In the past months a lot of things happened regarding our rats. Yukiko died. We got four young rats, Aki, Kiyoko, Ylvi and Una (Ylvi and Una are special, see our rats page). Together with Kazumi and Jun we then had six rats. But Aki got sick almost immediately, the other young rats got sick as well shortly after, but Aki did not recover and died a week later. Kazumi got cancer and had a operation but recovered very well while Jun got an infection of some inner organs and passed away only two days after we noticed that she was ill.

Same procedure as every year: we were at the Wave Gotik Treffen 2008 and I've put our pictures online.

Our dear rat Yukiko passed away tonight. She had what first appeared to be a small tumor (we only saw it one week ago). But when the vet operated her five days ago it turned out to be much worse. The operation went for two hours and the physical strain seemed to be too high: at first she seemed to recover quite good, but after two days it all went downhill. We were two more times at the vet but the last two days she refused to eat and only drank when we downright forced her. This evening at about 22:00 she finally left. I hope she is doing fine where she is now.

Today I found out that some lame hip-hopper stole my alias (sort of). He's also using DarkDust as his alias which I don't find very funny given the fact that I use that name since 2000. For example, I posted my first comment on SlashDot using the name DarkDust on 11.11.2000. I think I registered my domain darkdust.net in 2002, but I'm not sure about the exact year any more (and Whois doesn't show me when I did register the domain).

At first I was using the Drupal theme "Garland" but I wanted to create my own. The result is what you see right now.

I like the Christmas season. But maybe for different reasons than other people do: I like it because I usually get around doing things for which I usually don't have the time (or don't want to spend my precious time on). This year it's my website (once again): it's finished and today I switched from my old, handcoded site to my new shiny Drupal-powered one.

Well, I tried to do it several times, but now I'm really redesigning my homepage. My last attempts included a rewrite in PHP (in which my original site was hand-coded) and then Ruby on Rails. The later was quite complete, I had almost everything I wanted to have, including a nice gallery and I could edit my pages in a Wiki syntax. However, it was more about learning Ruby on Rails than really doing a new site. I've now decided to do the resign with a CMS instead of coding it myself. With age comes laziness ...