Early tomorrow I’ll take a train to Berlin for the GTK+ HackFest. I’ll arrive at 14:07 at the Hauptbahnhof [1] and wait for Behdad to arrive a few minutes later, if the trains are on time. Unfortunately, I’ll miss most people because I’m leaving the next evening. But I can only be away for one day and it seems I can be most useful as a German speaker helping to get things set up.
I wouldn’t be that useful later anyway. I don’t really do communal coding. For one thing, it doesn’t work when other people try to show me something quickly and see that I don’t use either emacs or vi on my laptop. I can’t imagine using them and I believe this may be due to some fundamentally different structure in my brain.
I am quite looking forward to the six hour train ride to Berlin. When I regularly did the Munich-Berlin commute it was great for solving bugs that had stacked up and needed some dedicated concentration.
Someone asked me today if I’m a native English speaker. Yes, I am. Ask a German.
[1] I can’t get used to calling it the Haupbahnhof. It’s the Lehrter Bahnhof even if it now looks like a giant ant farm.
What editor do you use? I also don’t use emacs or vim, but I know enough vim to use it if I had to (and I find it pretty useful for doing complicated search/replace sometimes)
Yes, to me te new Hauptbahnhof also just looks like a giant waste of money: Its a giant body. The Spree river had to relocated. The insanly expensive North-South train tunnel didn’t exisit before.
Yes, switching longdistance trains would have been a big pain in Berlin’s old train station concept – but I am not aware many would do that anyway. Settlement in Berlin’s hinterland IMHO is far to sparse to create that need. Well, on the other hand it’s a well know fact, that Hartmunt Mehdorn[1] would prefer running a shopping mall empire, instead of a train shop.
At least the outlook from the station’s shopping mall is fantastic, if you are a fan of Albert Speer style megalomania: You leave your train’s platform at get a perfectly arranged look at the Reichstag.
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehdorn