Christmas Gummibears

of COURSE Haribo would make its bears with Christmas hats for the holidays.....

Greetings from the Weinachtsbären!

Cupcake Madness

o the cupcake craze has mostly passed - at least in the USA...it's only beginning here in Germany.

I am looking forward to getting a tasty treat at Billy's Bakery in New York after Christmas, but I'm more amused now by the interesting colors and shapes. Baked by Melissa has an incredibly fun site and concept. You can order cupcakes from the wide selection, or create your own (for huge orders).

I know green cupcakes are kindaweird, but I like The Green Lantern...mint and chocolate....yummy!

 

and the very appropriately named NomsCookie

And I bet Cookie Monster would love this one!

  Her cupcake gallery currently has over 3,000 variations for your drooling pleasure, but the most fun part is the Create Your Own Cupcake Customizer. You choose your cake, frosting, color, topping, and stuffing...then can load it in the gallery for all to see.

It's a pretty addictive site.

Here's one I made for Herr J, inspired by one of his favorite (childhood) foods

 

Enjoy!

via Must Have Cute

Can't-Miss German Childrens Games

Germany is the home of such great games as The Settlers of Catan, Alhambra, and Carcassonne.  In fact, they invented the genre of game known as "German-style Board Games," including these strategy games similar to Catan.  The stores' game sections are full of them here and there is even a highly prestigious annual Game of the Year award.

(btw...you can play a short version of Catan online here)

The German toy industry also is very well known for its stuffed animals (by Steif) and model cars/construction machines (Siku and others).

But for the younger kids, there are some quite interesting toys and games out there by Goliath Toys. I remember Ants in the Pants and Hungry Hungry Hippos, but they've taken the interactive part a step further. My descriptions would be so inadequate....you just have to watch the short commercials.

These are not SNL-style spoofs....they are made for real products you can buy on Amazon.de here.  

Kackel Dackel ("Pooping Dachshund")

Schweine Schwarte ("Pork Rind")

Snotty Snotter (no translation needed) 

Fliese Fliege ("Fly Tiles"??)

Easter Eggs (not chocolate... software)

Don't misunderstand:  I realize Jesus hasn't been born yet this year (Christmas is over a week away) and it sounds like I'm already trying to crucify him (Easter).  I'm not.  The term "easter egg" here refers to a hidden message or function in media that takes an undocumented trick to reveal.  The Hallelujah Chorus in an HP lab machine made me remember these, and of course they can be found on YouTube.

Here are some of the classics from the bit-heads at Microsoft:

It's old (looks really dated now) but was so neat at the time.  Microsoft Word 2.0 (released in 1990 for Windows 3.1 !) crushes the WordPerfect monster.  Yes, there actually was a time where then was a real competitor to Word.

Many easter eggs are a means for the programming team to release steam and feel like they're getting extra credit for all the hard work.  Gotta keep it hidden from the boss, though.  Internet Explorer 4.0 (released in 1997) had a basic easter egg that scrolled their names.

1997 must have been a good year for easter eggs.  In Excel 97 (a.k.a., Version 8.0), the programmers included some frame code from the Microsoft Flight Simulator!  If you fly the right direction you would see a monument with their names scrolling on it (shown in the video).  Check out the process to activate this -- it's insanely random.

Coming into the 21st century, you have to raise your game.  So the programmers releasing Excel 2000 (oddly enough, in late 1999) wrote and hid a knock-off of the classic video game Spy Hunter and paved their names on the road.  Now we're talking.  What a way to immortalize your work.  Bonus points for having to use Excel and Internet Explorer to release the surprise.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has "taken measures to eliminate undocumented features from their products" in recent years, and the easter egg harvest has been lean.  At least we have the Google pranks/hoaxes and Google Doodles (time and context changes to their corporate logo on the search page).

Interestingly, when I was a software development manager at CSC Conculting, sometimes our client partners would ask us up to put something in the program.  Of course, we never wrote an easter egg...

Man Purse Math

Herr J is still manpurse-less.

To be honest, we haven't really focused our efforts on the issue. Too many other things to do...vacation, vacation photos, job search (me), german class (again, me), enjoying the wonderful Christmas season in Germany, Christmas shopping, etc.

Though, with winter, a man purse has even greater utility. It's really cold here - cold enough that even I am choosing function over form. yes, cold has brought me insanity and I wear gloves and hats and try to wear warm, flat boots. The point being that now guys also have to carry around gloves, hats, umbrellas, and extra weather-related necessities...greatly weighing down the pockets of the man with no manpurse.

I've been keeping an eye out for good bags for Herr J. The ones I've seen and liked brought up some interesting questions:

• Should a guy have a more expensive bag than his girlfriend?
• Is it OK for a guy to have more bags than his girlfriend? (In most cases, I'm going to vote no on that one!)
• Is there some Maximum Man Purse Ratio? i.e, what's the maximum acceptable ratio of how many bags a guy has to how many his girlfriend has? Is it 1/2, 1/3, 1/4???
• In terms of contents of your bag, is it ok for the guy to have more in there than the girl? (I'd say it depends what's in there....electronic gadgets good, hair care products not so good)
• What's the minimum ratio of electronics to other goods that need to be in there to keep the bag manly?

 This is so much more complicated than we thought

Hallelujah Handels

I love this kind of stuff:  a "flash mob" sings the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah in a shopping mall food court.  Even better -- some bystanders (bysitters?) join in!  And the sound quality is excellent given the circumstances.  Thank you America... this probably never would be organized in Germany.  Wish I could have been there.

Letting the-nerd-within loose again:  a more, um, clinical version can be found in the HP 3314A Function Generator and Frequency Synthesizer.  It seems that one of the equipment's internal test functions, coded by the developing engineers, plays the Hallelujah Chorus (unfortunately monophonically, but I'll bet very accurately).  What is the 3314A?  You don't know???  I thought everyone uses a variable symmetry, phase-locking, low-distortion waveform generator!

And to wrap things up, two of the all time great "performance art" videos (not Christmas-related):

Hammer Time Mob Dance

and  Frozen Grand Central Station (from ImprovEverywhere, check out more vids on their website)

The Resort Doctor

In a previous post, I shared the challenging experience of being ill and going to a Company Doctor in Germany.  A couple of months later, while on vacation, I had a decidedly different experience going to a resort doctor on Rangali Island in the Indian Ocean.

It's about the halfway point on our holiday in the Maldives, and we had already been scuba diving six times and snorkeling just as often.  We had two dives scheduled the next morning (that were great).  After lunch we sunbathed and went into the gorgeous pool.  Later in the afternoon I went snorkeling for an hour to do some tests with Frau A's 10Bar underwater housing & her Panasonic LX3.  By this time, my ears had had enough water -- and became infected.  You've probably had swimmer's ear:  sore to the touch, swelling makes everything sound like it passes through a foot of cotton...

I was hoping to dive some more, but also wanted to have my ears back to normal before flying 4 hours to Qatar and then another 5+ back to Munich.  Luckily, the Conrad has a small clinic on site.  It makes good business sense for them.  They have 350+ employees that live and work on the island, and it's expensive and time consuming to take a water plane back to Male.  Guests can use it too.  So I stopped by.  Here's what it looks like:

In a paradise like this, you're already feeling better just walking up.  Soft, white sand paths lead almost all the way up to the front door!  The glass etched sign also communicates modernity, so you have confidence too.  Frau A noticed that the M.D.'s flip-flops outside the door were labeled "doctor" (pic below).  Cute.  And who wouldn't trust a barefoot doctor?  You, the doc, and his assistant are all barefoot inside to keep the sand out.

I had to wait about 6 minutes before the doctor saw me.  The doctor was polite, looked at my ears, made the obvious diagnosis, and immediately prescribed antibiotic ear drops, which he handed right to me.  No trip to a pharmacy.  Unfortunately, I was not allowed to swim, but Frau A did some more snorkeling and underwater photography.

Two days later, the ears weren't much better, so I visited the doc again.  This time there was a 14 minute wait (one person ahead of me).  He checked things out again, was unhappy with the progress, and handed over full antibiotic pills.  All of this at no charge!  He said it didn't make sense to mess around, especially since I was flying in 48 hours and the initial treatment didn't work as expected.  Sure enough, it worked.  He was fast, polite, and practical.

We loved the time on Rangali island, and give kudos also to great service by Conrad's on-site doctor!  Now it's back to work, and I'm gorging on vitamin C to avoid the company doctor this winter...