Blog Archives 050414 to 050313

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

050414 København, Danmark
Time for a random cultural/linguistic observation. British English and American English seem to disagree on the contextual definition of the word "quite". Americans might say "You look quite nice." and mean it as a compliment. A Brit might see the same sentence as being a rude comment rather than a compliment. The American tends to use "quite" as emphasis, like the word "very". The Brit would use "quite" as a moderating word, weakening or deemphasizing the following word. Therefore the American would speak a compliment and the Brit would hear the equivalent of "You look not-so-hot on the scale of niceness." or "You don't look so good."
While I'm sure there are other words that cause cross cultural confusion between the Americans and the British ("rubber" for condom or rainwear being one example), I don't know of any other word that is interpreted in opposing ways.

050412 København, Danmark
OK, I can sum up Monday easily. There are days when living in a different country is a fun and exciting adventure... and then there are days when you are staring at a new-bought thermometer attempting to calculate in your head whether 40°C is a high fever or just a moderate fever that feels really awful.

050410 København, Danmark
There have been numerous behind-the-scenes improvements and fixes to the web pages, most of which will not be visible. You'll just have to trust me that it is better.
The main change worth noticing is that I have added a link to my picture gallery, which is hosted on my father's server. The gallery contains some pictures from around Portugal and some pictures from København.
I have been noticing that having high speed internet at home for the previous six months (in Davis, CA, USA) left me pretty net-addicted.
Anyway, the other day (050405) I was playing with unicode encoding of special characters. Almost everyone is able to see the proper letters when I use some of the special characters from the european languages, the german ü, the danish æ or ø, etc. However the three test characters of my 050405 entry were from the asian languages set (林, 安, and 石). On my father's computer, he saw what he should have seen; (now quoting my father) "something that looks like two tiny telephone poles with wires, followed by a squiggle under a line, then a rotated lamda on a box". On my mother's computer, she saw two question marks and a square. The cause of the difference in ability to display the characters may be something I can not fix, since display capability will depend on what character sets are installed on individual computers. However, I may be able to improve the likelyhood of correct display (somewhat), by specifying the use of comprehensive font sets (like arial unicode ms) in the style sheets for this page. Eh, who knows. I'll have to await your feed-back on what you can and can not see.
I'm messing around with internationalization of the site so that when I'm in China I'll be able to give both the romanized versions of the place names and the actual characters for the names. I think people might find that interesting to see.

050409 København, Danmark
A few different topics, inspired by emails with various friends. Topic one - how things are going.
Overall, things are going well. Needing to learn technical Danish at the same time I'm trying to do the lab work has ranged from interesting to frustrating, depending on my attitude. Everyone here speaks English and it would be easy to simply ask someone when I come across a sign or procedure I can not read. However, if I'm not making the effort to learn the technical Danish, then I continue needing someone's assistance with ordinary things. Yeah, it is policy that the safety info should be in English as well as Danish, but, until my arrival, this has been low priority. Now that I'm here, it is higher priority, but it is not done yet. I have been a lab monkey for a long time and I basically know what proper procedure it without reading the notes. Still, the details of procedures and such vary lab to lab and it would be best to minimize the number of assumptions I have to make. So, I have been doing the very slow procedure of painstakingly translating the procedures and safety instructions into English myself, thereby learning the specialized vocabulary needed for work. "Solution", "dilution", "control sample", "precipitate", etc. are not in the normal "Introduction to Danish" textbook. Generally, it has been mildly frustrating to have my work slowed down so badly, but mildly interesting as I can read more and more of the procedure notes.
Friday's experence was the exception. I translated only two things and it took me all day. One was a set of note on the sequencing procedure. It was an informal note on what to do with the samples and it used a bit of hard-to-translate slang. Worse yet, it didn't tell me any of the information I actually needed; concentrations and volumes and such. The other thing that I translated was a note on a vaccum pump... Only after I had wasted a rather long time on the note did I figure out that it was attempting to be "cute"... it used no proper names for anything, it was ungrammatical, and it contained several spelling mistakes.
Instead of saying "When the freeze-trap builds up frost, the pump will become noisy, and you should knock the frost off the sides of the freeze-trap", it said "As the lil' blue dwarf grows hair, he'll start snoring and sniffing. Play a macarena to shave him."
After hours with a big-ass dictionary painstakingly translating something I thought might contain important information for the use of the vacuum manifold, well, let's just say I failed to find the message very cute. I was, in fact, feeling a wee bit homocidal.
Sigh. These little frustrations will come up and they will pass.

Topic two - hiking with friends, maybe. I will have some friends and family visiting here, but all the Danes tell me that the hiking around here is pretty much just walking along farm roads, with no real chance to be in much that may be considered wilderness. When I get back to the US, I will be near(-ish) mountains and not too far from grad-school friends who may be interested in hiking. It will be nice to be in North Carolina since, if I'm lucky and depending on the weather, I may be able to get in a bit of hiking during fall '05 and spring '06. The desert hikes in Utah were nice and pretty, and some of the high mountain views were superior to anything in the southeast US, but they were often dry and brown. The trails in the Blue Mountains are lush. Hiking lush wilderness with friends will be nice if we can make it happen.

Topic three - hanging out with friends. This is just sort of my thoughts on something that several friends have brought up. Lots of us rememeber a really tight fun crowd that we used to hang out with, in either college or grad school, but now miles and time have put those people out of our immediate local circle of friends. It is rare to find a full circle of friends of the sort who inspire and involve themselves in great conversations these days.
If you think of it, the big late night philisophical questions occur in college and almost never occur after college. You have a combination of the right people, a selecting environment (lots of people of similar intellectual power brought together), and the right time (young adults still working out the rules of life and where they should go in life).
The conversations in grad school were also great, but the topics were often intellectual but not the big philisophical questions. There, you have the combination of the right people and a selecting environment, but they are at a different stage in life and have mostly moved past the philisophical searching stage.
For people where we are at now, it is very hard to have all the elements in place. Finding the right people is hard, the workplace is much less of the necessary selecting environment, and most people are at a time in life where many distractions vie for attention. Some of these distractions are things that should take priority as well - kids. Most of us are not Pondering with a capitol P, because we have both already done most of our Pondering and we are now distracted by thinking about big questions like 'why is Sue hitting other children in kindergarden?' This is not a bad thing; it is just a fact of the place in life most of our peers now inhabit.
So, unfortunately, it will take a lot of luck and effort to find a circle of people who are intellectually stimulating, interesting in compatable activities, and the sort to be putting in the extra brain-power/will-power to be Aware and learning things that will be interesting to discuss with the rest of the circle.
It's not impossible to find; just hard. One more goodreason to stay in touch with old friends who are the "right" sort.

050407 København, Danmark
For phone calls to the US, the 6-9 hr time difference is a real killer. Most weekdays, I'm commuting or at work from 11pm-2am US time until about 10am-1pm US time. By the time folks in the US are getting off work, it is very late at night for me.
The best bet for phone calls is going to be a weekend; in the afternoon/evening for me in DK, which will be the morning/early afternoon for you in the US.

050406 København, Danmark
I finally figured out that they have been advertising the heck out of the Hans Christian Anderson 200 year anniversary...
I didn't recognize that fact because they have been advertising it with gigantic posters starring some sort of ugly purple muppet bursting out of an egg. What this has to do with Hans Christian Anderson is beyond me, but I finally asked someone about why there were ugly purple muppet posters everywhere and they esplained that it was somehow about the Hans Christian Anderson 200 year anniversary bash. They didn't know why an ugly purple muppet was chosen either.

050405 København, Danmark
This evening I was planning on doing my taxes. Instead, I have spent *way* too long in figuring out how to write something in html that most of you will not be able to read... Is this (林安石) even shown as characters on your screen? For a lot of you, I'm betting that only blocks or question marks were shown. Oh well. Time for taxes.

050402 København, Danmark
Firewalls at work and a lack of internet access at home are limiting my ability to update this page often. København has provided free wireless access in a whole lot of the public squares. It will be really nice in a month or two, but until it warms up a bit more, sitting outside for any extended period is just not very pleasant. Walking is fine, but it is too cold to be holding still.

050327 København, Danmark
It is easter sunday and I feel like I have really settled in here. This past few days I have had the opportunity to wander around København and get to know the city pretty well. I had Thursday and Friday off from work. Actually there were things I wanted to do at work, but I have a visitor's badge that has not yet been keyed into the security system, so I literally can not get in the front door without someone there to let me in. So, I had to take the time off. Poor me. ;) Anyway, I spent my time touring around the city, putting in about six to seven hours of walking each day. I could have hopped the train or bus, but you see more on foot and I was able to link up a series of parks and gardens for the main part of the path, walking from my apartment into city center. I have not yet entered any of the numerous museaums, concentrating on seeing all the sights the public streets have to offer. I figure I'll save the museaums for when people visit.
Anyway, while I was wandering around, I did what I usually do, or at least have done since I have no longer been a totally impoverished student; supported the street musicians. I like the free music you sometimes can hear in big city streets and large public pedestrian areas. Of course, I chose to support the music I like. The guys in Denmark playing Italian restaurant music on acordian get nothing. However, when I ran across the guy playing medaeval and norse traditional music on proper period instruments, I not only tossed a few coins, in his hat, but I bought one of his CDs. I did the same for the guy who had hauled an upright piano on wheels into the pedestrian-only streets. This guy was *good*, playing original piano solo music that was reminicient of George Winston, only with some Soul and Blues influence. When I was in Davis, CA, USA, I bought a harp music album from the guy who would play occasionally at the farmer's market there. I like music a lot, but I'm unlikely to pick up an instrument myself - I have found my proper place in the sceme of music; the role of supporter, fan, and audience member, rather than music maker.

050323 København, Danmark
Language lesson notes - For email sign-offs, there are two choices, på Dansk (in Danish). There is the less formal, more personal form - Kærlig hilsen (abbreviated as Kh). This translates to something like "Affectionate greetings". Then there is the more formal and more common form - Med venlig hilsen (abbreviated as Mvh). This translates to soemthing like "With friendly greetings".
Enough with language lessons you find far less useful than I'm finding them. Time for random news bits.
I took myself out to eat for the first time since arriving one week ago. The Amokka is a cafe and restauraunt a short walk away from my apartment. It is very nice. The interior looks like a standard cafe, but the food is excellent, with true gourmet restauraunt presentation. Little grace notes, like the designs drawn in the foam of their cappuchinos, make it a very enjoyable dining experience. I think I'll take people to dinner at the Amokka when they visit.

050319 København, Danmark
So, my arrival was 2 pm Wednesday, after a 15 hr plane ride and not sleeping for the last 23 hours. A coworker was kind enough to pick me up at the airport and give me a quick car tour of Copenhagen (København) before dropping me off at the nice little fully furnished apartment, which my work had arranged for me. The apartment is in a good section of København called Østerbro, near Nordhavn.
I then went grocery shopping. My coworker had offered to take me shopping, but I wanted to learn the area better by walking the streets and neighborhoods. Also, I needed to do something physical (walking) to pass the time until it was late enough to go to sleep or else I would fall asleep on the couch at much too early an hour.
The apartment is quite nice. Unfortunately, it has a glass-topped coffee table as part of the furnishings. I say 'unfortunately', because, while the coffee table is quite fashionable, I have never owned a glass-topped table before and so I have done quite a lot of damage to my shins as I maneuver around the living room without paying sufficient attention to the near-invisible edge of the table.
The next two days, Thursday and Friday, were spent with getting up at 6 AM, puttering about the apartment putting things away, and then walking over to Nordhavn station to catch the train up to Bagsværd to arrive at work by ~8:30. The working days were spent with orientation sessions and briefings on a pile of information. As usual, starting at a new place results in a massive amount of new information to assimilate all at once. Much like when I first started at Davis, I'm tired at the end of each day from the effort to take in and learn everything ASAP. I am darn lucky to be working on the same general project as I was in Davis, which makes getting up and running much easier.
Compared to Davis, København is freezing and grey. I count myself fortunate to have grown up in Rochester, NY, home of plenty of grey, crappy weather. Because of that, I can look at the cold, grey, gloomy skies of København and think to myself "looks like home" rather than perhaps having a Californian's natural inclination towards depression when faced with the same circumstance. The weather is improving, though. On Friday, while riding the train home from work, I saw a tiny slice of blue sky way out over the sea. Perhaps we will be able to see the sky some this weekend.
Update: I guessed right and Saturday was clear skied and sunny... and colder than a witch's tit. I took two steps outside in the morning and then turned around and went back in to put on two more layers of clothing before setting out again. I thought I was dressed warmly before, but the extra fleece pullover and sweater were needed for my walk about the city. A bank's information sign read -4°C, later in the morning, but I'm not sure how cold it was a few hours earlier when I went out. I'm glad I brought my long underwear and sweaters for danish spring.

050314 On the plane over Greenland
The outside temperature is -65°F. Man, that is cold. Yeah, we are far north over glaciers, and over 3,000 feet up, but that is still shockingly cold. As I think of it, I am currently in "travel world", that odd, crowded, insulated, multilingual space. I like travel-world.

Page Last Modified: 2006 04 21, 08:25:10

 

 

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