Hardrock Hallelujah!

Okay, Germany lost this one - place 15 for Texas lightning. But anyway - a gorgeous contest and apparently Europe has more humour than I thought...
Lordi from Finland not only won the audience award for best costume, they also won the contest with their song "Hardrock hallelujah"!

"Iiiiincrediiible!"

Well, everyone who didn't vote for Germany because they had to vote for Finland... I'll forgive you! I'm already looking forward to the next Finnish contribution in 2007. Maybe they bring out more of their ork-like people. :-) The more orks the better - if you ask me!

Final countdown: Grandprix d'Eurovision

YES!!
Tonight's the big night! It's the final round of the world famous Eurovision song contest, called "Grandprix d'Eurovision de la chanson". I'm still taking some preparations to make this evening special. Since Ben left me alone this week, I persuaded my sister Teresa to visit me for the weekend.

So now we'll have our own little 2-person Eurovision party with a bottle of French red wine, Dutch cheese and Turkish pita bread (just to make it more intercultural, you know)!

I'm glad I was able to watch the semifinal on thursday to get an idea of what to expect. And I must say... yikes! This contest is going to be one of the most bizarre EVER! Sorry Marty, but I'm afraid your Irish milksop will be devoured by the Finnish participants called "Lordi" (see picture below).


Apparently Germany's participants are some kind of insider tip, so we might actually have good chances to reach one of the good positons. Keep your fingers crossed for "Texas lightning"!

Good marketing (?)

Just because the topic matches my previous post...

See this picture of some wily marketing found in a Berlin metro station.
The banner says "Just come closer..." and the company is an undertaker company.

Dead people in trunks

Some time ago Kent mentioned something about a dead person being driven around Germany in a trunk. This is the whole story:

A woman from a small village near Koblenz decided to carry over her 90 year old dead mother from Bremerhaven (about 500km north of Koblenz) to Koblenz on the backseat of her car, because she couldn't afford the costs for a professional transport by an undertaker.
Having arrived in Koblenz, they met up with some more relatives who wanted to "say goodbye" to the dead woman. Apparently some other person took notice of this and called the police.

I guess the lady knew that this was an illegal act, because she hid her mom under a bunch of clothes.

I can't even say that I can't understand her, because undertaker's ARE expensive over here and a lot of people even have to raise a credit for it.

Official excuse for not posting

After 2 stressful weeks I'm finally finding the time to post into my blog.
Sorry to those who visited this page so patiently and didn't find something new for so long.

School's taking up all my time at the moment. I'm still working on my prediploma thesis, which I wanted to finish by April :-( . And I've got a new, pretty time consuming job as well. I'm working for my University's Knowledge Media Institute (www.uni-koblenz.de/iwm). Sounds geeky, eh? ;)

We're doing some really interesting projects at the moment, e.g. an e-learning course for the firefighter-school of my federal state, Rheinland-Pfalz. We're meeting up with a lot of firefighters and they tell us how to use water hoses, how flashovers and backdrafts work and when petrol starts to burn - quite funny.
My task is to create quiz games and animations to illustrate all this stuff. At least I can use some of my flash programming experience I got in Chandigarh.

Another project is a small conference my institute is hosting every year - the "Koblenz eLearning-Days". I'm proud to be able to say they picked my poster and flyer design for this year's conference. If you want to see it, you can download the poster here. And yes, Ben is on that photo and he'll hate me for the rest of my life for it. :-)

And not enough! I had to organize Ben's birthday party last friday, including shopping, cooking, baking, cleaning and trying to stop Ben from looking for his gifts. At least the party was quite successful (still not a trainee party in Chandigarh, but good). The last guest left at around 4.30am.

So now you know my excuse for not posting often enough. :-)