The nominations

Me for removing her network cable earlier in the day to work while my PC was renewed. Later Outlook and IE are not working. Tim asks if I have plugged in the network cable, which of course I hadn't. And previously for for stopping Firefly's deletion of the Irish database after the ENGInE launch with the reason that we still need it for the Dealer Websites (i.e. NONAV).

Tristan "Hightower" Knapp, who enjoyed the most comprehensive training of all when joining the club and who always managed to be in the office just-in-time for lunch, for making all FatWire "dementors" disappear by pretending that he understands 3 of the 4 levels of caching, for logging dependencies, where there are none and for his undoubtedly expert knowledge of Bundesliga soccer (although he still keeps putting the ball under the arm and starts running).

Lebas Ludovic and the rest of the FatWire team for mystifying the intuitive, confusing the obvious, concealing the apparent and for four wonderful levels of caching, which we still don’t understand, but impresses us immensely! And no, we still don’t understand the difference between a bug and a limitation.

Christian “who loves you babe, where is my lollipop Kojak” Hausen and Alex “Obelix” M. for proving that "remote access" actually can make employees such as Reiner more productive, especially when exploiting that Window-L hack.

Gerda-Marie "Trinity" for her incredible talent in creating worms, viruses and other very nasty softlets (new buzz word) on development which crash servers intermittently, unexpectedly and mercilessly, confusing other developers, while looking innocuously throughout the room saying “Siggi we have a session issue on Prod Management”. And also for deleting the wrong site and actually deleting the mothersite.

Alex “Boom-Boom” Seyder for secretly setting his layouts and wrappers to cached and un-cached on various environments, rewriting urls and redirecting us to places we no man has gone before. A true trekkie.

Guillaume, "I think we will have wine with the fish", for introducing table manners and dining culture to the FORD canteen, for savoring every experiment of the canteen like it was fois gras, for looking like you understood us when we were babbling german and for winning the "I almost understand FatWire" award.

Maren for improving our job security, by training others for our jobs on an unspecified location on an unspecified continent, which will not be named, but should only be referred to under the code name “India”. Maren – jokes aside – no hard feelings from any of us I am sure – one should never shoot the messenger.

Tim Bailey “the Mechanic”, for screwing up QA and PROD. And for just screwing up. Don’t you know that art is only to look at and that you shouldn’t touch it? And also for setting his alarm wrong and missing his flight, then almost doing it again the following week.

Heike “shortstop” for her capability of streaming information at such an incredible rate that most of us ended with a buffer overflow before even beginning to understand what she was asking us, and still being able to interject “I don’t understand it”, “It doesn’t work” and “I can’t do it” 22 times into a single sentence.

Anke Hoffmann, for promoting, demoting, accessitating (no, that isn’t a word), processing, TD-ing, hmmm… really no reason for nominating you – screw up more often and you’ll have a chance Anke!

Stephan Barfknecht “the Roaster” for asking “läuft das Band”, even though he is reading Wikipedia’s newest entry for “coffee roasting”while simultaneously writing XSS exploits for Heise’s forums. And for mobbing and for his incredible soft-skills. Where is Stephan? Did he mention why he isn’t here today?

Winni, for spending countless hours transferring byte value 0 from DEV to QA, and subsequently to PROD, after tireless testing on QA to ensure that 0 really is 0. Of course, first waiting for Anke to promote the issue, after Anke also was secure in the fact that 0 is 0 and also tested the issue. For suffering through all Ford processes, following them to the letter and number, displaying incredible dedication to the obtuse, frustrating, and but still necessary processes, and being the best Clark Griswald there has ever been…

Ingo, for giving us Achmed (chhh chhh you said Akmed) and “do you have a flag?”, his undying support for the 1 FC Hennes, for his love for multiple individuals for whom he is inspired to say “Schätzelein!” and for his own line in the Ardennes, which he calls “Categories”. Actually, he is the inspirer for the Jeff Vader award and should be respected as such. And yes, the hair color is natural if you were asking yourself.

Reiner Harth, for his incredible talent for showing up (fashionably) late for almost every Tuesday meeting, with a full cup of coffee and a note from his mother, why he was late; for challenging multiple people with his innovative F+S data model and for that very impressive wide-screen display on his desk. And then of course for his extraordinary efforts operating two keyboards at the same time and his outstanding contributions in identifying the "Windows-L" hack.

Mikheil. For being the most optimistic user of a broken data model, that I have ever seen, defending Java and Eclipse to the point of no return, and to being one of the most capable and chaotic developers I have ever met… With emphasis on capable – ok you are officially disqualified for the Jeff Vader award. Klugscheißer ;)

Paul getting stopped at customs and spending half the day with men with rubber gloves.

Christian falling off his bike

Rainer not telling anyone about getting married