First things first

Hello World!

I decided to start this "Healthy Geek! :-)" - Blog in order to share tips and tricks in programming and daily life with as many people as possible. I hope this will become a friendly, useful and much loved meeting place for you and me.

Starting a new Blog is never easy. There are a couple of things that attract/upset people right at the beginning. So, probably the best way to deal with that is to address some critical topics right at start.

Some words about Blogger.com. One of the tricky decisions one has to make, is to decide for a Blogengine. I decided to use Blogger.com, mainly because it is very easy to use and maintain. Blogger allows me to concentrate 100% on blogging, without having to worry about trends and features in future or to maintain a server infrastructure myself. It is 100% free of charge. Of course, one can say the same about many other Blogengines, but knowing that Blogger is owned by a monstercompany such as Google gives it an additional bonus in popularity. Besides that, I definitely like the geeky history of blogger very much!

Some words about Advertising. Adverts in Blogs or on webpages in general are very argumentative. Here is my point of view:

1. It is essential to understand how the world we live in works. Firms with useful (and sometimes very unuseful) products decide to spend a lot of money for the promotion of their products. Their success significantly depends on advertising.
2. The internet has become one of the most important platforms for this purpose.
3. Innovative firms such as Google (whether you like Google or not, I have to tip my hat to the ideas the people working at Google have had and have implemented so well!) have created context-driven advertising systems (in the case of Google it is called AdSense), which makes it possible to automatically display adverts of products that match with the content of a website (the more content on a website, the better the matching). The impact of such clever technology on our daily life is maybe even bigger than we are aware of.
4. I peronsally decided to jump on this train and to allow advertising on this blog, with the hope that the adverts will lead people to other interesting websites with products they really are interested in! If you never heard about AdSense, I recommend to research it, it might be useful for your own Webpage/Blog too!

And finally, some words about myself. My name is Josua Hönger, I live in Switzerland and I am working as a programmer (mainly C++, MFC, C#, HLSL) for Green Hippo Ltd., London. Please check out my CV for more information about my education and career.
Since May 2005, I am happily married. Besides working, my wife and I enjoy dancing, swimming, travelling and cooking as our common hobbies.