Thomas (Thesis Submitted): I see "et" and "al". Bet … Petra (Exciting Times Ah…): Danke . Ich muss nur noch… Roland (Exciting Times Ah…): Mein Glückwunsch schon ma… Thomas (Unanswered questi…): Google Desktop brings Goo… Petra (NL vs. DE: Flour): Apparently the French hav… wiebke (NL vs. DE: Flour): or that just goes to show… Wiebke (iTunes Rant II): It is cute, that the firs… wiebke (EuroparlTV): phoenix shows many discus… Petra (EuroparlTV): Good question. I've seen … Christopher (EuroparlTV): Does the German Parliamen…
About
This is my personal weblog about some of the more interesting things I experience (at least to me). It is meant to be read by people who know me.
Friday 06 November 2009 at 1:55 pm
My thesis just got submitted to my committee. The next hurdle is taken - the next is the actual defense and then the corrections and then it will hopefully be done soon. Press your thumbs for me on Nov. 20th. or come along for the defense if you feel like it (11am). Since I don't want to make anyone read all the 200++ pages of my thesis, here is a Wordle of what words I have been typing all over...
Thursday 10 September 2009 at 12:18 pm
Interesting. The US Senate approved a bill to promote travel to the US. For this they need money and some of it is to come from the tourists themselves - those outside of Canada/Mexico that come in on the visa waiver program (like EU citizens). Somehow I have a high suspicion that such a fee will be very counter productive. After the whole business with fingerprints, pictures taken, and the online registration that is necessary to enter the US, this feels like another thing to make tourists feel extremely unwelcome. But there is still hope. The bill isn't passed yet.
Monday 07 September 2009 at 1:04 pm
... 22 women chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end the Germans always win. Well, it's time to see that this is true again. Germany is in the final of the women's European soccer championship for the 5th time in a row after just having beat Norway 3-1. To be a little more precise, out ot the 9 ECs that have been played so far, the German women have won 6 times.
In order not to miss the 7th time, turn on your TV to ZDF (or your favorite quality sports channel) at 18:00 CET on Thursday!
The opponent is my personal favorite: ENGLAND (an English player also issued the quote above ... just for the men's team of course).
Friday 21 August 2009 at 06:26 am
One of the things that can tell you a lot about different cultures is a view into a typical supermarket. Today's topic is flour. Every once in a while I like to do some baking and currently I am experimenting with different types of breads. Breads, as you may know, require all sorts of different types of flour and German recipes are very specific. For example, there isn't just one type of "white" flour, there is a number system that tells you how finely the flour was ground. For example, I use three different kinds: Type 405 (quite fine, good for cakes), 550 (my standard for bread), 1050 (often to be mixed with 550 to make a more diverse bread dough), and then whole wheat (1600). Then of course there are different types of rye flour, spelt, corn, organic and non-organic types, etc. Hence, a typical supermarket flour shelf looks like this one:
It's a little hard to see but the whole range of flour being sold here didn't even fit into one image and there are more flours to the left. Also there are a number of different companies selling different brands here - you can see this by the color on the packaging. Nevertheless, there are all the ones I named above and more to be seen in this picture.
Now let's look at the Dutch equivalent from a typical supermarket:
I marked the flour in the picture with a green circle. In this image you see white flour, white flour with baking powder, whole wheat flour, corn flour, and flour mixes for bread. Everything above that shelf are baking mixes for everything from pancakes to cakes, muffins, waffles, & breads. I must admit, though, that the size of the shelf with baking mixes is about the same size as in the German supermarket I went to (and much bigger than at Safeway in Canada) but this seems to be a trend in our supermarket. The amount of pre-made, read-to-cook food is quite remarkable. Now, I don't know if this is Dutch thing in general or if it's just a sign of us living in a city mostly inhabited by students, but it's quite noticable that few meals or baked goods here seem to be made from scratch.
Monday 10 August 2009 at 04:29 am
I started a new photo albums showing some of our summer tours around the Netherlands. Here is the first batch of pictures:
Wednesday 29 July 2009 at 08:57 am
For some reason there is never a lack or reason to rant about iTunes. Since I am now using my wonderful new iPod touch (and here and only here I am not being sarcastic), I thought I'd stick with the company to purchase a song I wanted. $0.99 is not too bad for song, especially considering that singles cost about 10DM back in the days when I was buying them regularly. Anyways, so I start up iTunes, the software once again (as so happens every other week or so), decides it needs a 100MB update (including all the other stuff like quicktime, safari, and the ipod software). Due to the size of the update I say yes to downloading it and continue on with my purchase. I enter all my information in the itunes store (btw, a horrible interface for finding an artist+song name combination), send my song to my cart, click buy, click buy once again ... iTunes notices my credit card info is missing, back to entering the card info, pressing done... now did that purchase the song or not? Well, I *think* not since the song is still in my cart ... so once again press buy, and confirm the buy - the song starts downloading -> wonderful - where it's downloading to - no idea...but I have high hopes that it's my iTunes music folder location and high expectations that it's my user/Petra/iTunes/music folder (which are not the same things).
Somewhere during the download of my song, the download of the iTunes updates is done and it simply starts itself - that's not what I wanted when I said yes to the download. Fortunately, iTunes realizes and asks: "Do you really want to update? You are downloading a song and this may interrupt the download" - I say "no, please, don't update, wait for the download to finish". Ok, the download I think finished, iTunes closes itself, disappears, reinstalles, requires a restart of the computer (which given that I use Vista takes about 10-15 minutes or so), comes back up - and no trace of the song I just purchases or downloaded.
No trace? No! A small entry in the "Purchase History" menu reminds me of this recent purchase. However, no song is to be found in the "purchased" playlist, in my iTunes music folder, in the users/petra/iTunes/music folder or anywhere else on my PC for that matter. What the... Ok, next steps are googeling the problem. First, it turns out there is a menu entry to check for pending downloads. I click that .. no response since the file already downloaded before the update. Ok, so off to the iTunes Store support. Here I need to enter my purchase info and number. Of course, copy and paste from the Purchase History in iTunes is not possible so I have to copy everything over manually.
Anyways, a loss of $1 isn't horrible but this whole event took about 30mins of my time. Makes you wonder if it's even worth complaining. However, out of principle I want my song especially since this was my first iTunes purchase - and will certainly be my last.
UPDATE
To Apple's credit, their customer support seems to work. Erika from Apple contacted me tdoay and I got my song back - AND it did download to my regular music folder. Credit to the programmers for getting this right :D.
Monday 06 July 2009 at 08:52 am
I am learning something new every day. The European Parliament (which we just voted for) has its own TV station. Here is a pretty interesting one about the new European Parliament - check out who the Italians are sending:
(an English player also issued the quote above ... just for the men's team of course).
