Switzerland doesn’t play when it comes to trains:

https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/sbb-cuts-deutsche-bahn-trains-switzerland-over-chronic-delays

If there’s nothing else, Germany can complain about Deutsche Bahn! I have a long commute to work (my employer ist sehr schlect in some ways), so I’ve spent many months playing “will it, won’t it” on RE train delays. I even had one vanish on the app after it claimed to pass through my station. Geistbahn!

The dumb part is that I started visiting Germany back in 1995. The trains ran much better. Nich so viel Störungen oder unregelmaßig dingen. Good memories only cover over so many cracks, though.

It’ll only take about 20 years of big investment to rebuild the train network after so many decades of underinvestment by conservative governments. No worries, any day now.

I kept seeing discussions about the way things generally work in Europe, the rights people have, and the cultural appreciation for people’s health and I finally said “fuck it! Let’s move to Europe”. I’d been visiting for decades off and on, so we made it permanent.

It only took three years of applying for jobs, saving, and finally getting all of our family needs in order, but we did it. If you can, give it a look.

Mülltrennung ist seht wichtig! Wir wissen das, aber die Gelbetonne ist komisch.

Unsere Wohnung hat kein nachbar jetzt. Es ist ein neues bau, und die Vermieter ist Meiter suchen. Ruhezeit ist sind die besten teil von Deutschland!

Bingo! Yeah, it’s bad there.

I had my first real sickness for time off since I moved to Germany. I had a call with a doctor, they pushed a sick note into the digital health system, and my company noted it as paid time off.

Modern civilization in a developed nation rocks.

Now if we could just get the paperwork to die down a bit… Oh, and find a way to get the trains on time!

Undeveloped societies can be like that. It’s often places that don’t have many rights for the citizens and are worse off in wealth then the pre French Revolution France. Basically peasants with smart phones given this day and age.

This was a reasonably solid week. I didn’t do enough speaking practice, but I did manage to navigate a couple of government paperwork sessions without much trouble. I’m still having difficulty with filler words, but the key words are getting better when I listen.

We’ve discovered the lexile level of the TV show WaPo Berlin (Water Police - Berlin) is very good for us at the pre-B1 level. The vocabulary is a stretch (perfect), and the speed of most interactions is pretty reasonable. We’ll be watching more of that.

I did re-read through Dragonball manga collection (3 normal books in one) books. I’m up through book 5 and I re-read them off and on to refresh the vocab. I spent time reading a few kids books, translating some 1-3 grade books, and did a couple of days taking on Der Tagesspiegel news.

I am re-reading a German learning book (A1-A2) that I finished a few months back. I’m able to read it about 60% speed with almost no word look ups. That’s huge. Having my reading speed get closer to reasonable is a huge deal.

Oh, and the Berlin Fenster news/entertainment screens on the trains are getting easier to read. I can usually get about 50% of it before it changes screens on me. If they could slow that down just a bit, I’d be very thankful.

I did manage to get partway through a call with a doctor (I was sick most of last week) in German before we switched to English. That was great!

Too bad Germany is currently not entering new people into Integration Courses for immigrants. I was hoping to find one near the almost B1 level to finish up early and get my certificate ASAP. Residency can be had in about 460 days! Lasst uns das Ziel im Auge behalten!

These are awesome. It’s good practice to learn how to build these, meet neighbors, and find out who is on the side of the community.

Shake some hands, learn some names, hear their stories. Some of these people might be holding the line next to you if things go further South and they’ll have your back if you’re a neighbor now.

Let users make decisions about what they want? That’s not how Microsoft works, at least not for a decade now. It’s their computer according to them.

Vertical spinning wheels to pick the hours suck donkey balls. WTF is up with those? You want to set it to 9 pm, so we get to spin the hour wheel up and down until we hit 9, then it always defaults to the current minute, so you get to spin it up and up and up and up until you get to 00 minutes, overshoot to 05, and then dial it back down.

There’s WAY better solutions for this available. Why use the ones invented 25 years ago?

Bingo. You’ve nailed it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus

That’s about right.

I’ve had a handful of past students have this conversation with me. I’m in “whatever floats your boat” crowd, so I basically ask what they’d like to be called and if they have any preferred pronouns. Then, I remind them I have enough trouble learning names on the first pass, but we’ll work it out after I screw up a few times (it’s just me being old brained, not malicious).

Then I make sure to say their name a few times as we wrap up to start learning whatever it is, and move into other topics. I’m not their therapist, so I’ll just be as normal as possible in the face of change. No worries, you do you and I’ll forget any old names/faces soon enough anyway once I stop using them.

How can you even fit it into a single chunk? You’ve got to set the chunk size big enough to have the room for the whole Redstone network. I made a spot with some simple logic gates (a flip flop and an xor gate for controls) and it took up a lot of volume for even something that simple.

Even just an ALU is going to be physically massive.

Brilliant.

I’d put it up there with the CPU emulator done in LaTeX.

WTF even is a Microsoft SlopC? Something that has hardware to speed up their AI deleting important files and sending your private data to hackers? I don’t think we need that fast-tracked, Windows 11 already does it well enough.

I don’t know every detail of your use cases, but my offline go to is xournal++ (xournalpp).

I use it for many of those actions. We moved to Germany and having a GUI pdf editor for signing, highlighting, redacting, pulling pages, etc has been invaluable.

My wife also uses it for her class lectures. She does math, so she uses a tablet to write on her slides (pdfs) live in class to talk through the material. Then, she saves the lecture PDF to give to students with the notes.

I’m actually both a student of history and old. I played this as a kid.

Highlight->Middle paste has been my friend for decades now. Using it from SunOS in the 90-s to now has been a great feature. It’s the quickest way to copy and paste while I’m working fast with text or data entry.

I love having both clipboards be functional. The latest rounds of tools that have stopped being as compatible with it has been no end of problems in my workflow. I’ll copy with the keyboard, highlight some text and then paste both clipboards somewhere else.

No, using the keyboard here isn’t as fast, don’t bother making that argument, especially since ctrl-c means different things in different places on Unix style systems. Left hand stays home row while the right is forced to leave for the mouse since it’s a GUI.

I’ve had to deal with many tools that don’t respect keyboard cut/paste as well. Add in that some tools like putty or git bash on windows have ctrl-ins for paste?

Panning in CAD/design is usually click and hold middle or even a two button system (freecad), so trying to take a middle click for that isn’t buying uniformity.

The copy/paste world is already fractured enough. Keep the highlight/middle click working so we can go fast. I might be a dinosaur, but I’m a fast dinosaur.

What? No way. I despise their captive scrolling stuff. Every time I get forced onto a windows system I forget that middle mouse is a weird scrolling mode and end up wandering randomly up and down pages until I realize what happened.