Hmm... seems that COREBlog doesn't play that nicely with Epoz... at least not with Firebird for Mac OS X...

Oh, well, I\'ll figure that one out, too, eventually...

After much debate I've finally managed to carve out a Sunday afternoon (thanks Mascha!) and convert this blog from CMFWeblog to COREBlog.

This was quite important to me: COREBlog has got features such as Categories, Trackbacks and - most importantly - Comments.

Actually, it was the Categories that won me over, in the end. (Eventhough SimpleBlog has got those, too...)

Now I can write ahead, whatever comes to my mind without worrying,whether it's "important" enough, or not. I simply assign the relevantcategory and (in theory) it should be then clear for anyone,that whatever I just wrote is perhaps not the biggest current issuein my life, just because it shows up first on my hompeage... ;-)

Another reason, of course, is that Jörg a.ka.a. Der Schockwellenreiter has switched to COREBlog already a while ago and is rather happy with it.

Technically, COREBlog isn't integrated into Plone,so I simply recreated this site's look by creating an additionalskin. Not very elegant, but from the outside you can hardly tellthe difference...

I haven't been able to import more than the last three entriesand currently, the old blog isn't available either... I'm hopingto fix that during the next days, though...

While having a bad cold used to be a pleasant excuse for getting away from it all, back in the days of school, university or employment, these days it's just not an option. Instead of staying in bed for at least three days in a row (literally!) reading books and watching movies and drinking copious amounts of tea with milk I simply gotta try to stay fit.

Which hasn't been that easy... one of the first things I noticed when I moved to Berlin more than ten years ago, is that it's a hell of a lot closer to Novosibirsk than Stuttgart (where I come from).  It used to be, that I wouldn't catch a cold in years... Nowadays I get at least two really bad ones every winter.

Why am I telling you this? I think, I've found a pretty good remedy, that's why! A couple of years ago I read about Linus Pauling and that he recommended high doses of vitamin C. I tried it out at the time, but not for long and didn't notice anything that I didn't attribute to much more than a placebo effect.

Over the years I've taken vitamin C on and off and then not at all. This year I decided to go for it. Ever since mid october I've been taking at least 500mg of vitamin C per day in special capsules that provide a continuously high level rather than releasing everything at once.

And what can I say? No cold so far! That was unusual enough in itself, especially considering that the past two months have been extremely stressful workwise. Also I haven't been eating really healthily and haven't been doing any sports for ages.

Then I became careless and took only one single 500mg capsule in three days. Boom! I caught a cold! That was two days ago. Ever since I've been taking ca 5 grams per day. And today I'm almost entirely well again! I've still got the symptoms and I'm going through my normal cold development (first the aching throat and then the runny nose etc.) but I feel unusally fit during it.

I still don't know, whether it's really true or not, but frankly, I don't care, either... From now on I'll simply take 500mg of vitamin C per day from October through to April. Period. And more, if I'm beginning to feel not so good.

Decide for yourself. I know, I did ;-)

Want to know what the hell I'm talking about? A good example is the comical-sad experience of a man named Tony Hawks - No! NOT THE SKATEBOARDER... Tony Hawks with an S - this guy's got a domain and homepage of his own... and apparently receives a lot of misdirected teenage fan mail that's actually addressed to said skateboarder.

Now, the poor guy makes the best of his predicament and has a jolly good time answering these misguided souls.

Here's an example:

yo whats up your my favorite skater. I'm a beginner i can only do the ollie but i am working on the cannonball. My baord got run over by the mail man but it did not breck. How do you do the kick flip ? I've only been to askate park once and it had a really crapy fun box. I know you've hurt your self pretty bad but i've only thrashed my ankle. yo can you e-mail me back.

Hello there. very good to hear from yo. Sorry to hear about the incident with the mail man. I'm very glad to hear that your baord did not breck. Yo experience in the skate park sounds disappointing but frankly I'm not surprised. Most of them have crapy fun boxes. That's just the way it is. TH

I've always thought, that he was an isolated case. Until recently when I (indirectly) became victim of a very similar mixup.

You see, our son goes to a Kindergarden called Billabong. That's because it's bilingual and because Billabong is, like, a totally cool name? Also none of us at the parent's meeting way  back could be bothered thinking of something better (One word: paperwork). Now, Billabong also happens to be the (brand-) name of an Australian surfgear manufacturer.

Which prompted an aspiring surf professional named Brock to send the following email to our (private) parent's mailing list:

hey, my name is brock and i was wondering, when im ready and good enough how could i get sponsord. Could you please email me back to xxxxxxx@hotmail.com thanks.

to which I answered:

hello brock,

how did you find this address and what exactly is it, that you want?

confused in berlin, tom

which triggered this elaboration:

heya its brock, i told ya man i was wondering could i get sponsord for surfing and i got this web sit of google.com so yeh man could ya tell me how i could if ya could that would be sick thanks catch ya

to which I couldn't help but reply:

dude,

we're a kindergarden, not a surf-shop.