I am sure that everybody has a favorite way of tracking time. In July and August I had a number of overlapping projects where I had to keep track of different types of work performed. I couldn’t have done it without Time Stamp from Syntap Software.

Time Stamp is “donationware,” but a donation is not required for the free use of this product. With this open-source Windows program you can easily track time spent on a project. It enables you to time how long you spend on a task, including features that let you take “slack time” for a phone call or break. Times for various tasks can be linked to an hourly charge rate for accurate billing. Export your data using ASCII or XML, and customize your report for your own letterhead.

Time Stamp is by far the easiest and best time tracking application I have ever used and it is definitely worth a look. You can download it here.

George Bush covers John Lennon – a must-hear.

The song, Imagine This, features the cut-and-spliced voice of Mr Bush seemingly repeating segments of Imagine, Lennon’s 1971 plea for secular harmony. Over modern dance beats and the original Lennon piano, Bush can be heard saying things such as “imagine there’s no countries, it is not hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too, and that’s a good thing”.

(via Walrusgumboot)

Avibase is a bird database with “2 million records about 10,000 species and 22,000 subspecies of birds, including distribution information, taxonomy, synonyms in several languages and more.” It gives the bird’s scientific name as well as the names in German, Danish, Spanish, Finnish, French, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish (though not in all languages for all birds). So if you always wanted to find out that the red-winged blackbird (agelaius phoeniceus) is ハゴロモガラス in Japanese (do they have red-winged blackbirds in Japan?), this is the place to go.

From the heavens to the sea. FishBase is a fish database with 28,900 species, 207,400 common names and 38,600 pictures. It helps to identify fish since they often have different names even in different regions of the same country. FishBase is not primarily a translation tool – it gives non-English names, though not everywhere. But even where it does not give a translation of the species name it helps to pinpoint which fish the text is talking about.

(from muttscomics.com)

Bastian Sick’s book Der Dativ ist dem Genetiv sein Tod is the basis for this article in The Scotsman. Excerpt:

As students of the language may recall, German has four cases – nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative – which see words change in order to explain their relationship to each other. In many cases, the genitive case is being wrongly dropped in favour of the dative, while some speakers – dimly aware that something is going wrong with their command of the language – try to ‘hyper-correct’ by inserting the genitive for the dative. In addition, speakers of the language are forgetting where to place verbs in sentences and clauses, infuriating purists and confusing learners.

Malaysia’s Education Minister Hishammuddin Hussein: “We should not be shy to say English is a Malaysian language.” (Read here and here.)

Language is never a subject in my local paper (other than in articles about spelling bees and the occasional need for Spanish interpreters in medical and legal situations). Imagine my surprise when found a full-page article this morning on “endangered” languages – even if it was straight from the AP news ticker.

Every two weeks or so, the last elderly man or woman with full command of a particular language dies. At that rate, as many as 2,500 native tongues will disappear forever by 2100.

While the article remains pretty much on the surface of things, it at least presents the subject to readers in mid-Missouri – with an interesting map of the world-wide distribution of languages (print edition only).

Staying on the subject of Japan for a moment: If you ever had any doubts about a good time to have a beer in Japan – help is here. Yahoo brings you the Beer Weather page, which depicts with cans of good old Asahi Super Dry just how much it would take to counteract the heat. We really needed that information.

(via gme.jp)

Überschrift im SpiegelOnline:

Hätte geschworen, daß Sterben eine Voraussetzung für Totsein ist. Aber dann wurde ich beim Googlen fündig: „Tote sterben erst, wenn niemand an sie denkt.“ Aha!

On her way to Thailand, my daughter stopped over in Tokyo for a couple of hours and described it as having come home. Yes, she was born in 圣母病院 – but she was only six when we left Japan and that was such a long time ago.

Still, home is where you feel home, I guess, and then I found these two beautiful slide shows by Tokyolil (whose music I listen to via last.fm) – and it was me who felt homesick.

Tokyo Modern and Traditional Japan.