Cultural Observations

One of my favorite sayings is "Yesterday's failed foreign policy is today's ethnic cuisine." (Credit must go to Steve Kenny for that one). There are a bunch of vietnamese restaurants in the twin cities that stand testament to the veracity of this statement. In Düsseldorf, I noticed a couple McDonald's, and realized that they were also supporting evidence. Germany's foreign policy initiatives in the late 1930's and early 1940's certainly didn't work out, and now they have to live with McDonald's and Burger King. For my part, I certainly prefer egg rolls to french fries.

Düsseldorf

Molly, the girls, and I are in Düsseldorf. We've been staying with my host brother from a high-school exchange program from 20 years ago, who has most graciously invited us to stay with him and his girlfriend in their small apartment in Düsseldorf. Laurel is more-or-less bilingual, at least as much as a 4-year-old can be, and she's had no trouble speaking with them. Perhaps more impressively, she's also had no trouble speaking with my host brother's parents, who speak almost no English at all. Maybe this bi-lingual thing is proving to be worth the effort after all. It'll be interesting to see how she behaves in Edinburgh - she'll probably have a much harder time understanding a scottish brogue than she does understanding Deutsch. I know I will...

There's also an interesting cultural thing going on with money. My host brother seems to feel like he's being rude if he's not paying for everything (since we're his guests, and he wants to be a generous host), and I feel like I'm being rude if I don't offer to pay for everything (since I'm his guest, and I feel like I'm being an imposition and creating hassles for him). We've had a couple short but amusing arguments
Host brother: "Ich werde dafür bezahlen."
Me: "Quatsch - ich bezahle!"
Host brother: "Doch!" and whips out a banknote
Me: "Stell das zurück, ich möchte bezahlen!"
Host brother hands banknote to the cashier, and I give up.

At least he let me pay for the ice cream outing on our last day, when I pointed out that my euros weren't going to do me any good in Edinburgh, and I may as well get rid of them here.

On being a rock star

We're doing a mini-tour of northern europe - really, just Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, and Edinburgh. I'm attending the IASSIST 2005 conference in Edinburgh, but we're trying to give the girls a little bit of the flavor of some decidedly non-USA places. That said, in Amsterdam, Laurel needed a bit of comfort food. I couldn't stomach the idea of going to McDonalds (literally), and so instead we went to the Hard Rock Cafe, which is at least an epsilon less offensive than american fast food. There were videos running on TVs on the wall, which Laurel found interesting. She was watching a video and then turned to me and said "You're in a band, right, Daddy?" I said "yes, I'm in a band called Daisy Cutter." She smiled and said "You're a rock star, daddy!", and went back to her burger.

Sometimes being a parent is surprisingly rewarding.

Come work for me.

The Minnesota Population Center is looking to hire a good java guy or two. Job posting is here:
http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/employment/openings/job129974.html
The U isn't necessarily the highest-paying place for technologists, but it does have plenty of benefits.

Growling with Tiger

I just updated my powerbook to Mac OS/X 10.4. The machine had 10.3 (Panther) on it when I bought it in late 2003, and Panther was a great OS. I got a lot of mileage out of panther. It was fast, sleek, the built-in apps were stable, and It Just Worked.

But now I have tiger. I did a clean install - reformatted my powerbook hard drive, installed all the apps from scratch, and copied over my files manually. Tiger has support for doing an 'archive and install', that supposedly automatically does the same thing, but I wanted to manually copy over what I needed, and have everything else start fresh. One of the problems of being a developer is that our computers collect lots of garbage on them.

Tiger has got a lot of nifty stuff - which you can read about at the apple site. Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal really likes tiger as well.

I'm still trying to figure out what I think about it. It was really slow when I first installed it, which was a common report, but I think that was just the spotlight system indexing the hard drive. Now that that's complete, it seems perkier.

The new mail app is odd. I don't know that I like it.

More news to follow.