Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 18:23:06 +0100
Subject: "The Periodic Adventures and the Adventurous Periodical of Marleigh," Issue 2

Hi All,

Figure it's time for another of these self-indulgent emails.  Not much
happened, the adjusting process continues.  The sky is blue for the
first time since I got here.  I hear all the snow went to Boston (ha
ha!)

It turns out semester break lasts until April.  I think Michael and
Sabine are staying home for most of that time.  Susanne started working
at the hospital Monday (she's a medical student).  I hadn't seen her for
a while before that.  Was starting to think all the roommates had been
abducted by aliens.

I had dinner the other day with a guy named Ivan who was from the local
branch of IASTE, an internship organization.   They provide social
activites and trips for foreign interns, so I thought I would contact
them.  Sadly, I seem to be the only foreign intern in Ulm at the moment,
so there won't be any trips or anything for a few months.  He mentioned
that he often has a cooking group later in the term with many of the
foreigners he goes to school with, and I was welcome to join it when it
happened.  I'm looking forward to that.

We had a very nice dinner at a salad bar (no really, it was a bar that
served beer and salads.  I found it an odd concept, but the food was
good.)  Ivan is Croatian, even though his family has lived in Germany
since his grandfather immigrated.  He was born and raised in Ulm, though
goes back to Croatia often.  He speaks excellent English (even noticed
my midwestern accent!), and we talked for two and a half hours,
comparing Croatia, Germany, and the US while discussing stereotypes,
sports, school, drug use, politics, national identity (he says he
doesn't feel like a German, and wouldn't want to be a German citizen),
and other random things.  It was way cool to be able to have an in depth
conversation with someone, especially someone with such an interesting
background.  My German's good enough for most things, but not for
debates or long discussions.  I've been missing that.

The big thing was that I saw a Kurdish demonstration downtown last
Thursday (If you don't know who the Kurds are or why they're
demonstrating, get thee to CNN or something, you self-centered
American!  It's a big deal in Europe just now.  Look up Abdullah
Ocalan)  Happily, it was a peaceful demonstration.  They just walked
down the street, shouting slogans in unison which I couldn't
understand.  There were a lot of police around.  The police weren't
needed, though, the Kurds seemed quite determined not to do anything
wrong.  Anyway, I was watching them march down the street, when I noticed
my bus pulling in on the other side of the street.  I would have just
let the demonstration pass and crossed afterwards, but it was cold and I
didn't want to miss my bus, so I waited for a gap in the crowd to dash
through.  As I was crossing, the next Kurd in line saw me.  Not only did
he stop and wait for me to cross, but he held out his arms to stop his
friends as well.  I thought that was rather chivalrous.

German word of the day:
geimpft = inoculated

This is a German expression which I heard yesterday.  I was in a meeting
with Richard and Ralf at work.  We were brainstorming about a user
interface for a project.  They needed new ideas by the next morning,
which is probably why they had me there.  In a few hours, they tried to
explain the history and objective of the project, as well as their
reasoning behind all their proposals.  At the end, Richard said I was
"mit Ideen geimpft."  I had no idea what he was talking about, except
that it translated to "[verbed] with ideas."  Richard explained that
it's an idiom, meaning that you're injected with a small amount of
ideas, which will then grow into bigger and better ones.  A trip to the
dictionary showed that geimpft means "vaccinated" or "inoculated."  To
my mind, getting vaccinated with ideas means that I've been given a few
small ideas for my body to reject, then I'll never get ideas again.  Not
a good omen.  I, in return, taught them another idiom, "brain fried." 
They took the hint and let me go home after that.

I should probably mention that I am much happier with work these days. 
Richard gave me a book to read (in English) to give me some background
on the group's research.  Then there was the meeting yesterday where we
talked about the project.  The project is to design a user interface
which would be used by everyone working on the same project, not
necessarily in the same country.  It's supposed to make working together
easy, as well as promote "group awareness."  Group awareness is an
ill-defined thing which the project manager, Johannes, thinks is most
important.  Ralf had pitched this one idea to him earlier which I
thought dealt with all the issues quite elegantly, but apparantly didn't
promote enough group awareness.  He wanted something bigger.  I pointed
out to Richard and Ralf that there will be no group awareness if the
worker refuses to use the interface we design because it's too big, and
that I thought Johannes was confused.  Ralf thought this was really
funny, and refered to Johannes as "the confused person" for the rest of
the meeting.  I think I endeared myself to Ralf for life with that.  

Anyway, the end of this story goes that I went to the meeting this
morning with Richard and Ralf.  The confused Johannes bailed and sent
someone else, who turned out to be reasonable.  During the course of the
meeting, I had a neat idea for a compromise on how to promote group
awareness without annoying the people who are just trying to get work
done.  The group liked it so much they gave it a buzzword: "active
wallpaper."  Don't know if it'll come to anything, but I feel I earned
my wages this week.

Honor and Glory...
	to my grandparents, Donna, and Mike P., for sending me
	   neat stuff in the mail
	to Sam Hoolihan and Joung-Mo, for letting me copy music
	   from their computers 
Dishonor and Notoriety...
	to my net connection at work, for spontaneously crashing every
	   few hours
	to the city building, for always being out of bus maps

Yup, that's about it.

Tschuess!  
(tscheuss = bye, pronounced like "choose" but with a hard s)

Marleigh