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Welcome at Germany
(29 Jan 2007 at 11:49) |
Hello everyone! I am in Germany. A common funny idiom here is to say "welcome at _____" (also "welcome in _____" or "welcome on _____") instead of "welcome to _____". That cracks me up every time. Did you ever consider underlining the underscore? It looks like this: ____. Actually it turns out that a lot of people prefer to speak their native language instead of having people like me chuckle at their speakos but I will still laugh anyway since I can't understand what they're saying so what else am I going to do? Getting to Germany like all international travel was a bit painful. I rebroke my glasses on the plane and since superglue is not a TSA sanctioned gel or liquid I had to put them back together using tape from the post office at the airport. Sometimes they fall apart when I'm just sitting there, like they slowly peel off my face like I'd imagine glasses would do if the frames were made of ice and I had a very hot bridge of my nose. That's okay, post office tape means my vision is First Class durch Flugzeug nerdstyle. Yesterday I was so jetlagged or food poisoned that I was up almost the whole night vomiting. I call such traveling sickness/food poisoning La Giardia, ha ha. Now that I am more synchronized with the rising and setting of the sun I think I'm doing okay.
The reason I came to Germany is for this conference on Web Programming, since my thesis project is sort of about web programming now. People here are very concerned with some words that I don't know what they mean, like "ontologies". I guess it is pretty ironic to not know what "ontology" and "semantics" mean. The conference is in a German computer science castle called Schloß Dagstuhl. This castle is way out in basically Nowhere, Saarland. (One of the locals asked us Americans, "What are you doing out in such a village?") I'm not sure I really understand what we're supposed to be doing here, but I think tomorrow when we break out into smaller groups I'll get it better. I prepared a ~30 minute talk about my work but when I got here someone forwarded me an e-mail that I didn't get that said our presentations should be 3 minutes, so I made one of those early this morning and then they changed their minds and said 2 minutes. Here is my 2 minute talk of a 'burning question'. If you don't have Flash 9 then you will probably only see pictures of fire and Skeletor. |
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| Dang, that's a pretty crazy reduction in time. I like the skeletor talk though. |
| Your talks always look awesome. I don't understand them, but I read them anyway because of the pretty pictures. Will you make me a talk for my dissertation defense? You have many months to do this for me. |
Your post made me laugh very much. In fact, I was trying to read the portion about your glasses aloud to my officemate and I couldn't finish. Instead I had to forward him the link.
I hope the rest of your trip turns out much better and you keep us posted on the burning questions that others have. I for one need to see more questions that are on fire!
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| vomit flash macro photography |
My glasses died just weeks before I had to go to Europe. A part actually fell out of my pocket at a movie theatre, so I could not even tape them together, so I had to go and just replace them. (The new ones don't look particularly different.)
That is an extreme time reduction! I hope there is time to find a He-Man costume to go with Skeletor. Good luck with the acronymists. |
| Welcome at OWL/S |
| Mein lookenglasses went kaput on Saturday, but Ich wasn't on ein Flugzeug. |
| Adam: Haha, they keep talking about OWL/S indeed. |
| I hope after you give your log(amount of time you thought you had) long speech they give you exponentially more awesomeness in some other area to make up for it! |
| rob: It looks like I'm going to get a chance to present it tomorrow, after all. Today there were some regular-length technical talks... |
I see on your last.fm profile that you are doing some major haering of the new shins record. what do you think?
PS: I'll be in da burgh on April 29th weekend... |
| K: Good question. I'm listening to it a lot mainly because it's the only album I have with me. ;) My initial impression is that it's good; it has some great songs on it, but on the other hand I miss the non-stop rulingness of Oh Inverted World or the cohesive album flow of Chutes. So in a way it's disappointing for the Shins. But I do appreciate the evolution in sound and it will probably grow on me as Chutes did. |
| s/\//-/; |
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