Author Archives: Nils

About Nils

By day, Nils Jeppe is a 37 years old service- and project manager in the IT industry. By night, his secret identity as a world builder, writer, and cartographer is revealed and his feverish imagination roams the multiverse in search of interesting worlds that he then documents on his blog, Enderra.com. You can follow Nils on Twitter.

A few of My Ancestors

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Thanks to Herbert, we now know two more generations of my personal ancestors – on my father’s side – though any connection to the Jeppes he is researching remains unknown and – at the moment – actually fairly unlikely.

Jürgen Jeppe’s – my father’s – ancestry currently stands like this:

  • Jürgen Jeppe, Parents: Paul Alois Jeppe + Irmgard Elisabeth geb Fiebrandt
  • Paul Alois Jeppe: Father: Christian Gustav Heinrich Jeppe, 1885-1979
  • Christian Gustav Heinrich Jeppe: Father was Johannes Matthias Jeppe

We really don’t more yet, but considering a few years ago I didn’t even know my grandfather’s full name this is quite a bit of progress!

Thank you Herbert!

Videogame One-Line Reviews

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Played a bunch of videogames lately.

  • Mass Effect: One word: Awesome. Best CRPG I have played in a long time, only topped by its sequel.
  • Mass Effect 2: Beyond awesome; an absolute must.
  • Solar 2: Beautiful. Kind of cool. But also a little too hard, and fairly pointless. A toy rather than a game. Buy it cheaply.
  • Civilization 5: Good evolution of the franchise, way too buggy. Wait another year, then buy a discount version when the glaring stability issues have been fixed (hopefully).
  • Dwarfs! Very fun but a little on the simplistic side. Again, buy it cheaply.
  • Plants vs Zombies: One of the best Tower Defense games ever. Must have.
  • Universe at War: Earth Assault: Very fun, but crashes so often it is a definite “do not buy”.
  • Nexus: The Jupited Incident: Old game, looks like publisher is defunct. The game is a space strategy sim a little similar to Homeworld. Very fun game so far.
  • Torchlight: Fun Diablo clone. Buy it cheaply.

Of these, you absolutely must get the two Mass Effect games. Play part 1 before the sequel, even if the sequel is vastly superior: Many of your choices in ME1 will affect quests and conversations in ME2.

Housekeeping, HOUSEKEEPING!

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I am finally tired of the chaotic structure (viva la oxymoron) pf this, and some of my other weblogs and I decided to go ahead and clean them up. The Blog Cleaning to end all Blog Cleanings.

What I thought would be an easy task, isn’t. In itself, the technical aspect of it, it’s really trivial. If there are no comments on a posting, I can just copy and paste it; otherwise I have to do some import and export magic. Really, no matter.

But what I found to be incredible difficult is to rip apart my history of blogging. I’ve posted some stuff on here that’s really superfluous. people really need to know I ordered ADSL in Frankfurt nine years ago?

Then there’s some stuff I’d probably not post today – nothing really bad, just… not perfect for a site any potential customer, a future employer (no, I am not looking…), girlfriend (I am still not looking, I am using these as examples, don’t hit me honey! *ouch*), or any total stranger could look up. For example, I used to have a neighbor who liked to undress at the window. It’s there, in a bemused posting I made way back when it wasn’t even socially acceptable to call a blog a blog.

Then there are potentially harmful postings. Example: A rant ridiculing the ITIL fashion. Yeah, seven years ago you didn’t need ITIL if you had some common sense. But I’m now a project manager and service manager. I understand that ITIL is a reference that saves people from having to come up with that stuff themselves, and it provides for a common ground and terminology. But reading that old blog posting could give a potential employer a completely wrong impression of myself. I need ITIL as a tool and, more importantly, I need – and my employer needs me to have – ITIL as a badge to show off to my customers. So I actually “parked” this post already.

Another case are posts I really do not have any other home for. I could move my book reviews to my new Kindle blog, but then what about my DVD reviews? Shouldn’t I just keep them all together? I don’t want to start a reviews blog, really. A similar situation for my tech posts (though I have a solution for those), or my travel posts, or the ones about RIFT and World of Warcraft. And if I move all of these, my personal blog will have very little “meat” left.

A final and very special example is a post about Wizard of the Coast’s search for a new setting. It’s just a snippet, really, but it’d perfectly fit in with my world building blog. Except – That post is from 2002 and my world building blog started in 2008. Do I really want a lone post from the past in there? Doesn’t seem to be very useful.

I haven’t really figured out a good solution yet. I don’t want to delete too much. In a way, this blog and its ten year history are dear to me. And once you destroy data, you won’t get it back.

I think I must consider this matter in greater depth before I go ahead.