Annet wrote me about this week’s English Club:

This week we are meeting at Caf? 100 in the basement
on Wednesday at eight as usual.

In January another English club activity will take
place. We want to visit the Karl-May-Museum in
Radebeul. A guided tour in
English costs 50 ?. That means we should be at least
ten persons, so that it won't be too expensive.
Please tell me if you are interested and which date
would you prefer: 17./18. or 24./25.Jan.?

I wonder if that is to say we would be sleeping over in the museum over night from the 17th to the 18th? Better bring a bedroll, partner.

Tasks For today:

1) I am getting a digicam for Xmas. Which one should I ask for? It needs to be in the 200 – 300 Eu price range. But money isn`t everything. It?s all about what comes with. Some good starting points are listed on page 29.

2) You have not done a lick of preparation for your presentation?!! Well, no time like the present, eh?

3) Find some nice text. Translate it in Babblefish. Then do it again. And again, then back into English. Send it through the Chat.

4) Apropos Babblefish, a Doctor Who story written by Douglas Adams: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/shada/ You need sound.

5) Links galore:
the ones in bold seem pretty neat.

(more…)

I’m goin’ back to Cali, Cali, Cali.
goin’ back to Cali…
That’s right!

Attention- all who did not sign up for the Arnold Let Me have Some Pie Too giveaway!
Let me know asap what you want me to bring back from California.
Please limit your responses on this one to item, quantity and your name seeing as how one tends to be discursive.

Thanks- have a fantastic time where you are during the holidays and everyone be nice to each other.
See you at the Roar of 2004- rOn

“Further out, scientists salivate over the prospect of data manipulation and storage on an atomic level.” (From unit 5.)

A “Bazillion” thanks to Onkel Roman for the cartoon.

I stumbled upon an interesting passage about Arctic pagan roots of Christmas when I stumbled upon this article on shamanism:

It has even been suggested that the figure of Father Christmas derives from this type of shamanic practice. At the winter solstice, Finnish shamans would eat large quantities of the highly toxic fly agaric mushroom. They would then go around the village, dressed in red and white to mimic the colouring of the mushroom, and urinate down the smokehole of each hut. The villagers would drink the urine, which would contain a potent - but not life-threatening - dose of the fly agaric toxin.

Getting high by drinking the urine of those who ingested highly toxic mushrooms is the very first image I get when I think about Xmas.

Here’s more on that from the good folks at Fungus of the Month! With some great pictures.

We will meet the week of Dec. 8th in Language Lab BZW 251.

No no no. I have decided not to make another advent calendar this year. Last year’s was exhausting. So I just put a button to last year’s on the front page along with an irreverent xmas ecard, now that I have all my PHP ducks in a row. The perls are all working now too.

I just heard the news from Dr. Kaestner. The 2003 DigiSax awards have been announced:

Gewinner der Kategorie Bildung und Qualifizierung – Interaktivit?t

1. Platz: virtualingua.de, Dresden (Online-Sprachkurse)

That’s right, kiddies. Dah dah dummm. Mr. Seezen –part time Flash designer is now Mr. Seezen —award winning Flash designer. Dum dum dahhh.

See how on the the date jumps from late November right back to late October?
It ain’t as if I didn’t write anything for a full month. The entries just don’t want to show up. Still working on that bug.
Anyway, Here is that article from today about 65 nanometer techology based SRAM and stuff.

There still seems to be a problem here with the blog. It keeps trying to kill the past month of entries.
So here again is the link to the presentation guidelines.
Here.