What else is there in this site? Well, it started out as a blog in 2003 and the old blog posts are still accessible in /blog, also sorted into categories. Note that there is a wild language mix. If you know Swedish, you can for example read about one of my observing runs at a big telescope on the Canary Islands.

I have written a few HowTo-texts, product reviews and real-life linux stories. Find them here.

Then there is my picture archive, in case you want to click through gazillions of not generally interesting pictures. And my list of travels. If you want to come visit, there are directions available.

My name is Thomas Marquart and I was born in 1978 in southern Germany, close to Aschaffenburg where I finished secondary school ("Gymnasium"). I studied physics at Heidelberg University and got a masters degree ("Diplom"). During my year abroad I got in touch with the astronomy department in Uppsala, Sweden, where I later applied for and got a position as a PhD-student. In total I have now been living in Sweden for over seven years.

In my free time, I write several blogs, run a one-man company, do photography and enjoy having guests. Via networks such as HospitalityClub and CouchSurfing, I have had over a hundred guests from all over the world, staying at my place for free during the last years, and met many wonderful people.

Language skills:

• German, mother tongue
• English, fluent.
• Swedish, fluent.
• French, intermediate.
• Latin, almost dead.

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Mehr Info hier und ein etwas ausführlicherer Kommentar meinerseits hier.

Förutom två blyga inlägg på den här sidan (för över ett år sedan) och sporadiska bidrag till en "blogg med astronominyheter":http://astromalte.blogspot.com/, har jag nog inte skrivit mycket på svenska.

Det blir dags att ändra på det. Dels för övningens skull. Jag känner mig mycket trygg med att prata svenksa, men allt jag skriver annars är på engelska eller tyska.

Dels också för att jag har äntligen hyfsat bra koll på svenska nyheter och vad som händer i landet. Det beror inte minst på min blogg "_Fiket_":http://www.fiket.de/ där jag skriver på tyska om Sverige och om hur världen (och speciellt tyskland) ser ut från svensk perspektiv.

Jag har åsikter om saker och ting, men det bidrar inte så mycket till sammhällsdiskussionen i Sverige när jag yttrar dem på tyska.

Därför denna återstart på den här sidan.

Except for the regularly extended picture archive, this site is horrendously out of date. I have started thinking about a major relaunch, disentagling the three languages. It might even happen that I switch from drupal to wordpress or joomla.

In any case, something will happen soon.

_Addendum, March 8:_ I cleaned up several things and decided to not give up having this site as a three-language blog. But they can be more easily separated now with the according links above. There are also RSS-feeds for the different subsets.

I also had the gallery-software Coppermine running but never updated it - this is therefore discontinued. However, I introduced the "PhotoBlog":http://thomasmarquart.net/photo instead

Comment spam in blogs is evil and unexcusable. Not enough that I have to take certain measures to keep this site and some other blogs clean, no! Now they have started spamming my picture gallery which uses Coppermine. I turned the anonymous comments off now, so you have to register in case you want to comment pictures there.

Which reminds me that I have to select some good images from the last months and put them there...

Akismet is a service for sorting out spam comments. I have already used this with Wordpress but now there is a plugin for drupal, too. I have it running on this site and it seems to work nicely. Your occasional comment will therefore no longer be held for manual moderation and should appear immediately.

Yay! Adapted from here.

Well, although the images in the winter-gallery keep streaming in, there admittedly has been very little writing here. This may be due to my blog in German that has gained a little momentum recently, mainly because I got a little involved in the discussions about the Mohammed-Cartoons. But I am awaiting the 4.7 release of Drupal and most probably the upgrade will bring a change in layout, too.

My interest in photography had worn off lately and my camera mostly remained in my backpack. Yesterday evening however, I felt like going out and taking night pictures here in Uppsala. Have a look!

In addition, this year's winter gallery is opened and will subsequently grow during the following months. I also added some older galleries that had been forgotten to the picture archive.

I think I'll stop writing in English only and occasionally include texts in German or Swedish. If you only want to see the English texts, simply go to http://thomasmarquart.net/english. The same thing works for German and Swedish texts, but there is not much to see yet :-)

For more information and language-specific RSS-feeds, have a look here.

New feature: All my blog entries are sorted into categories from now on. Read more about it here.

Using the taxonomy module of drupal (the software behind this site), I have classified each blog entry into different categories. This may or may not be useful for you - at least it helps me find my older writings. Each blog entry can belong to several categories. To access only texts from a certain category, click on their names below, or use the link in each entry that shows this entry's category. You find this right below the headline.

If you want, you can combine the category numbers in the URLs with "," or "+". For example /taxonomy/term/3+14 gives you all articles that belong to either of "computers" or "about this site", while /taxonomy/term/2,6 gives you all articles that are in both the "photography" and the "travelling" category. A separate news-feed for each catecory is also available, linked on the RSS-logo. The "+" and "," game can be played for the news-feeds as well and I am sure you can figure it out if you want to.

So here they finally come, in alphabetical order:
about this site
computers
events
movies
music
philosophy
photography
politics
science
social things
travelling
weblink

In addition, I introduced language keywords in order to write in German or Swedish in the future and to be able to split the content for those that only want a specific language:
only English entries
only German entries
only Swedish entries

I just understood the concept of a blog API. Having an external application to post your blog entries is practical. I hope it will make me post more often :-)