http://www.hesspoint.com

I am a big fan of the Trillian Instant Messenger, which is an IM client, able to handle ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo! and Jabber. With plugins you can even use it for Lotus Sametime and Novell Messenger. But one thing was always missing: Skype! I mean the cool thing about Trillian is that you only need one contact list for everything. But also using Skype means two contact lists open. Now, there is the solution: SkyLlian. It is a Trillian plugin that puts your Skype contacts in your Trillian list and lets you use Trillian to chat and voice chat. The downside however is that you still need to have a Skype client installed and run in the background. Hopefully they will get rid of that in the future that you really only need a Trillian. Anyway it is a great step in the right direction.

Skyllian Website

The hotel chain Ibis has a special promotion: You can book a room in any German Ibis hotel for just 1 €. You can book the room for the time between the 24th of December and the 6th of January. Each person can only book one night. But hurry, there are only 10,000 spaces.
Click here for their website!

PC Magazine released its flop 10 list of this years electronical gadgets. But not only no name brands, also Sony, Samsung or Motorolla released some major electro-garbage this year. Click here for the full article. Here are the according pictures.

Here are two links that brighten up your day. Not to say they are pretty damn funny:

• Computer Science Exam (German only)
• Smoking kills (not 100% political correct ;-))

The SANS institute released this years Top 20 software vulnarabilites. Surprisingly, even anti-virus tools and Firefox not 100% safe. Not a surprise, the MS software (Windows, Office, IE, etc) are top of the list. Maybe they should spend not so much time on making the new Windows more colorful, but making it safer!

Recently I was driving in my car and I saw two funny names of companies on two trucks (sorry is only funny if you can read German):

Does not need a comment.

This one is funny for all you Stromberg fans By the way: You can watch all episodes of Stromberg online.

I just placed my 4th cache, "Fischers Fritze" (The name refers to a well known German tongue twister). Well, technically my 5th if you are counting the event cache I am organizing. As the last one, it is a micro, but unlike "Sanatorium" this one is not for you guys in OWL. I felt I had to put one in the town where I spent most of my youth, in the little town of Preetz in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein (Germany). However, you guys from OWL, feel free if you happen to be up north some time

Recently I created my very own Signature Item called "Geosmuggler". If you wonder why I chose this name, think about my nickname Anyway, the Geosmuggler is a card which I drop into caches I find to mark that I was there. But that is not all. Each card has an individual ID number which can be used to track it online, similar to a Travelbug or Geocoin that you can track at Geocaching.com.

A fellow geocacher put up a really nice website, that allows to track personal signature items and was so kind to hook me up with an account. So if you find one of these cards, you can take it from the cache, go to hansolo77.sigitem.com and log the card. Then you can drop it into some other cache and log that you dopped it. This way it can travel around.
If you are interested, here is a list of signature items, other cachers created.

I just got a mail from my blogcounter that my blog has exceeded

hits. Thanx to all you guys for visiting!

The Domino Day 2005 is just over. They broke the broke the record again! More then 4 million stones (precisely 4.155.476) fell. But that is about all good I can say about the 2005 edition of this event. I really liked last years Domino Day. It was fun, it was exciting and easy to follow. This year it more or less just sucked. The creator, Robin Weijers, just wanted to make it even more spectacular then last year, but it ended up being just too much to follow. So many different things went on that even the camera could not follow all the action. Neither did the two commentators. Well, I can only talk about the German ones, but they did a just awefull job. The where babeling nonsense the whole time, missing all important moments. Event when large portions of stones did not fall, they didn’t even realize it. It was just a huge mess with no clear line. Second of all the theme was horrible. God, how can one use Fairytales for that? The theme was pushed so much in the foreground that the actual effects and special tricks where just lost. Last year the cool effects and stunts where the focus of interest, this year they where just a byproduct, while the two commentators got carried away in telling stupid fairytales mixed with dumb jokes.
It is too bad, but as it always happens when you want too much, you just mess it all up. That is exactly what happened this year. Hopefully next year we will have a Domino Day that focuses on the real protagonists, the stones.

Wikipedia: Domino Day