Well, what a headline! Full of energy and still kind of energy-conscious, full of nature and still kind of technology-centric, serious stuff and still fun. Let me explain...
As most of you probably know, my familiy is living in a passive house (very low energy house). The Winter in Germany has been long and cold and everybody spent a good chunk of money on heating. Everybody? It turns out that even though our entire house was heated throughout the Winter, we only consumed a little bit more than the year before. Yesterday evening I checked the energy meters (still not smart meters) and we are on track on being only less than 5% higher consumption for heating than last year. We will see the result around mid of July.
After some really warm weeks it is cloudy, rainy, windy, and chilly outside. Seems like the so-called ice saints have an early arrival (this is a weather pattern caused by warm land masses and still cold ocean in Northern Europe). Speaking of wind and clouds: Google just invested in windmills and IBM is buying Cast Iron for cloud integration.
What is left? DB2 and the nice prizes. IDUG started a contest "Do you DB2?" where - if you are based in North America - you can win a Wifi-enabled HDTV or an iPad. To win you need to tell your personal DB2 story. Running a DB2 server in a passive house is probably not a good story ("with product X the house keeps warmer than running DB2 because more CPU cyles are burned and more disks are needed for X and hence more heating is produced") or is it? What is your story?