From the monthly archives:

December 2008

The Boy is Nine

28 December 2008

We spent much of Christopher’s ninth birthday taking Frauke to the airport (6 hour round trip) for her flight back to Germany, but being able to pick out his present at the Lego Store and the ice cream cake in the evening seemed to make up for the boring drive.

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Merry Christmas

24 December 2008

Merry Christmas from cold and snowy Minnesota!

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The Dremel: An Essential Tool for the International Traveller

22 December 2008

Left: Original Travel Adapter with safety tabs (left and right) to prevent use with grounded plugs

Middle: Modified Travel Adapter with safety tabs removed (using a Dremel)

Right: A grounded plug that can now be inserted into the modified adapter

Note: Use of the modified adapter is not recommended with any essential equipment you don’t want to see [...]

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Snow Chaos

20 December 2008

According to the Hamburger Abendblatt, the entire United States has been hit with snow chaos. Well, we’re flying in on Tuesday, and Christopher is ready! Do you think Grandma will let him play outside dressed like this?

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Kittens on a Slide

13 December 2008

In lieu of actual content, I present Kittens on a Slide, as seen at Andrew Sullivan, and which pretty much describes how I feel about getting work done at the moment.

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Auto Blogroll with Google Reader

9 December 2008

The other day I overheard @AmiExpat and @NewWrldYankee twittering about how annoying it is deal with link requests and keep a blogroll. My solution to that used to be to keep an automatic list of blogs I actually read.

At the time I had a bunch of scripts to do the dirty work (don’t bother looking [...]

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Last Minute Advent Calendar

7 December 2008

The season for advent calendars is going fast, and unfortunately we ordered a few too many “McDonald’s Adventskalender” (with Lindt chocolate and exclusive coupons good at McDonald’s in Dibbersen) to sell at the restaurant. We’ve started selling two for the price of one… i.e. two for 8.49€.

The second Sunday in Advent is of course the [...]

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Swimming in the Adria

3 December 2008

I wrote the following as a guest post for Yankee In A New World, an American studying in Hungary. Reading her blog reminded me of the one time I visited Hungary and that we haven’t seen as much of Eastern Europe as we would like. This is not so much about what we saw as [...]

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Breakfast Awards

2 December 2008

To push the launch of the new breakfast, our McDonald’s North German region held a contest over the past 2 months for all 225 restaurants in northern Germany. Cash awards were given in three categories

Top 10 stores with the best breakfast sales increase Top 3 stores with the best breakfast marketing (as determined by an independent [...]

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Rant

1 December 2008

The first rule of cash security is “you don’t talk about cash security”. But starting today we’re having an armored car pick up our receipts, since with multiple locations it makes no sense to deposit cash ourselves. Now I can finally say what I hate most about my job.

I HATE MAKING BANK DEPOSITS!!! IT TAKES [...]

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