I had it once, and I thought it tasted like most subways smell.

We have a climate chamber ("Klima-Kammer in German) at work for testing products, and my Ukrainian coworker kept referring to it as the “camera”, I thought that was funny.

My favorite anecdote revolves around the many meanings of shit, which is hardly surprising, since the way this word is used in English is in no way forthcoming to a non native speaker.

So I was sitting in this call between my company (a medium size German tech company) and a big US corporation, discussing the development of a tool that we were doing for them. The people on both sides all knew each others at least in passing, and one of the people asked if one of my collegues was in the call, too.

Them: “So, is mr. X here, too?” Us: “No, mr. X had another appointment.” Them: “Ah okay. Mr. X really is the shit.” My collegues: wait…what? did they just…? Me, to my collegues: it’s good, it’s good, it wasn’t an insult! My collegues, getting more and more aggrevated: “Did you just call mr. X ‘shit’?” Them, not understanding: “What? NO!”

The Americans did not understand what the problem was, because they did not really think about what they said and that it might not be understood the way it was meant by a non native speaker.

It took a lot of explaining from my side after the call to cool my people down. They were completely bewildered, and they could not believe that calling someone “the shit” could possibly be a compliment. Me, I had a big big laugh the entire time.

Problem with that is that almost everyone who was interesting is dead. Actor wise.

What’s that about, O’Neill sitting in a fishing chair next to a pond, opening a cold one and going “yeap.”?

Maybe you can suggest alternative questions, maybe something involving homeopathy or reiki, or perhaps chemtrails.

Just a small reminder that Volkswagen paid out 4.5 billion euros in dividends last year.

Strict name rules that still allow parents to name their children “Ralf-Rüdiger” or “Ronny-Horst”, both of which are real life examples (Ralf-Rüdiger worked at my company!).

I downloaded slackware from a BBS. It took forever. It booted from two floppies, a boot and a root disk. It did not even have X. I still loved it, because I recently got into programming, and all I had ever programmed on was DOS. In Linux, you could actually malloc() with any amount, even a full megabyte! It was marvellous! Later, I installed it on my HD on a separate partition. The installation process was really fascinating, so much choice, so many new programs! At least the first time.

Surpression of sunshine must end? Does that mean he wants to ban sun blockers?

ISO 9001

I actually joined a class action suit against them and got some settlement money out of it after buying one of those 🙃

Yeah. Volkswagen management fucked up on every strategic decision in the last 10-15 years, the stakeholders went with it and got paid 4.5 billion euros in dividends last year alone, and now the employees have to pay for all of it. Makes sense if you don’t think about it.

They even sound like their russian counterparts now.

Thoughts and prayers.

Season 4 of Lexx had all that and aliens.

Concept2 rowing machines. Even if they break, you can still buy spare parts at reasonable rates even for the very first model, which is decades old and only sold a few copies. Fantastic engineering.

Yeah I know. I had a much longer comment all written out, but after reading it, it was just too depressing and I deleted most of it.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz

He won’t be around for much longer anyway. His chancellorship will effectively end december 16th with a vote of no confidence. The one who will likely succeed him (Friedrich Merz, CDU) will do less then nothing for the environment anyway.

What difference would it even make if they attended this useless greenwashing feel-good event, if that attendence never seems to be followed up by any meaningful action?