Sprachduo and Kulturkueche

Uncategorized

At the weekend I heard about a couple of interesting websites:

SprachDuo: Helps, for instance, an English-speaker learning German in Munich to find a German-speaker who wants to learn English, to practice conversation. They do other languages too. This would have been very useful when I arrived in Munich.

Kulturkueche: Reviews and interviews from a group of independent/aspiring writers in Berlin and Munich who pooled their work to promote their talents.

Presidential Debate 2

Uncategorized

Tomorrow I'll be in Munich, where I have no english-language TV channels, but I've managed to find somewhere to watch the second US Presidential debate when CNN repeats it at 10:00am.

Also, my dedicated associate learned from one of the Munich For Kerry people last night at Cafe Puck's, that the Amerika Haus will have an election night event on November 2nd, so I might not need to rent a hotel room just to watch the coverage, but I don't see it on their schedule.

Presidential Debate 1

General

I watched the Kerry v. Bush debate on BBC World last night at 3am with Daniel Elstner at my place in Berlin. I was glad that Kerry made the key points about deception and incompetence, and when I looked at the repeats close-up I saw that Bush backed up the incompetence theme quite well with the bizarre blinky village-idiot look.

I'll be in Brno again next week.

The Office

General

I recently finished watching the 2 series of The Office on DVD. I thought I'd catch up on some British TV culture, because I haven't seen anything after The Fast Show. But I can't really enjoy it. I grew up with these thames-corridor/west-country/estuary accents and they still grind my nerves. And I can't think of anything in the show that I haven't actually witnessed in real workplaces over the years. It's all too horribly real. The familiar shots of car parks and roundabouts in the opening titles make me so glad that I escaped.

Also, I am Tim.

Back from Brno

General

I’m back in Berlin after a week in Brno, in the Czech republic. We had almost no chance to see anything but the inside of a meeting room. Our hotel was so far away that it was in Austria, past the border crossing. I’ll probably be back there next week, and in Munich at the weekends.

IMGP0349I am quite glad to be missing Munich’s Oktoberfest this year. It’s boring and it’s violent. If they had Guinness instead of dull dull Helles then I might see the point.

Linux phones

General

This Interview with the CEO and CTO of E28 is fascinating to me. You might not have heard of E28, but they are a chinese daughter company of one of the established Taiwanese designer/manufacturers, and have deals with others in Taiwan. Taiwan (and probably mainland China) is the present and future of mobile phone design, and they are heavily into Linux.

I look forward to seeing these open APIs one day. I'm particularly interested in how they integrate/abstract the various implementations of the various proprietary audio and video codecs, which probably all need to be licensed individually.