yeah, on the 29th of july i did my first bLog-entry. but since it was not based on the date itself, but rather on the celebration that was on this specific day, namely the "System Administrator Appreciation Day", which is on the 28th of july this year, i celebrate my bLog's first anniversary. yippieh! hooray! oh yeah, my colleagues sent me an eCard this year, showing a superman-like sysadmin fixing all the broken stuff. absolutely appropriate! just like my real life! amazing! i was moved to tears - honestly! now some stuff from yesterday... firstly, i paid a visit to c-na_ to see her little cat mona. since mona will move away from hagenberg, the last chance to see this cute little pussy for the last time. lucky me, i had my camera with me, so i took some pics... meow - what a cutie! for more pics of mona, follow this link. hm... yesterday some colleagues and me went to the whisky-museum (mind the missing "e"!) in steyregg. it was a birthday present to our boss primarily, and anyone interested could join. in the museum we saw loads of bottles of old whisky, whiskey, both blended and single-malted, and heard loads of facts and history. this was the theoretical part for warm-up in the beginning. took about half an hour, pretty interesting! then, for the practical part, six bottles of hand-picked whisky-flavours were offered from our "whisky-tour-guide" thomas neuhauser. starting from very mild to pretty hard stuff. i just smelled each of them, but didn't drink any, since i do not like the hard stuff. unfortunately my colleagues seem to be well trained, none of them tumbled or babbled - pretty impressive! get more visual impressions of this right here.

yesterday GangMan got a nice present from his girl- friend c-na_. she organised a quad-bike and a place to ride this thing. several other people from hagenberg, namely Eliza, Ro, cypher23, lexx_, marco1475, nipes, and y2uk, were invited to join them too. so was i, but i preferred to take pics of this event. yeah, so here they are... thanks to c-na_ for the invitation.

today DM04 had their graduations in the "redouten-saele" in lince. nice event but unfortunately it was way too hot. zombiequeen got her diploma and is now officially a Mistress of Science (MSc) - yippieh! oh... last week i finally handed in my diploma-thesis. my exam will be on the 13th or 14th of september, then my courses are over. so is my need for studying any longer. the two years were fine, and i had loads of fun and learned a lot, but for now it's enough. as usual, here are the pics from the graduation. some are unfortunately a bit blurry. it was pretty dark in the room, and i was too far away to use any flash-light. yet, they should give a good impression of how it was.

congratulations on your MSc exam, zombiequeen! also congrats to all the other students that passed their final exam and are now either "BSc", "DI(FH)", or "MSc".

the annual seminar from the RISC software company took place from the 29th of june to the first of july 2006. this year we did a trip to gosau. besides the usual stuff, like presenting the company's balance throughout the last years, and the assets it gained, we did some hiking too. the first tour on friday the 30th of june took us to the zwieselalm. the tour lasted about 4 hours and was slightly exhausting in the beginning and the end, since the path was pretty rampant. but the middle part was absolutely ok (see the picture below on the left). the weather was pretty ok too, since it was cloudy all the time, but unfortunately a bit rainy too from time to time. due to some heavy storms within the last few days some areas of the wood we were walking through were destroyed. it really looked like a battlefield (see the picture below on the right). the last hundred meters to the cablecar station we got a cow escort. funny somehow. they joined us, and walked along with us for quite a long time. the next day, the 1st of july, we had a trip to the koppenbrueller-hoehle, a stalactite cave. inside the cave it was dark, cold and very humid. we got a guided tour, which did not last too long since most parts of the cave were flodded anyway, again due to the heavy rainfalls within the last few days. so the tour lasted only about half an hour. but it was really wonderful inside (for those that are not so sensitive to chillness and dampness). all in all it was really a nice break to my daily routine on the diploma thesis writing. a little strengthening, fresh air, nice people (including zombiequeen) around, and loads of fun with my co-workers. more pics are available here.