« November 2006 | Main | January 2007 »
December 30, 2006
Döner on Greifswalder Str.
Somewhere on the German autobahn, we overtake a Robben&Wientjes rental truck. The girl next to me in the car smiles. The rental truck is one of the many small icons that people connect to a city they adore.
2000 hours, arrival in the capital. Half an hour later, I buy my first
Döner Kebap at Greifswalder Straße, price 2 EUR. On my way
back, I pass a long queue of people in front of a club with large
dark glass windows and a number of home-made posters announcing this
night's DJ. Slim women, dressed in dark colors, they show no legs: it
is cold tonight in Berlin.
Pretentiousness? Not here.
Posted by dr at 11:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 18, 2006
Freedom is under attack
Henry Rollins, punk singer/songwriter and now a TV personality, doesn't hold back about growing surveillance and regulation, particularly in the states. Those protecting the U.S. constitution want everything but freedom, it seems. Watch the two-minute stunt Rollins: Freedom is under attack.
Posted by dr at 1:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 9, 2006
Big Bicycle Lights
A quick 5.5 mile bike trip to the train station turned out to be 11 miles or so in the dark, not being able to see road signs with my minuscule bike light. (I missed that train.)
Posted by dr at 11:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 4, 2006
Alois Kapfer, 16-Feb-1916 - 03-Dec-2006
Up until two weeks ago, Alois Kapfer, aged 90, would drive to the
grocery store, fetch fire loggs, climb apple trees in fall and,
occasionally, make a door or a shelf out of wood in his carpenter's
workshop. He was the last person I knew who experienced World War II
as a soldier, spending ten years in his military service, driving a
mobile kitchen on a horse-drawn carriage in Russia. Even 60 years
later he still knew how to said "bread, please" in Russian. Apart from
that, Alois Kapfer spent all of his life as a carpenter in a small,
provincial village called Demmingen in rural Germany, near the
Bavarian border. With his wife he lived in a large estate surrounded
by fruit trees, with a small barn where sheep and chickens used to be
kept. His life dream of being a farmer had come true in some way.
Alois Kapfer left his wife and a family of four children and eight grand-children, one of them me.
Posted by dr at 11:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 1, 2006
Computer gibberish #1
When dealing with an internet domain name registration today, the website of UK-based internet registry Nominet greeted me with this informational message:
You cannot change the legal registrant for a domain using this systems, that needs a registrant transfer.
Do you understand it? I don't. At least unless I try really hard.
It's a fantastic example of how some programmer got not only the spelling ("this systems"), punctuation ("," instead of "."), but also wrote this without his audience in mind. What's a "registrant transfer", and why is it different from changing the legal registrant?
I know what they really mean - but why on earth do they expect a random visitor to understand this computer-gibberish?
I quoted this in an e-mail to the Nominet support, asking them if anyone speaks English in their company. A Michael L got back to me: "Please could you confirm the domain name, the Nominet service you were using and what you were trying to amend and I will be able to advise further."
I don't think he got the point.
I've created a new category in this blog - entertaining you readers with occasional findings. It's not so much the occasional spelling mistake that drives me crazy. It's the fact that people don't think about who is supposed to read things. And that's what I'd like to point out occasionally. Feel free to correct my English.
Posted by dr at 6:12 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack