Heidelberg

This weekend I ventured out of Coburg once more - this time to the lovely city of Heidelberg. Some photos of the trip are here. Possibly this was an odd time to visit, since Heidelberg is very close to Frankfurt, where I will be living in a couple of months. However, I was keen to visit and catch up with my old friend Nicki, whom I went to school with.

It may seem surprising that we both ended up living in Germany, but only until one realises that I have been stalking Nicki on and off for several years now. It is fitting that she is living in Heidelberg, while I am living in Coburg, since there are suburbs in Melbourne with the same names, so many of our friends assume we never left town.

Heidelberg is famous for having the oldest university in Germany, and it has a large student population. While there we checked out the castle - which is very impressive. In fact is possibly more impressive even than the Veste Coburg, although it has been allowed to fall into some disrepair over the centuries. Of particular note is the enormous wine barrel, which can hold either 220,000 litres or 220 litres, depending on how one interprets the period on the sign.

Nicki told me I had to have a drink called a Warmer Erpel while I was there. It is apparently some kind of ritual that must be undertaken upon entering the town. Personally I suspect that this was made up purely to sell the drink, since I can't imagine anyone would want to drink it unless they were a complete newcomer. The taste is somewhat akin to that of battery fluid, or so I would imagine had I ever had battery fluid.

New Host for Blog

You may have noticed a slightly new look for the site. This is because I have moved my blog to a commercial host. This blog is now run by Blogware, blogging software which so far seems pretty good, and hosted by Blogzerk.

Why did I do this? Primarily because there were bugs in my old setup (which was hosted by my old housemate Cameron). While I could probably have fixed them, basically I just couldn't be bothered. This is all part of my new philosophy, which says that I should do as little work as possible, and get web startups to do it all for me, and then hope that they don't go under and take all my content with them.

So here we are, on a new server and on new software. Hopefully this will work better than the old one. Certainly the server is faster, so you should be slightly less frustrated viewing the page, although of course the real frustration is in the quality of the page rather than its loading time.

I have also moved my photos to Flickr, which should result in their being faster to load as well. It also has a much cooler interface for browsing and uploading - hopefully from now on I will be able to post a lot more photos.

The bugs in the old blog, which meant that, whenever anyone posted a comment, it ended up on the main page, rather than on the article it was commenting on, should not happen here.

The downside of course is that the permanent URLs of the articles have changed, and likely the feed URLs. However, I imagine that this will prove not to be a problem at all, since no-one actually reads anything on this site...