Welcome to my personal website. My name is Richard Cattien, I was born near Munich/Germany on April 16^th in 1980. Currently I'm studying mathematics at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Everything study related can be found on my study page. The following headlines below "News" indicate some topics I'm interested in.

2008-06-17: Added Contact section

2007-11-05: New design, I hope you like it.

2007-01-21: Added a section for photos

2007-01-02: Added the "too cool for IE" butten at the lower right corner.

2006-11-30: I removed the dynamically generated music stats from the page. If you're still interested, ... they're still availiable directly at last.fm.

2006-02-04: A new and shiny favicon is availiable now as well :-).

2006-02-03: I included my dynamically generated last.fm music charts.

2005-12-31: There's a juggling video availiable now.

Yes, I prefer encrypted email (let's drop the hyphen), please get my PGP public-key. The key may also be found on several keyservers like http://pgpkeys.mit.edu. For those who are unfamiliar with PGP I've collected some helpful links:

• Why emails should be encrypted:
  • Warum PGP? (german)
• PGP software
  • GnuPG, a free PGP implementation
  • official PGP website (USA)
  • official PGP website (international)
• Information
  • PGPi FAQ
  • PGP at Wikipedia (english)
  • PGP at Wikipedia (german)

Another very good solution for encrypted email is Ciphire Mail. Chiphire Mail is much easier to use than PGP and in some ways more secure than PGP.

This website is also accessible via https. Traffic between you and the webserver is encrypted when using https.

Typography: The art and practice of designing type, books and other printed matter according to aesthetic and scientific principles (taken from http://www.redsun.com/type/glossary/t.shtml).

Some intresting links (mostly in german):

• Geschichte der Typografie
• Satzspiegelkonstruktionen im Vergleich
• Gute Typographie auf Papier und im Web
• Die Anmut des Unscheinbaren (Eine dienende Kunst, um die sich der Literaturbetrieb nicht einmal zur Buchmesse kümmert: die Typographie)
• T_EX
• L^AT_EX
• DANTE e.V. (Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung T_EX e.V.)
• TUG (T_EX Users Group)

I use OpenBSD as my operating system. OpenBSD is probably the most secure operating system available today. The best of it all, it's free! Of course there are some drawbacks in using this kind of freakish system as a desktop, there aren't any fancy 3D accelerated games available for it for example, neither flash nor java is working currently (state: Dec. 2004), but on the other hand you get an extremely stable and clean system which just works. Latest news (may 2005) are that I switched to Apples Mac OS X, to combine the best of both worlds, the power of UNIX and the comfort of a commercial desktop environment.

Juggling is one of my favorite hobbies. One thing I learned from juggling is the fact that practice is everything or at least pretty much of everything :-). There's some incredible glow-in-the-dark juggling gear availiable from Aerotech Projects. I created a video of me juggling, it's my first one. If you can't play it you probably need a newer player, in this case Mplayer (Linux/Unix), Mplayer OS X (Mac OS X) or VLC (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows) may be the right thing for you.

If it gets to music, my favorite sound is Goatrance (often also referred as Psychedelic Trance or Psytrance), especially at parties. Of course I listen to many other different kinds of music too (mostly electronic though), but when it comes to dancing, Goatrance fits best to me. To find a party near you, the best place to visit is goabase, an international database of Goatrance parties. The best parties in Europe take place during summertime, often enough at exotic locations such as mountain tops, forests or beaches. Special fluorescent decoration is applied within the party area and illuminated by UV-blacklight, definitely worth a look. If you plan to visit one of those magnificent happenings you might want to check out my Open Air Packinglist.

Listen to Goatrance live from the web, via one of the numerous mp3-streams:

• Philosomatika
• PsyRadio
• Powershout

I've created a more comprehensive list of streams, in case you want to listen to more.

Some pictures I have taken:

• local Soulclipse Festival gallery
• my flickr photos

• Email, the address is at the bottom of this page. (please get my PGP key)
• Instant messaging, here are my fingerprints for OTR encryption. I urge you to use the XMPP protocol, because it's an open standard and similar to email in structure, that means there's no central server which coordinates the communication, which is a big plus.
  • XMPP (Jabber/Google Talk): rickski@jabber.ccc.de
  • Yahoo: rc_rickski
  • MSN: rc.foreign@gmx.net
  • ICQ/AIM: 7875702
• VoIP via Skype: r-ich-ard

I would be pleased if you sign my guestbook (with https).