Learning French

I've been learning French for quite some time now and I have come to a point where a typical French course doesn't really bring me any further. Yes, I can study and pass the tests, but about a month later I will have forgotten the majority of the vocabulary again and the grammar will not come as easily as I thought it would.

I'm trying various things to improve this rather sad affair with a plethora of approaches. If someone else has got any other good ideas, please feel free to use the commentary section below.

Currently, to improve my ability to talk about my specialist field (i.e. chemistry), I have been 1) reading French chemical literature (if you do not have access to it, it is rather hard to come by I am afraid) 2) Reading chemistry articles in English and explain to the world in general what is going on in the article... in French. 3) Practise presentations that I have given at some point in my life, but in French.

So far this is going well, as I learn topic-related vocabulary all the time, because I have to. With general broad French that is a problem, because I do not feel the need to look up words. If I talk about a general topic to myself, I tend to go around in circles only using the words I know without learning anything new. The problem here is that they are not new topics that I think of and I have re-visited them on occasion before.

The solution I came up with so far, is 1) read French novels and newspapers. This is for passive understanding. Unfortunately, the passive vocabulary does not readily enter my active one. As a consequence there is 2) reading articles and newspapers in English or German and again tell myself, what has been happening in these articles. In addition, there is 3) finding topics that will come up again and again, such as talking about my CV in an interview or describing one's personality and write the answers out in English. Once that is done, I do not translate word for word, but note down the words that I don't know and remember them. Afterwards, I talk about the topics I prepared.

Improving listening comprehension is the easiest one. My wife and I own several DVD box sets of TV series. Many of them have a French audio channel et voilà, practising listening comprehension has become easier.

As a consequence, I speak, listen or read French almost every single minute on my own and I get the feeling that it is improving, although I must say it is quite a lot of effort. Of course, there is also the chance to go to places where they speak French, but unfortunately these chances are few and far in between. At best, I find them to be add-ons to the core rather than a part of it, which is a pity as a language is supposed to be spoken in an interactive setting. My experience with other foreign languages has taught me, however, that speaking it in such a situation comes with confidence. I guess all I am currently doing is boosting my confidence, so that I am ready once a "real" situation rolls round.

Becoming a Reader

Well written novels are a joy to read. What I recently found out is, that well written novels are a joy to read "out loud", as well. But let's start at the beginning.

My wife suffers from travelling sickness, i.e. whenever she is in a moving vehicle as a passenger for a certain while and in her case can see outside, she starts to feel queasy in the stomach and may even be sick. How long this takes depends on the circumstances. Generally, jerky driving style and crowdedness catalyse the process, one might say. The strongest catalyst of them all, however, is reading or watching something, like a film or so. Thus, she is condemned to just stand there and wait while wondering when she will be sick.

Making matters worse, she has to take the bus on several mornings per week to get to work... in rush hour. The procedure is always the same. Bus is never on time. One generally arrives when three or four should have been there already. Consequence many people, traffic jams, you get the idea. Obviously this is not very pleasant as you might imagine.

So I had an idea. You probably have guessed it by now. I own a headset, there are several recording programs out there. Some free of charge. My mp3 player is hardly in use nowadays. Therefore, I decided to record myself while reading a book out loud and put it on the mp3 player for her to listen to.

I started out with a short book that she liked, Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis". When I read this book, I was not used to recording myself and I was quite shy in the process. The result is a very monotonous drone of my voice. Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that I didn't like the book much, I don't know.

As the second book, I chose Terry Pratchett's "Mort" and now that I have gone past the weirdness of hearing my own voice recorded, I am really starting to enjoy it. Anyone who knows the book can now try to imagine the voice he would give Death. I think after another couple of sessions, I will need to change my vocal chords ;). The Klatchians fell victim to my bad Indian accent as I have no Arab one in my repertoire.
My main problem at the moment still is to a) remember what voice I have given to characters that do not appear often and b) find the right tone of voice. Very often it happens that I say something with a booming voice only to follow it up with a  "mumbled Mort."

She loves it, though, so I can still improve my little charade. It's fun while it lasts. I wonder what other books I will read for her... 

Contributing to Mozilla

I guess, it's time now to talk about an activity that I have been doing for quite some time. Since almost a year, I am a contributor to Mozilla's Automated Testing Team. I've been learning all this stuff about Python programming, but I didn't find a real way to use it properly. Anyone who followed my blog (I doubt there is such a person as I am not actively promoting it) will know that I had a couple of semi-useless projects on the go, but these all died down for one reason or another.

In the end, I became aware that Mozilla is an Open Source project and aside from the core developers who are employed full-time, anyone is invited to join. I was quite sceptical at first, but once I figured out how to use IRC, I was ready to go (Now it feels odd to think that at one point I didn't know how to ;) ).

For anyone who is willing to improve his skills and is not afraid to be thrown in at the deep end, it is a truly awesome experience! From day one, I was welcomed and everyone had a lot of patience. There are a lot of online resources and when you're completely stuck, you can always go and speak to someone on the IRC channels. I first made my way through Bugs Ahoy! until I figured out how to use Bugzilla and at some point, I was shoved towards various sites on Github to help out on there.

Because it is such a big project not only entailing Firefox and Thunderbird, but several other aspects, as well, there is quite a variety of programming languages being used such as JavaScript, Python, HTML/CSS, Java, or C++. So if you really want to learn something new, there is a lot of opportunities to practice it within the community, as well.

All in all, I am glad I took the step and got involved. There is no pressure and everyone can contribute as much or as little as they want. I am quite proud to say that I have contributed quite a few lines of code to mozdownload and I had a blast doing it!

I recently returned to my home town, Würzburg, with my wife to show it to an Italian couple that we are friends with. What struck me yet again is how "different" I looked at this city that I grew up in.

You really have to ask yourself how much you look at that city of yours. I can't count how often I walked over the old bridge over the river Main without having more than a brief glance at the toes of the statues (which are at roughly head height) while rushing to wherever place I needed to go at the time.

I really started to appreciate more what a nice place I actually grew up in. Since we showed them both the city and also introduced them to the regional culture, we had the chance to enjoy fantastic food and to delve deeper into the historic aspects.

For example, Würzburg was for a long time the seat of the so-called Prince-Bishops (Fürstbischof) who wielded both spiritual and worldly power. As a consequence there are a huge number of churches in the city alone. When I looked at these churches before, I just saw a church plain and simple. Ever since I have been to the cathedral in Cologne, I have been more than disinterested in churches (it's hard to get better than that one in my eyes).

Not this time, though. In passing, my Italian friend commented that he finds it weird, that there are many "worldly" symbols in here. And true enough, the majority of the interior designs depict the bishops and several swords and other insignia, but not many crucifixes or other pictures associated with Christianity. It was very enlightening to see, that worldly power of the Church led to a fusion of symbols of power.

This was just one of several anecdotes of a very enjoyable trip. My conclusion from this trip is to really have a closer look at my surroundings. Especially when I have been in one place for a long time. There may still be something to discover.

Kreator...

Let's talk Kreator...

I know that I haven't mentioned it yet, but I am somewhat of a metal fan. Now Kreator is a band that has wowed me since I started listening to metal. Mostly through their live performances on festivals. This article is by a fan with a couple of beers so I will not bother with references, therefore clearly marking it as fan-fiction :P.

Kreator's been around almost since before I was born. Mille Petrozza's an intelligent song-writer with an amazing aura on stage if I've ever seen one. As a German, his German-influenced English makes me cringe sometimes, because I tried so hard to let go of the accent in favour of the British accents (which rule over all things American by the way).

Anyways, over the years, I have spoken to many a Kreator fan and mostly it appears to me that the albums 'Outcast' and especially 'Endorama' are considered some sort of mishap among the 'true' Kreator fans. Personally, I think they are the best things that Kreator ever ... well... "kreated", I guess. The self-confidence to take the foot of the pedal for a second although one plays thrash metal is a powerful tool. The contrast to the fast parts becomes all the more apparent that way.

This thought only came to me today when listening to the two albums while trying to switch off (don't know why it works for me, but it does!). I went to a Kreator gig now about two and a half years ago (Thrashfest) and that is when I noticed first. The supporting acts were fantastic consisting of Death Angel, Suicidal Angels and Exodus. All great bands in their own rights, but they were all concerned with destroying the place with speed and just sheer amazingness. Non-stop aggression was awesome at first, but once Exodus arrived I honestly got tired of it. It sounds crazy, but it did.

I couldn't believe it, but I felt like not being bothered about Kreator before they even stepped on stage. It was the first time, I saw them live on tour, not on a festival, which is different anyways. Then Kreator did something, that I so did not see coming. They renewed my excitement for thrash by playing one of my favourite songs from an entirely different genre from tape and on screen before they even stepped on stage. Watch yourself. I put the opener and a favourite Kreator song of mine one after the other.

Kreator was suddenly harder than anything I have seen only half an hour prior, simply because they put in good ole Johnny. He's got style "and" helps in making Thrash Metal just that bit more Thrash ;) Coming back to my initial point, by making albums like Endorama and Outcast, Kreator gave themselves a chance to makes their truly epic thrash songs sound even heavier and more awesome.

End of rant.

A Hero Worship Article to Stephen Fry by an Admirer of his Work

I have recently finished reading Stephen Fry's [1] two biographies (yes, his life was interesting enough to allow for two not just one and it looks like there may be a third one) Moab is my washpot and The Fry Chronicle. To my own, very personal surprise, I found that it merits writing my thoughts down in one of those rather unremarkable articles of mine.

The books in itself were fantastic due to Fry's rather peculiar writing style balancing between rarely found excessive eloquence (as befitting one of those bloody Cambridge graduates who can only speak like twats... I jest of course, I am envious of the experience... probably not, I loved rough Glasgow and skanky Manchester a lot) and infrequent (and for that reason all the more shocking) vulgarity. Of the two books, I definitely favour The Fry Chronicle which describes his Cambridge years and his subsequent rise to fame (Moab is my washpot talks about his childhood and adolescence up to the point of his incarceration as a youth criminal for credit card fraud).

As a non-native English speaker who lived in Britain a decade, I wholly enjoyed reading Fry's writing for something that only Greg Graffin [2] of the popular punk band Bad Religion [3] (and another person whose life fascinates and interests me) achieved before him. I learnt new English vocabulary (regarding one of Bad Religion's song lyrics: I still keep forgetting what the word reprobate [4] means). It sounds weird, but I have become so accustomed to using English and using it also in academic context that I rarely encounter a text where I truly have to check words. With Stephen Fry's prose, this happens to me about every five pages. Some people find that annoying, I revelled in it as I felt for the first time in about three or four years that I actually improved my English (Since my departure from English shores, it actually feels that I am losing my edge a bit).

I was very surprised to read that Fry is a hobby computer enthusiast like me. Not just electronic gadgets but programming and all. But unlike me, he was there from the very first minute. I felt several pangs of envy when he talked about how he spent thousands and thousands of pounds on computer equipment (unfortunately on Apple Macintoshs, but youknow my view point on that [5]) - As a side note, I always want to call him Stephen, because the two books were so courageously revealing his most personal trials, tribulations and fears that I feel that I know the man already since 20 years. This is, however, not true, thus I shall stick with his full name or plainly with Fry.

His friendship with Douglas Adams [6] also left me a little bit envious as I have been a great fan of Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy infour parts [7] since my adolscent days. One of the true literary masterpieces.

I have found several parallels to me (but also quite a lot of huge differences... and no, the parallel is not that I am also gay) that left me feel very sympathetic to him and makes me appreciate the works and contributions that I like so much even more than before (Blackadder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie).

I guess, as a conclusion to this rather pathetic hero worship article, I can only hope that Mr. Fry never reads this article after I read how critical he can be of other people's work (despite saying that he will never admit to having thought it). 

References

[1] http://www.stephenfry.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Graffin

[3] http://www.badreligion.com/

[4] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reprobate

[5] http://nebelhom.blogspot.be/search/label/Apple

[6] http://douglasadams.com/

[7] http://douglasadams.com/creations/hhgg.html

New Year's Resolutions 2013 – No More Facebook

Much has happened since my last post to this blog and this is, of course, in no little part due to my laziness. I just had “better” things to do or as a friend of mine put it once quite fittingly. “Having no time for one thing, just means that you would rather spend your time on something else.”

So for awhile, I simply “rather spend time on something else”. The reasons were different. The main one being the demise of my pet project. The music player (see various posts here [1]) for roleplaying. The player was built on the idea of tagging, but my approach of using an md5 hash was just not working right. It was slow and sluggish and it took about 10 seconds to start with about 5 songs and an eternity for about 1 GB worth of music and sound effects. I couldn't improve it for reasons I don't want to get into.

Once that fell through, I decided to improve using Udacity [2] and hone my skills (if one could call them that) by helping on the Mozilla Project [3] in the Automated Testing team (A*Team) [4]. This proved to be such an enjoyable experience that I have stuck with it since August of last year and spent most of my free-time on their IRC channel trying to learn more about it and the way they run their projects. By now, I have come to hate git [5] and only just about accepted mercurial [6] as version control software.

Anyhow, three paragraphs just to explain why I stopped blogging. Sheesh! Onto the real reason for this blog entry. It is the new year which I passed in lovely Vienna with my darling wife and a good friend from there. During that time, a certain resolution ripened with me. I want to opt out of this facebook harrassment (from now on referred to by its french joke name fessebouc; la fesse = buttock, le bouc = goat; Why I do that? Because I can). Everyone sees it as this fantastic tool, but over the course of last year, fessebouc has annoyed me greatly with some decisions they made.

It started off harmlessly enough with them wanting to change my user interface to this timeline idea [7] that they fancied so much. They first asked me if I wanted it, as in “Do you want to try our new and great timeline”, to which I said No. Several weeks after, the same request came, to which I said again No. Why change something that isn't broken, for crying out loud. And then shortly after, they just changed it. Just like that. All illusion of being able to decide it myself gone by virtue of their little display of power. I am sure they thought that “he won't mind anyway, the old chap.” ... Well, I did mind and it pissed me off so much that I wrote a complaint in which I said, that these sort of measures are more likely to drive me away than endear me to fessebouc. Of course, there was no answer. Not even a hint.

Well, that was me already annoyed by them. But then there followed a consistent stream of these things that were handled the same way. First a mail saying that if you don't want it, say so, with the subsequent change to it anyways. The more outrageous changes were, however, yet to come! Let's start with forcing anyone to use their real name [8, 9 for policy]. Why on earth?!? No conscious thought were given to those rather sensitive cases where someone may truly endanger himself by publically stating his opinion in countries where freedom of speech is not as existent as in the western world (as an example of the merits read this article [10]) or the much quoted teacher-pupil relationship problem. This is a very sensitive area as adolescents may unknowingly endanger the teacher's career by bringing him into a dicey situation. If they want to become "friends" with the teacher, is s/he supposed to block any attempt or is it no problem? Using an alias would be a good solution for a teacher in this case to avoid any such issues with accepting pupils as friends. "Friends" - Such a freely used term nowadays. When before it defined a close relationship with someone who is not the partner nor has familial ties to the person, now it can describe someone who is not even an acquaintance. But I'm getting diverted from the real issue here.

Now, looking at the above problem, one may think: “No problem, I just set my privacy setting so that people can't find me with a name search.” Well, the clever people from fessebouc thought of this, too, by getting rid of this possibility and making every profile available for all search engines [11,12 for German]. Again, why on earth?!? To me, this really was the final nail in the coffin.

Thus on New Year's, I came to the conclusion that I will stop using it. It was a nuisance and e-mail spam that I accepted for the greater good of keeping in touch with people who seem to only live in the world of fessebouc and are only reachable through it, but this is it. I have had enough. I am aware that it is here to stay and unlikely to go away. I am also aware that not only fessebouc adopts dubious policies regarding privacy in the digital space, but in this case, I can do something about it and I don't want to play any part in it anymore. I will also try to discourage people from posting pictures of me on it. If you, as a fessebouc user read this, please consider this a polite request to refrain from posting pictures with me in it on fessebouc (or any other media as a matter of fact without my explicit permission). Thus, my New Year's Resolution for 2013 is to leave fessebouc and be done with it. May it go its merry way, I hope it falls flat on its face (which it most likely won't) and that the people responsible for these decisions understand that the privacy of the individual should be respected even though the majority of people “doesn't seem to mind.”

References

[1] http://nebelhom.blogspot.be/search/label/Music%27N%27SFX
[2] http://www.udacity.com/
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/
[4] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools
[5] http://git-scm.com/
[6] http://mercurial.selenic.com/
[7] http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline
[8] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/08/facebook_real_names/
[9] http://www.facebook.com/help/292517374180078/
[10] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/02/07/google-executive-wael-ghonim-admits-he-was-el-shaheed.html
[11] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/facebook-changes-privacy-settings-again/
[12] http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/namenssuche-bei-facebook-privatsphaere-einstellungen-werden-simpler-a-872932.html