From the monthly archives:

August 2006

Chopin Vodka

30 August 2006

MamaMaus was on a 3-day business trip to Warsaw (the business was only one day, but extra activities and stupid connections meant she was gone 3 days), but unlike her numerous Munich trips, she brought home a nice present… a bottle of Chopin Vodka. The coolest thing about it is the packaging.

There you can see [...]

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Skipping School

28 August 2006

I doubt if Christopher’s first day of first grade on Saturday will be anything like this

Ah, the first day of school. Catching up with friends you have not seen all summer. Hoping that none of your teachers assign homework on the first day of school. Dreaming of the first snow [...]

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Pennant Race

27 August 2006

The last few times we’ve visited the States, a highlight for Christopher has been a baseball game, a visit to the “big stadium”, as he puts it. We first took him to see Tampa Bay when he was 3, and a year later he still remembered the stadium when we saw it from the freeway. [...]

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Nico Ballmer

25 August 2006

My employer has posted a recruiting video for web developers featuring my boss Nico on YouTube. I hope developers will come work for us anyway. (You can get by without German, and the office is in Cologne, the second nicest city in Germany.)

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MacBook Blue Screen

24 August 2006

My MacBook wouldn’t wake up this morning, and worse than that, it wouldn’t even start. It would chime and get stuck on a blue screen, the default background color (nicer than Windows blue screen), similar to the problem described here.

I started from the Install DVD, and after that the installed system started up just fine, [...]

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Captain Christopher

24 August 2006

No, that’s not a GPS navigation system on the dashboard, it’s a fish locator.

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The Captured Flea (or The Prisoner Fled)

21 August 2006

You might think German is such a precise language, with all the genders and spellings for noun cases, that capitalizing nouns is a waste of time. Not so… bronksi.net has some examples involving birds, spiders, blisters and fleas of why it’s important to mind the capitalization.

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Ciao Bella Open Air

19 August 2006

Just 24 hours after our return to Germany, our neighbor is holding an open-air concert in his farmyard, with the band Ciao Bella touring from Texas. We’ve never had any concerts in Lüllau that I can recall.

Maybe I should offer not to report the noise to the police in return for free beer.

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Back Again

18 August 2006

We’re back in Germany, in body if not yet in spirit. The brain takes a couple of days to catch up.

Our return with Northwest Airlines was a mixed bag. Internet check-in and seat selection is cool. Flying 25-year-old DC-10s in this day and age is not. We arrived 3 hours before take-off, taking the travel [...]

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My Brother Dave

11 August 2006

By the way, my brother’s name isn’t really Dave.

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It could be worse, it could be raining…

11 August 2006

For our return flight to Germany next week, not only do we have to worry about flight attendants creating CHOAS for Northwest Airlines but now we can no longer carry liquids in our carry-on luggage. It seems you don’t actually have to commit a terrorist act to disrupt airline travel, merely talking about it within [...]

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Wherever we go, that’s where we are

4 August 2006

Christopher fishing with Grandpa on his first day in Minnesota (direct link).

I’ll have to take back all the bad things I’ve said about Northwest Airlines. Our flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis was our best flight ever to the States. The A330 is comfortable even in coach, and the entertainment system kept Christopher well occupied. And [...]

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We’re Outta Here

2 August 2006

We’re almost gone. We have a 6 am flight out of Hamburg in the morning, so we have to set the alarm for 3:30 or so. But with only one connection (our bet that NWA would keep flying paid off), we get to Minneapolis at 11:45 am, so we’ll have the whole day in front [...]

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Men Not Working

1 August 2006

NY Times: Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job. “Millions of men… between 30 and 55 have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work”, choosing instead [...]

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Immersion

1 August 2006

We’re getting ready for our trip to the States, and given that it was 103°F (with humidity to match) at the lake on Sunday (where it’s supposed to be cooler than in town), we’ll be packing very light. Good thing the weather broke on Monday… it should be down to 85°F by the time we’re [...]

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