" exhibition around the castle "Dyck" near Duesseldorf. The light installations around the castle looked really beatiful. See additional pictures here.
Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures, my equipment is not even semi-pro ;)

New Toys

Last week I spend some money on fun stuff and I bought the Gyrotor indoor helicopter from Silverlit as well as the X-Twin rc-plane. I first tried the Gyrotor in my living room and it's pretty hard to control. It took roughly three hours training to get a feeling for this helicopter, but now it's really fun to fly it inside. You should have plenty of space in your room, otherwhise you will hit the walls more often then you wish ;)
This weekend I had the chance to try the helicopter and the X-Twin plane outside. It turned out that the gyrotor is a pure "inside" toy. The range of the RC is pretty limited and it's quite unstable to fly outside.
But the X-Twin is a real cool thing for the outside world. It's easy to fly, and the battery is good enough to play up to 15 minutes! I really enjoyed that!!
Upate: Check that heli flying in my office ;)