From the monthly archives:

October 2006

Expat Pitfalls

31 October 2006

Slate, “Henry Miller School of Overseas Living for Misanthropes”:

Expat scenes invariably have plenty of writers and artists but a curiously scant quantity of writing and art. This isn’t a new phenomenon: Ernest Hemingway alluded to it in The Sun Also Rises, when Bill Gorton jestingly upbraids Jake Barnes: “You drink yourself to death,” [...]

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The Bastardization of German Culture

30 October 2006

Thanks to the undue influence of American programs in German television, Christopher is insisting that we go trick-or-treating tomorrow night. Super RTL has been running Halloween specials of all their cartoons yesterday and today. He wants to dress as a ghost and collect a sack load of candy. And carve a pumpkin.

I try to tell [...]

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20 km Detour for a Red Light

28 October 2006

One of MamaMaus’ endearing characteristics is how she takes out her frustrations on her car. I admit, it’s annoying at times that when we can’t locate our destination, she tends to drive faster, thus making it more difficult to find our bearings, and with her Audi Quattro she can accelerate quite quickly when she’s mad. [...]

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NPR Berlin

28 October 2006

As reported by Anglofritz, National Public Radio is now broadcasting in Berlin on the old Voice of America frequency (104.1 FM). Most programming comes live from the US with a 6 hour time difference. I wonder if they will do pledge drives.

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Demonstrating Sensitivity

28 October 2006

German Joys has been running a short series on Getting Hired or Fired in Germany. This entry explains the differences between an American “letter of reference” and a German “Zeugnis”. A Zeugnis is required by law to be positive (at least on the surface), but there are a number code phrases that can be used [...]

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Buried Treasure

24 October 2006

Yesterday there were two separate instances in Germany of old munitions being struck by machinery and detonating.

A construction worker was killed in an explosion on the A3 near Aschaffenburg (between Frankfurt and Würzburg). He was scraping concrete about 30 cm deep when he apparently stuck a buried bomb from WWII. Pieces of machinery were thrown [...]

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links for 2006-10-24

24 October 2006

O’Reilly Network — Open Tools for MySQL Administrators (tags: mysql tools admin sysadmin database monitoring administration) The Vegetable-Industrial Complex – New [...]

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Male Bonding

23 October 2006

Christopher and I returned from our long weekend at Legoland Denmark last night. I hear the weather here in Lower Saxony was good, but up in Denmark it rained cats and dogs. Over the 3 days we had exactly 90 minutes of sun. Good thing we decided against the campground and went for the [...]

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Vote!

19 October 2006

My absentee ballot for the November election arrived today. The fine folks at the Maricopa County Elections Department in Arizona are very good in that regard, I don’t even have to request it. The races aren’t all that exciting, Jon Kyl will be easily re-elected to the Senate and the Democrats don’t even have a [...]

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McCafe Elmshorn Reloaded

17 October 2006

(I’m recycling this post from September 2005 for the sake of Creamaid. It’s still interesting since McCafes are not yet being built in the US, so the idea of a coffee bar inside a McDonald’s will be new to a lot of people. It also shows off how to embed a Flickr slideshow in a [...]

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links for 2006-10-17

17 October 2006

Pilot’s Perspective: The Crash of a Yankee – Popular Mechanics (tags: lidle crash nyc via:instapundit.com)

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Make Money At Home With Blogging

16 October 2006

Earn $10 from home! Simply write about McDonalds for your blog. We’ll see if they also take old posts. (via MetaFilter)

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links for 2006-10-16

16 October 2006

How I automated my backups to Amazon S3 using s3sync (tags: backup amazon s3 s3sync rsync) Davids Medienkritik: The Interaction of [...]

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Travel Plans

13 October 2006

I won’t be at the Whiney Expat Meetup in November. MamaMaus needs me to accompany her to her firm’s annual charity auction, this time in Munich. I’ll again need to rent a penguin suit. The next day we’ve been invited to a 100th birthday party. The proprietors of the Naturheilzentrum Drochtersen (there’s a free link [...]

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Internet Killed the Video Star

9 October 2006

When I was in high school in the ’70s, you could only see good music on TV late night on weekends on shows like Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert or The Midnight Special. Some bands started to make little films that went along with their music, and (according to my friends) I said that would someday [...]

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Comeback

8 October 2006

After a devastating injury at her first 10K run in July, MamaMaus today ran 10K at the local Jesteburger Volkslauf. The weather was cool and pleasant, and the route was mostly on soft trails rather than aspahlt. Her goal was 70 minutes, and she hit it almost exactly (70:30). She got a certificate and an [...]

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Google Patriotism

3 October 2006

The German version of Google at google.de has a nice German flag logo to celebrate the Day of German Unity holiday today (as pointed out by Telagon Sichelputzer). However, if you have English set as your language, you see only the normal Google Deutschland logo.

google.de in German google.de in English

The main site google.com doesn’t show a [...]

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links for 2006-10-03

3 October 2006

Where My Team Stands: Minnesota Twins Gleeman parodies himself (tags: twins baseball playoffs aarongleeman piranhas) [...]

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Hans, Are We the Baddies?

2 October 2006

The British have always had a somewhat disturbing obsession with Nazis, but the comedy sketch The Anxious Nazis from That Mitchell and Webb Look is perhaps a sign they are getting over it (translation: it’s both poignant and funny as hell). You don’t suppose they’re really talking about the war on terror, do you? (via [...]

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Don’t Get Pregnant in Europe

1 October 2006

Raskal Trippin wants a logo to warn expat women Don’t Get Pregnant in Europe. She’s had to defend herself for not drinking, avoiding coffee, simply being American, and then there’s the insensitive receptionists:

(We need) an image that effectively communicates to OB/GYN receptionists that the correct response to “I’ve had a positive pregnancy test [...]

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