TroubleZone.Net

.. hidden by the stormy light, a battle rages for the right for what will become..1

Alright guys,

been here for about 5 years now and I always hated Microsoft’s Windows XP. Oh, I hated it so much.. One might ask why and IMHO the answer to this question is pretty simple: Phoning home.

Yes, I don’t like this. I don’t like this, because the idea that someone tracks my habits. So, I never ever wanted to install that OS onto my hard disk.

But on the other hand I had my Windows 2000 Professional2, lacking support for Dual-Core-CPUs: everytime I printed a page and afterwards turned off the device, I got a BSOD3 telling me about a “BAD_POOL_CALLER” which actually shouldn’t happen when SP4 and UR1 are installed..

So, I had the choice: waiting for Vista Home Premium and ignoring the BSOD till its release or switching to Windows XP.. – I’ve choosen the latter and now, after 5 years, I have to rectify my opinion about this OS.. Damn, this kicks ass..

Lastly, if everything goes on as expected, there will be a special Xmas-present for all Firefox-lovers out there..

Cheers,
Martin..

1. DragonForce — Valley Of The Damned [↩]
2. With latest Service Pack #4, Update Rollup #1 and the most recent drivers installed. [↩]
3. Short for: “Blue screen of death” [↩]

.. To save us from the master of all evil sign1!

Alright, time for some news.. Yes, the sidebar shows it already — nearly all remaining bugs are fixed!!
Only some graphical stuff is left to be fixed. But this time, there’s no ETA, but a PTA2. So, Firefox V2 2.2 will be available by the end of this month.

Everything else3 will be published afterwards, so stay tuned!

Cheers,
Martin..

1. Taken from “Black Winter Night”, a song from my new favorite power metal band: DragonForce [↩]
2. An abbreviation created by myself, short for “Promised Time of Arrival” [↩]
3. News about my personal life, job, etc. [↩]

Hey guys!
Yes, the page is very buggy if you’re browsing my blog with IE1.. And yes, I know that the blog shows up for about 2 or 3 seconds and then IE switches to its “Page could not be found”-error page.. — But that’s IE, so what did you expect?

More seriously, the problem is inside the new, flash-driven counter2 and I’m in close contact with one of the inventors to fix this issue.
Meanwhile, you could try an alternative piece of software which is worth a download.. – Honestly, you won’t ever want IE back after giving it a try!

Lastly, I’d like to mention that I’ve finally found an apprenticeship training position as a student3 and after 2 years of training, the apprenticeship will be finished and I’ll be a “technical assistant of information technology”4.

Cheers,
Martin..

1. That’s really funny, because you’re mostly looking for my “Firefox V2”-theme, aren’t you? [↩]
2. A service kindly provided by FlashCounter.com which offered the first Flash-based counter ever! [↩]
3. Not an university-one, but sort of a vocational school-one.. [↩]
4. In plain language: software developer.. [↩]

.. a lost fallen angel, helping mankind where I can1

But since a couple of weeks I’m asking myself one single question again and again and again and […]: Why is it me?
I’m talking about stuff, I’m hardly able to describe — so many fears, sorrows and so much pain, too. I’ve never ever won a prize2 and still I’m the one who has to pay for it.3
No, no, I don’t want to whine or cry all the day and even in the night — I’m far beyond that point, quite close to the “OK, my life is pure shit — but I won’t look down and give up!”-point.
At least I thought so.. At least until last Monday.. At least as long as my mind wasn’t shattered.. — But then Monday morning came and with it the mailman who gave me a registered mail. Damn, I’d have been better off staying in bed.. :x

The letter was from the university4 and the examination board wrote that my request for a second resit has been declined..
This isn’t a big thing for me as I started studying because I wanted to know if my skills are good enough for it. But my apprenticeship is bound to the studies, so in other words: no second resit, no studies, no apprenticeship — and here in Germany it’s quite hard to find an apprenticeship for people who want to train as a software developer..

Some of you might say “Tough luck!”, that I didn’t learn enough or things like that. But in fact, I did my best and therefore I think I should get paid5. Unfortunately, life didn’t pay back so far..

Anyway, as stated above, I’m not a man who whines — instead, I bear misery, keeping my dreams in mind for the day they will come true6 and as long as I get knocked down by life, I will stand up, again and again and again and […]

Theme development was on hold for a while now — it’s time for going on, right?

So, stay tuned, because I’m going to continue my work since I’ve seen people using my theme7!
Cheers,

Martin..

1. Yes, another quote and of course it’s a Helloween song: “The Invisible Man” [↩]
2. Only the junior-edition of Trivial Pursuit when I was about 10 or 12.. [↩]
3. And I can’t remember a different situation.. :x [↩]
4. As you might know, I’m studying at an university of cooperative education. So it’s not a fully-qualified university.. [↩]
5. With “paid” I mean some “prizes” which I (in my humble opinion) deserve and not “plain” money.. [↩]
6. And they will, for sure! [↩]
7. This is really a source of power for me: discovering people using the stuff I’ve created. [↩]

.. for just a little sign1

The meaning of this blog was actually always (more or less) kind of a “diary”2. But that changed rapidly, because the possibilities WordPress offers are absolutely amazing3)!

So I had the idea of creating a new project — but the core, the headline, was missing. Then, while snugly “wandering” through the Web4, I had a sudden inspiration:
All these websites5, forums and also blogs are frequently talking about problems of people with the Web or at least with technology in general6.

So what about a blog which talks about those “simple” problems we’re all experiencing, almost every day, again and again? — Boom, there it was, the “bright idea”, the “troublezone”!
But I also wanted that the people should know the basic idea when they saw the domain name and that it’s more about “technical troublezones” of our lives than social ones.
Thanks to the “InterNIC Domain Name Registration”7 finding a suitable “domain ending”8 wasn’t really difficult.

Due to I’ve got a weakness for wordplays, the domain name should include such a wordplay. My blog is about problems with the Web, like a “virtual zone”, so it was quite simple: TroubleZone, with a capitalized “Z”9 — The “TroubleZone.Net” was born10!

So far,
Martin..

1. “Just A Little Sign” is a song made by the German Power Metal-band “Helloween”. [↩]
2. That’s the original meaning of blogs. [↩]
3. Without plug-ins, it would be just boring.. ; [↩]
4. I got something like a “street”, which I run down every day while browsing the “World Wide Web”.. [↩]
5. The German word for “websites” is the same, but some stupid guys created another word, “Webseiten” which is kind of an “English-German-mix” and I simply *hate* such word deformations! [↩]
6. For example: bugs, viruses, spam and so on. [↩]
7. That’s the registrar for “.net”-domain names. [↩]
8. From the technical view, the term “Top-Level-Domain”, short “TLD”, is correct. [↩]
9. That’s for underlining the big topics of my blog: troubles in the technical zone, mainly the Internet. [↩]
10. More details can be found at the “The Journey”-page. [↩]