Met up with jzaun in the wonderful old city of Marburg. We had a beer or two, and talked a lot about both differences between life in Europe and the US, our common enemy (companies dictating government policies), studies, and of course open source project work. The bzFlag stats system, as being worked on by him, is very advanced already and we should more or less catch up to that level on the www side of life. Having had a look at pictures of current multimedia applications on Windows and OSX in Keys magazine, we found out that none of these actually comply to any HIGs, and the same applies to games of course. Thus, while GNOME and KDE UI designers should care about the average desktop user, it should not be forgotten that the lack of specialized applications comes from the fact that custom UIs and desktops are not yet well-integrated. (I'm talking not about proprietary applications, those should vanish of course - I'm talking about nice interfaces to powerful free software libraries.)

For checking email later in the day, we've been to an Internet Cafe. The two guys who run the business didn't seem to speak English, and were even less skilled to administer PCs. Equipped with Windows ME, they had neither an alternative browser on it nor could handle 1024 bit cipher suites that certain online banks require. Oh my, they made my day in there :)

On my way back, I ended up in Berlin, watching camels being fed, walking nearby several heavily guarded embassies, and going back home in the early afternoon.