if you can watch german tv, you probably came across one of those emigrant-series, which are quite popular at present. the plot of every episode is nearly the same: a couple or family want’s to start a new life in a foreign country and therefore has to leave all behind. in many cases they have had enough of germany, are frustrated of their current job situation or their salary progression. with the dream of a better life in mind the breadwinners quit their jobs, sell all their disposable belongings and plan how to transfer their remaining stuff to their new home.

the whole story get’s interesting when the folks arrive at the new place. in many cases everything seems quite different to what they had expected earlier. the language barrier for instance is one of the reasons for quite a few problems. it becomes even serious for those families with only basic language skills and no assured job or income. in this context it really hurts to see, how naive some of them could be to think that all will work out without fundamental preparation. but there are also a number of really successful and impressing stories which demonstrate as well that you can achieve a great deal if you are willing to take some risk.

one of my good friends is in a comparable situation right now. he has left germany and moved with his wife from bonn to washington dc in the us. in his blog he documents his experiences in the form of a field report which is far more interesting and entertaining than the above mentioned tv series. try out the stories about the hollywood principle for finding a job or the garbage disposal…

hey, ever wanted to get rid of your headset and use your mobile device for skype? last year i came across an application, which looked promising, but was really crap.

the piece of software i talk about is called im+ for skype. it let’s you conntect your device with your local pc, where skype is installed, over a mobile data connection. so in order to use it your pc has to be turned on, your skype must be up and running and your firewall has to accept incoming connections. what a miserable situation!

now i discovered a way better solution: with fring, you can use your mobile device to make voip-calls not only to users of skype, but also to googletalk, msn and sip endpoints. after you have installed a small mobile application (which was quite easy and well guided) you are ready to use your skype account without the need of further pc software. i have used it with my local wlan on a nokia e61 and it works quite perfect. you even don’t need a fast mobile connection like umts, because fring consumes only about 8mb for a 60 minutes voip-call and about 10kb (!!) per hour connectivity.

as you probably know, second life is one of the most famous virtual communities of today. and as i wrote some time ago, there is also an evolving virtual economy which significantly affects real life businesses. therefore many well known companies (i.e. adidas, toyota, sony and ibm) started a virtual counterpart.

but the last thing i expected was that the company i work for gets to second life as well, because i could’t really think of a useful application. but an email, which reached me today, quickly disabused me. now there is also a quite impressing equivalent of the deutsche post in second life

you can send a post card of your avatar’s face or some other theme via second life to a real world address. i don’t know if this is really useful, but it’s a quite cool idea