I was born on March 16, 1970. I am a native German and Europe is my home. I love my girl friend, “ze boyz” (see the picture on top of this page), movies, books, computer games, soundtracks, Heavy Metal, digital photography, the English language, Italian food and the Spanish islands and main land. I love to write and have dinner with my few good friends while I can watch a river or the ocean. I am a night person, through and through, and I love thunderstorms and heavy rain and snow. It inspires me and fills me with energy, and that’s when I can work best.

Maybe this is yet another blog. But it is the only blog that has the three great cats Pardi, Darce and Hercule as mascots. Their full names are Largo Leopardi d’Asparagus, D’arcy Vaigl and “the professor” Sir Hercule de Montescieux. When they are not acting as stars in their own forthcoming computer game and book, they watch movies with their friend Tim Drums, a bear with a taste for honey and Glenfiddich (not necessarily in that order). Actually, this blog wasn’t planned to be about “ze boyz”, but rather about my own thoughts about everything. But whenever the little guys are around, they get all the attention.

Pardi uses an Xbox 360 with a 24″ HP TFT display at 1920×1200 pixels resolution and loves Half-Life 2, Bioshock and Gears of War. Only after a few minutes into Gears of War, Pardi declared: “I want the same bandanna as Marcus Fenix!”

Darce, while eating serious amounts of original Mozartkugeln and pondering about his career as a politican, uses a Mac Pro with two 20″ Cinema Displays (and shares the 24″ screen with Pardi).

Hercule, lover of British Porridge, uses a 17″ PowerBook G4 and is not growing tired of writing on the second volume of his scientific tome “The bat, its mysteries”.

It seems that their favorite movie of all time is Roman Polanski’s “The fearless vampire killers”. At least that’s the one they watch almost every day. On Sundays, however, they have their traditional steak breakfast with the ultra long version of George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the dead”.

Cat shots are made in Pentax RAW format with an *istDS camera body and a Sigma 18-200 lens, developed in Aperture 2 and post-processed in Photoshop Extended CS3. 2D animation prototypes are quick and dirty made in Flash Professional CS3.

Our programming focus has now moved from BlitzMax to Python, with BBEdit being our favorite editor and Eclipse with PyDev being our preferred IDE.

Our preferred database systems are PostgreSQL and SQLite, both on Mac OS X Leopard.

Sounds are edited in Soundtrack Pro, Propellerhead Reason, Logic Express and Amadeus Pro. For video, we use iMovie and Final Cut Studio.

Our text-tools are Scrivener, Journler, StoryMill, Montage, Mellel and iCalamus. There’s plenty of other stuff as well on our Macs.

We could really need a talented illustrator with love for the great cats here. I can write code, but I suck at graphics. Send me a mail if you are interested and I’ll let you know what the story is.