December 2005

I’m happy about 2005, because
… it means I have survived the last months of 2004, although I’m still asking myself how I did that.
… my world view has begun to change thanks to David and Gilles.
… I got to know new interesting people, some of which have alas already gone again.
… I found new friends.
… I was able to help friends, although of course it would have been better if they hadn’t needed any help.
… I got to taste sushi for the first time, and it’s yummy.
… I got to star in a short movie which I even got to edit.
… I could assist to the editing of a film for a very good friend of mine.
… I succeeded in the exams.
… old friends became even more important in my life.
… Fred came to Europe for the first time since January 2004.
… I got a break when I really needed it by travelling to Serge in Brussels and having a great time there.
… a friend was there when I needed help the most.
… the time spent in Lloret de Mar was a great week.
… I have realised what really matters in (my) life.
… “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
… I decided to study English under the wire and am happy with that choice.
… it was a great year for naischtnotz.net (approximately 433% more visitors than in 2004).
… this blog became a personal success.
… I launched my own podcast.
… I finally worked seriously on “The Fallen” and wrote about 50 poems.

I wish all of you the best for 2006! See you next year. :-)

Here is tonight’s great playlist.

NORA: Writer’s Block
The Starting Line: Saddist Girl Story
Sophia: Another Trauma
Nickelback: Side Of A Bullet
Puddle Of Mudd: Life Ain’t Fair
Estrepito: Painsong
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Salvation
David Gray: Disappearing World
From Autumn To Ashes: Trapped Inside The Cage Of My Soul
Inborn: Renaissance 17.0
3 Feet Smaller: Dancing In The Rain
Down By Law: Punk As F*ck

playing tabletop soccer at Grégory’s (November 2003)

After having discussed the blog.lu issue here and in comments on some other blogs, and having reproached that website for not being in Luxemburgish, I asked myself why not make a post in Luxemburgish for once. It might not be good, but that’s why I normally blog in English. ;-)

Eng Bréck rofsprangen,
Lassloossen a falen,
D’Péng op éiweg verhaalen,
Am Himmel vun der Trauer sangen.

Ech gesin dech
Wéis de do läiss
A laachs.
Ech gesin dech,
Wéis de an dengem wäisse
Kleed voller Blut
Do ennen op mech waarts.

De Kapp no ennen, ee Fouss no fir,
Deen aneren kennt vum selwen no.
Wéi een Gentleman sot ech: “no dir,”
A wéi eng Lady goungs du.

Firwat war den Himmel blo?

Hei kommen ech bei dech erop,
Maachen der déi gëllen Dier op
A soen äddi bis ni méi.

Maybe it were her eyes, there were supernovae inside each of them when she looked at me. Or perhaps, it was her smile that would have made everyone in the world happy if they had seen it. Or mayhap, it was her holding my hand and the warmth this made me feel throughout the whole body. But most certainly, it was all of this together.

It had been a wonderful evening: we went to the cinema to watch her favourite movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, had dinner at a Moroccan restaurant and afterwards chilled out at a lounge. I could tell her wish even without her pronouncing a single word: she didn’t want to go home yet. I didn’t either.

Apart from the fountain’s water we heard burbling, the streets were filled with silence. But the scenery spoke a million words. The streets were bathed in a yellow-orangish color and the water drops were flying to show the world was real. At that moment, a thought crossed my mind about how any human could ever have believed in the Four Noble Truths or chosen to walk on the Eightfold Path. We were alive.

I am here on my knees looking up at pure light. I have nothing to offer you but my soul and my eternal care for yours. You are my universe, the perfect bubble that will never burst.

There were two other couples walking through the same street as we did, but, even if I wouldn’t have admitted it that moment, they seemed to feel a similar thing and didn’t talk. There was no use in talking, I felt linked so deeply and so close to her that words would only have taken away this magic. She didn’t say a word either and I knew that she felt the same thing. That we weren’t alone would have made me sad and taken away the singularity, but we were alone. We had our own world. A parallel universe that could be distinguished from the others’, but was unreachable for anyone else than her and me.

In my mind, I still heard Mancini’s Moonriver and saw Holly running through the rain looking for her cat. Yet, I was completely conscious of what was happening at that moment. I was living a hundred lifes in a few seconds and enjoyed every one of them at the same time.

See these stars, there are billions of them. Millions of them have planets. But nowhere is a being that could ever feel the same for you I do.

She had huddled to me and lead us to a bench opposite the fountain. She put her head on my shoulder and I put my arm around her. It is a cliché, but it didn’t feel as one. It was an extraordinary moment that no other human ever felt or will feel. There was almost no light pollution and we could see all the stars clearly. The past was looking down on us, these insignificant lifes, that mattered so much for these moments.

She slowly raised her head and looked at me, her eyes giving me an insight into the purest soul that has ever existed. She smiled, but before she could say anything, I brushed her forehead with my lips and said:

“I know. I love you too.”

Whether they read the critics on doofblog, on egalwaat or here I don’t know, but at least they’ve changed some things now, and state that the site is still in a beta version. I find it a bit obvious that now after I posted some things that don’t work, they corrected it, although it should have been done long before the page went online:

– they completed the translation French-English
– they created a faq
– they corrected some error messages

The registration form though still has not got a clean structure in my browser. But it seems as if they finally seriously started working on the site. Now what I still miss is a Luxemburgish version.

Saying that my Christmas was a catastrophe would be an understatement. I won’t go into the details, but believe me when I tell you I prayed for the day to be over. Well, I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia after finally having gotten out of that hell, so I guess it wasn’t such a bad day after all.

What did I do on the second Christmas day? I had a gangbang!

Decmber 26th, 2005. That was a real Christmas. I got to be with people I like, friends I have fun with. An entertaining afternoon, a good Chinese dinner (if only the day before the food would have been half as good…) and a relaxing evening with cocktails at the lounge of the Spaghetti Factory.

It was a wonderful day, and it made me realize that Christmas can, in fact, be a joyful day. For the very first time, I’m actually looking forward to next year’s Christmas. It’s really too bad that some are going back to university in France and Germany and I won’t see them again for months.

Oh, and ladys, that gangbang was quite something. ;-)

As Raff critized the new platform blog.lu, I had to check out that site too.

1. The design is bad, whether these rose-babyblue colors are a good choice or not might be arguable, but for what considers me, they hurt my eyes. The font used (Bauhaus 93) for BLOG.lu in the header is nothing original to me. I’ll simply ignore the fact now that the designer has used a different font (Brush Script MT) for the slogan.

2. “Sommaire” as the title of a website is unprofessional. (Does the webmaster need help to find the title tag and change it?) There are tons of good books on (X)HTML out there, I recommend this one.

3. A mistake in the very first sentence is ridiculous! (“Le premier BLOG Luxembourgeois est ouvert et qui plus est entièrement gratuit.” – wtf? Is my French that bad or does the second part of this sentence sound terribly wrong: “est qui plus est entièrement gratuit”?!)

4. If you click on FAQ, you only get the following message: “summary_faq_description TEST”. I can only say: don’t you know the rules of webdesign? Grab the book I’ve just recommended you and see if you can find the very first rule of webdesign. (I’ll come back to this at the next point).

5. The terms of use are the following text:
“Please edit the contents of the file
templates/summary/agreement.template to suit your needs.
If you do not need a service agreement to be accepted by end users, please disable this feature by setting ‘summary_show_agreement’ to ‘No’ via the administration interface.”

Please, read these rules of webdesign again. One of the very first ones states: do never, ever, put an unfinished website online!

6. Damn it, but if I decided to register blog.lu, then I’d do a website in Luxemburgish! If you want a French blogosphere you’re too late, there already is one: blog.fr. A website I like a lot more, already the header is funny and the design looks more professional to me.

7. The initiative to create a Luxemburgish blogosphere would be laudable, but this way, you’ll never get there. I like egalwaat.lu’s list of links to Luxemburgish blogs a whole lot more. Also because everyone can insert her or his blog, and that way create a much more complete list of the Luxemburgish blogosphere.

8. Now to some positive stuff: I like the URL the members get (e.g. thierry.blog.lu). Especially for people who do not want to buy their own domain name – although you can get one almost for free today – this seems quite convenient.

9. It could get so good now: The registration is as easy as you could imagine. Choose a nickname, enter your full name, a valid email adress and a password, choose a name for your blog and a theme and wait for the confirmation email. But, unfortunately the layout of the registration form is confusing. At least in Safari it hasn’t a clean structure at all. Oh, and guys, please delete the Kubrick theme, there is nothing more boring than yet another weblog with WordPress’ default theme. So better not lead anyone into temptation…

10. And, finally, although I chose French as the language for the admin interface, the error messages were still in English!

Conclusion: (Almost) everyone can install LifeType – which blog.lu seems to be based on – on a server, but it takes a whole lot more to create a great website. This site simply doesn’t meet my requirements for a good webpage. My proposal: delete the site and built it again from scratch. The project surely has potential, but this way you’re most certainly never going to exploit it. It’s simply yet another bad Luxemburgish website.
Considering it has been created by Netline.lu, who offer webdesign as a professional service, I don’t know what to say. But hey, before anyone claims I’d be defaming Netline: I’ve checked out some other websites they created, and bofferding.lu as well as luxlait.lu actually seem to be good websites.

Imho it got a miserable start, but nevertheless I wish blog.lu success, maybe it will get over its many teething problems (although at this point I doubt that – but I’ve been surprised before) and become an interesting and wonderful service in the future.

Thank God we have champagne
Shrimps and caviar
On this lavish feast.
Now that we have switched off CNN
We can forget the sorrow and pain
Throughout the world,
Enjoy ourselves over wine
Ang get sloshed before midnight.
The ladys drink their babycham,
Gentlemen smoke Cuban cigars
Lit with Abe’s capes.

Thank God we are the rich,
And the poor are distant theys.
A cantankerous old man
Tells me we should help the poor
But only today.
He has bought each of his grandchildren
Four PSPs and six HDTVs
And spent twenty dollars to Unicef
For orphans in South Africa.

Thank God we have a caring family
Who looks after its members
When it finds the time in between
the Financial Times and Bloomberg TV.

Thank God when we have survived this day
And can run to the shops to change the presents
On December 27th it all is finally over,
And we can try to lose our weight,
To become fat again, next year.

So this, this is Christmas,
Christmas without you.

She was sitting on her bed, eating the crackers he had bought that afternoon. He sat on a chair next to her desk, looking over at her. She smiled. He’d have asked if he could eat some of the crackers himself, but he knew how much she liked them. It was 1 a.m. in the morning. The house was completely silent.

What a lucky guy I am, he thought. Do you know how much I care for you, he imagined asking her. He didn’t dare breaking the silence. He didn’t know what it was that made him feel as if he was embracing the whole world, but the chances that this silence was the reason seemed too great to take the risk.

I am hovering next to your dreams, floating through your feelings, flying with your wings. Let me gently touch on your silk-like skin, let me take away one teardrop and I will swim in an ocean.

It was a warm summer’s night with a gentle breeze and somewhere, people were still walking through the streets, breathing the fresh air, looking at the stars and enjoying themselves. But the outside didn’t matter to him. A sentence out of a book came to his mind, without being able to remember the novel’s title: “You travel the world searching for the perfect moment. I have discovered that a perfect moment can be a world on its own.” That’s it, he thought, this is a world on its own, our world to us alone.

The door opened and her brother came in. He apologized and got the cd back he had lent her. It’s okay, she replied. But it wasn’t. This world had ended. And he hadn’t even knocked.