kirjoittaessani

Kurz vor Weihnachten in der Multimedia-Abteilung des hiesigen Kaufhauses. Ich irre durch die Gänge, als mir ein Regal mit der Aufschrift Alben ins Auge springt. Etwas verwundert registriere ich, daß dort unter anderem Fotoecken angeboten werden.

Aber ich finde ja auch den Zeitungsausriß, der an einer Tür des physikalischen Instituts klebt, unglaublich witzig: 5000 Liter Latex ausgelaufen.

During that weird state between sleep and waking, the mind is in a very special state. Especially heavy and sluggish, I often think. But sometimes, it is also capable of surprising insights. Unfortunately, these often vanish before one can use them. It helps to hold on to them immediately, but the heavy and sluggish part is not really helpful there.
However, sometimes it works. This morning, various Old English words tumbled around in my head. This was probably a result of reading David Crystal's By Hook or By Crook yesterday night. One of the words was sælig, that is sad. Suddenly, I noticed the similarity to Finnish sääli, that is pity (also as in what a pity).
I do not really know what to make of this, but English and Finnish are not related, so this is either an astonishing coincidence, or one of the languages has, at some point, imported the word.
Finnish has lots of indoeuropean (and especially germanic) roots, but I know of only one finnish word to make it into English: sauna.
Once I am home, I will consult my library.
[Postscript:]I am home again and have looked it up. Now this story has a tiny problem: sælig means happy (compare German selig). There goes the theory of immense brain power during half-sleep.

There should have been a blog post here. I made it up in my mind this morning (or yesterday night?). Unfortunately, I have since forgotten what it was all about.

Also, eines muß ich ja mal festhalten: ab zwölf Stunden im Büro wird es nervig; und das nicht nur, weil dann die Zeit zum Bloggen fehlt.

Today, I have gotten a letter from Analog in the mail: they ask if I am interested in renewing my subscription (I am not, because the stacks of unread issues are sky-high).
After glancing at the address, I was rather puzzled: apparently, I have moved to Hendersonville, Tennessee. The place looks nice enough, but why do they imagine me living there?

Oh, well. The zip code is correct, they simply picked the wrong country...

Today was the first working day after my holidays. It has been a bit strange: on the one hand, everything important has remained the same; on the other hand, there have been a few changes, like construction sites appearing on our campus.
Not taking into account 4000 emails, the day has been pretty quiet.
By the way, I now have new RSS feeds (see Und dann noch in the lower right). The old feed still works, showing English texts whenever possible. Moreover, you can globally set your preferred language (see Zungen).

Gestern haben wir einen Verwandtenbesuch mit einem Flohmarktverkauf kombiniert. Obwohl wir kaum länger als 24 Stunden weg waren, kam mir das ganze wie eine Woche Urlaub vor -- herrlich.

Heute ist dann eher der Tag des Faulenzens.

After having followed Jeff Atwood's Blog for some time, I have taken a look at Stackoverflow today: it is a developer community (this is Web 2.0, after all!) that gathers knowledge concerning software development. The idea behind Stackoverflow is a mixture of a wiki, a blog, a forum, and a Digg-like ranking system.

I guess it is worthwhile to keep the project in mind.

In other news: my audio declicking software does horrible things to harpsichords.

Ist Aushärten eigentlich das Gegenteil von Ausweichen?

Heute in der Kantine gehört:

Bei dem hat meine Tochter ja ihre Tochterarbeit geschrieben.

Äh? Ach so, Doktorarbeit.

Im Supermarkt habe ich mich dann gefragt, welches Lebensmittel mit brennt leicht an beworben wird.

Es war Holzkohle.