About Myself

My name is Markus Weissmann and I'm currently doing my M. S. in Computer Science at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of applied Science at Nuremberg in the European Union (Germany). If you want to communicate with me: I'm speaking German, English and French fluently.

Apart from the stuff, that you'll find on these pages, I love arts, technology, books, yoga, philosophy and coffee.

Technology refers mainly to those automata, most often refered to as computers. You will find a lot of stuff about this on my site.

My favorite arts are dancing and music. While ballroom dancing myself (Latin, Standard, Salsa), I very much enjoy listening to music of various kinds, from classical (Beethoven, Mozart) over rock (e. g. George Harrison) to modern dance, pop (James Blunt, ..) and alternative styles (R.E.M.) — nevertheless I do have a rather strong aversion to folk and RnB. Other varieties of art I like are literature, poetry, painting and theather (tragedy prefered) — performing on stage myself from time to time. Also on my list of hobbies are cinematics – though I'm only watching here – preferably with profound story and/or good (e. g. british) humor. Among my favorite movies are Pulp Fiction, Fight Club (to reiterate this: this film is about nihilism and the position of men in pomo, not about violence), The Godfather, American Beauty and Life of Brian.

I'm interested in some philosophical topics, one of which is of course the meaning of life, the universe and everything. The field of theoretical computer science also brings up some mind-boggling questions and facts in this area, e. g.:

The cosmos cannot be modeled by a Turing Machine (though I disagree here)
The unavoidable inconsistency in mathematics
The Church-Turing Thesis - which has not yet found counter-evidence and probably never will

Overlapping with my interest in technology, I'm an evangelist of open standards and open source software in order to give fair opportunities to less wealthy people, who can't afford buying expensive licenses from western software companies (and also to create some competition in the software market). I therefore repulse companies that fight open source and discriminate third world countries. By using open standards, we give the third world the opportunity to actively bring themselves to the information age. Most people don't recognize that they cause harm on the less fortunate by using closed standards in fundamental stuff like web-browsing, e. g. the Internet Explorer. Every internet site that because of this will get optimized for IE is a closed door for those who simply can't afford the Windows operating system. (Software piracy is not the solution to this problem!)

Last but not least: The coffee part is considered being rather self-explanatory. Not to mention that - like most human beings - I of course enjoy undertakings with friends.

I very dislike superstition (e. g. astrology), conformism, fundamentalism, egocentrism, violence, ignorance and stupidity despite better knowledge. Of course I also condemn extreme violence, as war and the death penalty.

Last not least, if you encounter serious spelling or grammar mistakes, drop me a note. As my mother tongue is German, please blame my english professor Thomas Huke for them.