Notes from Germany
I am an American expat living in Germany. It's a far away land on the other side of the ocean. It's interesting and often weird here. If you read this and want to comment then email me at blog(the at symbol)chillmost.com. If you find any spelling or grammar mistakes, you can keep them.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
Weihnachtsmarkt
Oh yeah. It is that time of year again. The Christmas Market in Lüneburg was in full swing this weekend. Walking down the street was a major challenge. I was reminded of the video from the Verve for Bittersweet Symphony where Richard Ashcroft is walking down the city sidewalk knocking and shoving people out of his way. Not that I would do something like that but if someone did, I could understand. I spent yesterday evening working on a little music and experimenting with CSS for Chillmost v2.0 which, because I decided to start again from scratch, won't be ready till next year some time.
This coming weekend I am taking a PHP programming course. I can already work with PHP a little but I want to really learn it correctly. I have realized that when it comes to programming languages, I am not really motivated to learn it by myself. I find it more helpful to have it taught to me by a professional who knows what I should know.
In the last 3 years I have learned so much about computers, programming and the Internet. I had already known the basics and when I worked for my friend Kim I learned about hardware and networking. But in the last 3 years, as I began using OS X and the terminal, I have learned a lot about Unix-y things like permissions, root/user privileges, compiling source code and installing things, configuring Apache servers, perl, etc. Hmm. Maybe next year if I find space for yet another computer I will start messing around with Linux. I could install Yellow Dog on a partition but I don't feel like messing around with my hard drive like that.
----
For those that don't know, Wikipedia is a free open source encyclopedia. That means entries can be added and edited by users just like you and me. Although there is some debate/controversy/misgivings over the accuracy of such a project, it is pretty good. Sometimes I might look something up and I will follow one link to the next and end up spending a good chunk of time there. It is pretty interesting. The again I used to read the World Book Encyclopedias cover to cover as a kid, so maybe it is just me. The point is I spent lots of time today reading up on Germany and German things: History, language, politics, culture, etc. Here are some links:
Germany
German Language
German History
German Politics
Soon after I got tired of German stuff so I look at more serious and interesting things like:
The Marx Brothers
Spacemen 3
Spiritualized
Psychedelic music
Aphex Twin
and my first Apple: The IIGS
So, it was a productive day.
| Link
