In Saarbrücken gibt es eine Straße des 13. Januar. Es ist eine kurze Straße, sie verläuft von der Daarler Brück, einer Fußgängerbrücke über die Saar, bis zur Mainzer Straße – oder man kann es, wie der Schriftsteller Arnfried Astel in Die Faust meines Großvaters & andere Freiübungen, auch so beschreiben: „Vom Schlachthof zur Polizeikaserne…“ Als ich in Saarbrücken aufwuchs, hatte ich nicht die leiseste Ahnung, warum eine Straße nach einem solchen Datum benannt war. Konnte mir auch keiner sagen. Ich werde das Gefühl nicht los, daß es einer Straße des 23. Oktober heute ganz genauso gehen würde.

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To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul… Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.

Dr. Mandelbaum to young Mr. Mundy in John le Carré’s Absolute Friends.

Just what your browser has been missing – fur and lot’s of bling. PimpZilla 2.0 is here.

PimpZilla is probably the most tacky & overdone piece of GUI design out there, aimed solely at true internet-connoisseurs.

I don’t remember any “mode” in translations during the 70s. Cameras and HiFi equipment were my staple then, and there would have been plenty of opportunities. Instead, the constructions were simple. Instructions would read “When recording, make sure…” and a chapter headline dealing with, for example, flash photography would be “Flash Photography.”

Then, during the 80s, the word “mode” appeared. Infrequently at first and then suddenly it was everywhere. Now the instructions would read “In recording mode, make sure…” and the chapter headline would say “Flash Mode” or, even worse, “Flash Photography Mode.” There seemed to be no end to the “mode” inflation. With the increase of documents in the electronics and computer fields, the modes grew exponentially.

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Wer noch nie übersetzt hat, glaubt oft, die Schwierigkeit läge darin, die Fremdsprache zu verstehen. Sicher, da gibt es auch schon mal Problemchen, aber das viel Schwierigere ist die deutsche Sprache.

Hätte man besser gar nicht erklären können.

(isabo)

It always has been frustrating to copy and move files under Windows, especially if you had to process big files or lots of them. The operating system has the tendency to hijack the computer, and it is impossible or very difficult to carry out any other tasks at the same time. Copy Handler to the rescue. I am very happy that I disovered this small utility for copying and moving files. It is fast (its authors claim 6 to 7 times faster than Windows, and I believe them), customizeable, and it runs in the background. And what’s more, it’s freeware. Check it out.

This blog had a visit from the Securities and Exchange Commission today at 14:51:55. The interesting part was the Google search phrase that brought them here: “ach du lieber” translate. Perhaps this was uttered by a subject of SEC enforcement?

The snow-words myth was back in the Language Log just yesterday, and when you search their archives for “words for snow” you will find some very interesting and entertaining posts. I particularly like the one of March 4, 2004.

Guy & Rodd have now put an end to this debate, however.

I met a lot of people during the years I lived in Charlottesville that I would not have met, for example, in mid-Missouri. Albemarle County seemed to attract a lot of well-known (and to the detriment of the cost of living well-off) people. Being a supporting parent at my daughter’s school for many years, I met more of them than I would have otherwise. In the early years I was introduced to people I never even had heard of (“Dave, this is Michael. – Michael, meet Dave.”) – coming from the Pacific Northwest in early ’94, how was I supposed to know the local musical heroes.

Another group were the Australian expats. UVa had a large number of Australian researchers in the natural sciences, and Ian Henry of Crozet got them all together once a year for an Australia Day celebration. I am Australian by marriage only, but that doesn’t stop me from celebrating. In fact, during my years in Tokyo we regularly got together to celebrate Melbourne Cup Day, and there were not that many Australians among us.

But back to Australia Day in Albemarle. One of the participants and one year gracious host in his Earlysville home was none other than Barry Marshall who today won the Nobel Prize, together with his colleague Robin Warren, for the discovery of Helicobacter pylori as the most common cause of ulcers. While in Charlottesville, he worked on developing a breath test to determine the presence of H. pylori. Congratulations, Barry!

This is not a gadget but a new resource. My main computer just turned 5. Mind you, only the housing and the motherboard are 5 years old, everything else has been replaced and upgraded at least once. But instead of throwing money at an old computer I decided to have Jakub Sarnecki build me a new one.

I wanted to be able to multi-task (as much as this is possible with Windows), not run into memory bottle necks, and have reasonably good video and lots and lots of hard drive space. To top it off, I did not want to be forced to back up all the time and I wanted the housing to be cooled as efficiently as possible.

Here are the specs of the new (black) box: A D945GNT motherboard with a 3.0 GHz dual-core Pentium 4 processor; 2 MB GB RAM; 2 × 300 GB hard drives with a Promise RAID controller; ATI RADEON X300 video card.

It is a joy now to see Trados chew speedily through megabytes of Word documents even when TMs are gigantic. And I can upload, download or copy for long stretches of time while working in a different application and not being slowed down at all.

And best of all: Having a computer built to one’s exact specifications is quite a bit cheaper than buying one off the rack – no paying for unwanted features either.