randomosity

Sleep Tips

Local Her­oes?

Naru Shi­ode from the Uni­ver­sity at Buf­falo gave a spell­bind­ing present­a­tion on spatial-temporal ana­lysis at the Centre for Spa­tial Ana­lysis (CSpA) on Fri­day. Shi­ode is trained as archi­tect and urban plan­ner and finds him­self in the Geo­graphy depart­ment at Buf­falo. He has been asso­ci­ated with pro­jects such as Digital Egypt and the Vir­tual Ryoanji pro­jects explor­ing ancient his­tor­ical recon­struc­tion as well as time-based recre­morph­ing. His cur­rent pro­ject is the 3D Buf­falo pro­ject which allows a user to inter­act via a chro­no­slider that trig­gers time points for each build­ing within a multi-block area sur­round­ing down­town Buf­falo. This pro­ject is only in its early stages, but the poten­tial for his­tor­ical ana­lysis is tre­mend­ously prom­ising.

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Nam­ing Names

Star­bucks Challenge

Dutch Tulip Island

Was out to the kino to catch some­thing that I could claim as some degree of expos­ure to the Ger­man media scene. The red­light dis­trict prob­ably could have provided some spe­cial, ;-) exper­i­ences, but went the other way. What are the kids watch­ing — some­thing Ger­man only. I found ‘Lissi und der wilde kaiser. It advert­ises itself as a par­odie of the clas­sic ‘Sissi’. I can only say that it takes ser­i­ous license. As it turns out, it’s aimed at a little more mature audi­ence than the nor­mal anim­ated show goer. I booked early. Cir­cum­stances. And with Ger­man effi­ciency had an assigned aisle and seat. Showed up close to time as I recalled that there is a suf­fi­cient period in advance with com­mer­cials, not trail­ers. Inside there’s three people in a 150 per­son theatre. My seat if right beside them. Another couple girls 13–15 come in and sit on the oth­er­side of my 13–15 year old male friends.
Two adults come in. They are the seats in front of my col­leagues. I can see that there is a sys­tem in the seat assign­ment process…but it sucks. Its starts from best seat and starts assign­ing in all dir­ec­tions. so you get 15 people all sit­ting right adja­cent to one another des­pite 100 extra seats. And my Ger­man cimen­a­go­ers just went with it.
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One thing that really strikes me and I’m not sure I was as con­scious of it before was that Eng­lish holds a strange place here. There is the unique fas­cin­a­tion with cer­tain words that seem totem and sym­bolic rather than lit­eral. In many cases, the words chosen have no con­text in Eng­lish (don’t make sense), its almost as if they are per­ceived as more res­on­ant when writ­ten in Eng­lish. You see descript­ive terms on cloth­ing for example that are solid such as ski­ing on a jacket. Oth­er­wise there are of course many words that may even have ori­gin­ated from Ger­man roots and are now bor­rowed back from the Eng­lish. These have formed many of the words I have chosen to con­trib­ute to Geof­frey Rockwell’s Dic­tion­ary of Words in the Wild.

Well, here I sit at the Flughaf­fen Frank­furt. Its about 8am, and we got in a little ahead of sched­ule at 6:45am. No sleep, but then I decided that that would be best in the end and forewent the sch­laf­fendrage (sic). Feel a wee bit fatigued, but not too bad yet. The 777 is a pretty sweet ride. The enter­tain­ment sys­tem has all the choices you could want for any length of flight. Seat pitch about the same, but it was one bumpy ride most of the way. Its just light­en­ing up in FRA and I have a rather lengthy lay­over. Tried to move to an earlier flight as there are Lufthansa flights for München every hour, but they tell me that with my fare, I would have to pay a hefty sur­charge. Not quite sure where the air­line eco­nomy is in that, but alas. We’ll just kick back for a bit and wait it out.
Frank­furt always seems (and is abso­lutely) removed from nation­al­ity. Every­one is on their way some­where or in between places. Its has that tran­si­ent feel­ing about it.
Saw the final Pir­ates of the Carib­bean, which was amus­ing then watched a string of sit­coms, includ­ing a Brit­ish one about pale­on­to­lo­gists deal­ing with dino­saurs in mod­ern day Eng­land and a US one called 10 items of Less which seemed quite good as well. A couple Office epis­odes, a Eureka and ‘Til death. All good.
Eng­lish is spoken in the air­port here more than Ger­man it seems, but then that seems to be the memory for here. About an hours walk to get where I am in the ter­minal. We shall see what we find in München.
No wire­less in the ter­minal that I can find.

8 Laptops in one cof­fee shop…every one a Mac.