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During my efforts to understand the ridiculous language these Germans speak, I discovered something sort of interesting: The English word “snow” contains the word “no” in it. That’s often how I feel about snow—NOOOOO!!!!!!
As it turns out, the German word for snow is “Schnee.” The Germans also have a word “ne” which means “no” or “nope.” So, this means Germans also insert a “no” in their word for snow: Schnee.
Do any other languages insert their word for “no” into their word for “snow”?
I got a little prod from Leo a few days ago to post something on my blog after weeks of silence. So this is it. I’m posting.
So what happened? How did I go from posting nearly daily only a few months ago to now only posing once every month? The answer is: nothing has happened. With nothing happening, I’ve had nothing of any significance to report.
Therefore, these next posts to my blog may be a little less significant than most. Fragments of thoughts, funny notions, and other miscellanea. So here’s the first one:
Snow—Part 1
When I decided to make the move to Germany, I was definitely wary of potentially brutal winters. Though I just came from Southern California, I have experienced my share of winters before. Growing up in Idaho, the snow plows would create mountains of snow over twice my height out in front of our house. Tons of fun. Climb, slide, repeat. I used to wear snow pants to school and would wear holes in the knees from sliding around on the snow at recess.
In Denver, there was plenty of snow as well. My first year in Denver, it snowed so hard on my birthday that the schools were closed. Talk about an awesome birthday! There were many other school delays and closures throughout the years from the snow, and I also remember the headaches of scraping snow off my car and even a few occasions where my car got stuck in deep drifts on the road.
I remember power-outages all over the city caused by heavy snow building up on trees. The weight of the snow would break the branches which would then fall on the power lines. I would be working the graveyard shift at the copy shop when everything would go dead and I would just be sitting there in the dark waiting for the utilities to be fixed. Being that the copy shop was open 24 hours, I couldn’t even leave since I didn’t have a key to the place!
With all these memories in mind, I then extrapolated what things in Berlin would be like. I took my Idaho experiences and moved them 700 miles north. I shuddered in fear.
I’m very pleased to report, however, that my first winter in Berlin was astonishingly mild and short-lived (knock on wood). The way I see it, we only had snow once here this year. Yes, there were multiple occasions where snow fell from the sky, but it only built-up on the ground once from around the end of November until the start of January. “Fortunately” for me, this is also when I was stuck at home with my broken toe. As a result, I actually missed a lot of snow-ridden commutes to and from work. I would just sit on my couch with my foot propped up as I stared out into the white. Of course, the few times I had to go to the doctor to have my toe checked, I had to do it in the snow. Waddling through the snow with a destroyed toe was no fun.
But since shortly after New Year’s, the snow has melted away and has not returned. The temperatures are still cold here which has caused the pond out front to freeze again (this second time was great because it froze without any snow cover), but things are definitely improving now. The days are getting noticeably longer. A few months ago, it was dark by 4:30PM. That made the work-day feel really long since I still had 3.5 hours to go in the dark. Now, it’s still light at 6PM which has made the end-of-day sneak up on me a few times. Soon, it will be light until 10:30PM! That’s going to be a super-awesome summer here in Europe!
There is still one fact, though, that gives me pause: My birthday is April 3rd. If Denver got pounded hard enough to close the schools on my birthday, then there are still 4 weeks left where a storm could still clobber us here.
To all of my friends and family all over the world: I send you much love and gratitude from Berlin on this Christmas Day!
And now that I have decent bandwidth, I can share the following video with you. I saw this strange phenomenon occurring on the pond outside one morning. As you’ll see, there appear to be white ghostly formations moving across the surface of the pond. While I’m not 100% sure, I believe what is occurring is that a slight gust of wind would come along and freeze a very thin layer of water on the surface of the pond. According to the weather report at the time, it was 0?C at the time and you can see that there are still many frozen section remaining on the pond. If the water was right on the threshold between liquid and frozen, it would explain what’s going on here. When you watch this, be patient as the first sweep of freezing doesn’t occur for about 20 seconds. At one point, I will zoom in to an area where frozen water meets liquid water. There is a bizarre motion occurring there that sort of looks like white fire. Very cool!
GhostPool-H.264 300Kbps Streaming
I have also uploaded a higher quality 640×480 version in .m4v format for iPod/iPhone which can be found by clicking here.
After nearly two weeks of being stuck at home, I’ve finally been given a clean bill of health and can return to work starting on Monday. The doctor says that it will probably still be a few more weeks before my toe is in tip-top shape again, but it’s at least healed to a point where I no longer need any follow-up appointments and the tape on my foot has been removed.
I’m quite happy about the de-taping of my foot since one of the consequences of having a taped foot was that I could not get it wet. Doing so would have ruined the adhesive on the tape and it would have all fallen apart. This limitation made bathing a lot more complicated the last weeks and provided me with an opportunity to use some bathroom features that I normally would have not.
The first attempt at bathing was performed by taking a bath–in the tub. Until moving to this new apartment, this was not an option. The old apartment simply had a shower stall that was nothing more than a section of the bathroom floor set down about half an inch from the rest of the floor. Combined with a floor drain and a shower curtain, it created a stall that was quite easy to get in and out of. Now, with a full tub, I’m having to step in and out and, surprisingly, I have to step up to get in and down to get out. I nearly fell over the first time I tried this since I expected the bathroom floor to be closer to my foot than it was. Nevertheless, the bathtub itself works great–the drain seems to seal properly and the water stayed warm for a satisfying amount of time.
There is a ledge at the foot of the bathtub and that’s where my left foot went while I tried to have my bath. This ledge is also where my foot went when attempting showers. By propping my foot up on this ledge, it kept water from running down my leg and soaking the tape. Another thing that helped was another European bath-tool: the hand-held shower nozzle. The old apartment had one of these, but it also had a wall mount so I was able to set it up at the top and use it like a “regular” American shower. In my current condition, though, it was actually helpful to use the hand-nozzle to direct water away from my foot. However, the water pressure sucks. I don’t know if that’s because I’m on a higher floor or if the pipes are sort of clogged, but the shower trickles more than it sprays, and the temperature can vary from cold to skin-peeling-hot within a second. Gotta be careful.
I’m very much looking forward to my shower tomorrow when I can do it normally: on two feet under the big shower head. Though I have them available, I’m not a fan of the bath or the hand-held shower–I know that now. I’m also looking forward to getting out of this place! In the last two weeks, I’ve only ventured out for two doctor’s appointments, a few trips to the corner grocery store, and a taxi ride to and from the old apartment so I could pick up my dirty laundry. Staying off the foot was required, I guess, but I’m now actually looking forward to getting out in the snow!
If all goes well, I hope to pick up a few rugs for this place this weekend. This place is carpeted, but it’s been used and there are some dirty areas that would be nice to cover up. I think the rugs will also add to the whole look of the place–then I’ll just need something for the blank areas on my walls. The exciting news, though, is that I will be getting proper Internet installed here on Monday which will bring me back into the online world. This means I’ll be able to upload the pictures of this place that I know you’ve all been dying to see. I should also be able to catch up on a few weeks of The Big Bang Theory that I haven’t seen. Gosh, I wonder if I’ll even remember how to use the Internet once it’s available. I’ve been dealing with this epically-slow USB adapter from Vodafone that I think I’ve learned to limp along on the Net, too. It’s time to learn to walk (and run) again!
With my broken toe keeping me home this last week, I decided to try getting some better sound happening in this apartment: I broke out the M-Audio CX5 monitors. In visualizing the setup of my new apartment, I figured I would be putting the studio in the corner farthest from the couch. There’s a lot of space there and the speakers would be able to fire out into the room instead of reflecting off walls to my sides. Since I’d managed to get the big desk setup before injuring myself, I placed the speakers on there, connected them to a little Behringer mixer, and hooked up my iPhone to hear the results.
Crap.
Actually, I’m not sure if “crap” is an appropriate term here. How about “Holy crap this sounds terrible!” That’s more of what I was thinking. For a musician living in an apartment, this place is sort of a blessing and a curse, and it’s all due to the pure concrete walls, floor, and ceiling surrounding me.
The good: Being that the walls are concrete, it’s very hard for sound to leak through the walls and annoy my neighbors. And I’m not just talking about treble frequencies, but bass frequencies as well. Bass is often the hardest thing to control in an apartment building. The bass can pass through the walls, run along floor joists, and end up in many apartments even at quiet volumes. This usually puts the nix on any sort of quality home entertainment center (5-channel surround with subwoofer) and definitely puts the kibosh on a music studio.
The bad: Being that the walls are concrete, it’s very hard for the sound to leak through the walls and annoy my neighbors, thus the sound is reflected back into my room where it creates massive reverberations with a surprisingly long decay time. When any sort of bass frequency is released in this room, it bounces around all over the place at a specific pitch–it sounds like my head is inside of a bass drum shell. The built-up frequencies are so strong, in fact, that I cannot hear the pitch of the bass that’s coming out of my speakers. It’s completely gone. Without a doubt, this is the absolute worst place I’ve ever tried setting up a pair of monitors.
Something must be done about these reverberations or I’ll need to buy an amazing set of headphones. Normally, a person would resort to mounting acoustic foam on the walls to minimize the reflections. Indeed, this will help a bit in my case, but it will only dampen the high-frequency reverberations (which are definitely bad in here). But the foam won’t do squat for the bass frequencies. Because the bass frequencies are so long and so strong, they’re the hardest to control. To wrestle them into submission usually requires serious physical reworking of the room including finely-tuned bass traps (aka huge hollow boxes) positioned in key, but not necessarily convenient, locations throughout the room.
I obviously want to avoid installing bass traps in my living room, so I’ve had another idea: The Auralex MAX-Wall. This is a system of broadband absorption panels that can be set up on stands to create a temporary sound booth. There is a system that would create 4 walls 5 feet high and 4 feet wide each that could then be arranged to separate my studio workspace from the rest of the living room. If I also put foam padding on the walls in that corner of the room, I may be able to create a fairly dead sound-pocket within the living room where I can work. The MAX-Wall would attenuate some bass on its way out into the living room and it would attenuate the reverb from the living room that may try passing back through the wall again. Double-attenuation of bass coupled with massive high-frequency damping may solve the problem.
Admittedly, this solution would not be particularly sexy. This living room is nice right now because it feels so open. Setting up this wall will shrink the size of the room quite a bit. And, unless I missed something on their website, Auralex doesn’t make this MAX-Wall in light colors. They only seem to have dark colors like charcoal gray, deep purple, or burgundy which would really make the room seem smaller.
So it seems I’m stuck between concrete and a MAX-Wall. What should I do here? Should I not even try this and basically give up on having a proper studio at my place? Sure, I can still work on headphones but, as any sound engineer will tell you, achieving a great mix is really hard to do on headphones due to a loss of certain psycho-acoustic characteristics inherent with speakers in a room. Relative volumes get harder to judge, the stereo field gets exaggerated, and even bass pitches can be transposed.
If I do go this wall route, it won’t be cheap, so I welcome any suggestions from anyone who may be reading this. What do you do when you’re stuck inside a concrete room?
The snow here in Berlin is now real. The temperature has dropped below freezing and is staying there. Winter weather is officially upon this place and, damn, it’s cold. Within a matter of days, things went from “This isn’t that bad, is it?” to “Holy Hell!” as can be seen in the images below:
Now that we’ve dropped below the freezing point of water, I’ve decided to switch my iPhone Weather app into Celsius. As a result, it’s been -8 or colder for the last three days and may not get above zero until the end of the weekend. And it’s supposed to continue snowing through the weekend.
As a result, I’m very happy about last weekend’s decision to make the mass-purchase of furniture from IKEA. Sure, it was cold then, but it wasn’t snowing, windy, and below freezing like it is now. Looks like I made my move just in the nick of time.
Even with it being sub-zero outside, the apartment is nice and toasty. That certainly has something to do with these kick-ass double-paned windows, but may also be a result of the mostly-concrete construction of this place. All the walls here are concrete (which creates wild echoes in the rooms–I’m gonna have to do something to tone them down if I ever hope of making any music here on speakers) and there are spots on the floor that feel warm. I don’t know what is being routed through that spot–maybe it’s the radiator line going to the bathroom–but Zoey discovered it and it’s one of her favorite places to loll about.
As I look outside down at all the cars, I’m reminded again of the benefit of not needing one. The roads are packed with snow and I can see all the snow-scraping that has to take place before a car can be driven. It reminds me of Colorado for sure. My only hope is that, like Colorado, this may all melt away within the next couple of days!
Gah! My hopes for another “Yahoo! Weather Fail” have been dashed. It’s finally here: snow. I’ve gone years without it, but I can no longer dodge the bullet.
Truth be told, this isn’t anything to worry about just yet. It’s technically snowing (there are white flaky things falling from the sky) but it’s practically raining (the snow melts the moment it hits anything so it’s merely the equivalent of rain). It’s not cold enough for anything to freeze yet and the snow didn’t even add a second to my walk to work. In fact, it’s not even snowing anymore (it’s 1PM here).
I did get to try out my new boots today and they feel very comfortable, even though it will take a little time to break them in so the ankle bends a little more easily. I brought my crazy hat and gloves with me, too, just in case the snow starts coming down by the time I’m to walk home.
Yahoo! has also updated their forecast to show snow on Saturday. As you all saw in my previous post, they can’t seem to make up their minds about this one. Friday and Sunday are still listed as sunny days which is nice, but it could be a big pain-in-the-butt if it’s snowing Saturday because that’s the day I want to do my big furniture purchase at IKEA. That would be the day for moving furniture in and out of places and cold weather and precipitation won’t help.
So it’s not feeling like full-on winter yet, but maybe it’s still time to pick up some Glühwein and get cozy.
Weird. After the incident reported last week where the recurring alarms in the iPhone started going off an hour later, the problem appears to have now fixed itself. The problem started when Europe went off Daylight Savings Time. This year, Europe did it a week before the US. During that time, any alarm that was set for 8AM would actually go off at 9AM. Thanks to all the construction happening at my apartment building, I did not miss work as a result of this iOS glitch.
This morning, the alarm I had set for 8AM actually went off at 8AM. And what really chaps my ass is that there was no construction to be heard this morning. The workers have evidently moved enough floors away from me so I don’t hear them, or they’re on the other side of the building. So I should have been able to sleep peacefully until 9AM if it wasn’t for the iOS non-glitch. I thought I’d have to wait for the next iOS update (which I am still desperately awaiting) in order to revert to my normal alarms, but it looks like iOS is internally calibrated to the US calendar. The glitch must have resulted from a cheap fix Apple did for the week when the rest of the world was out-of-sync with America.
Therefore, I’m guessing nobody in the US actually experienced this issue themselves. I would assume that the system worked fine and everyone thinks I’m nuts. Sorry if I got you all worked up for nothing and I seriously apologize to anyone who set their alarms an hour earlier anticipating this problem. If you did, you can be happy knowing that I was awakened an hour early today as well. Karma?
The whole ordeal of installing new windows at the apartment building has given me a number of headaches. Not only did it require me to relocate myself to another apartment in the building last week (waking up at an unholy hour to get the key), but I’ve been startled awake each day with the sounds of saws, hammers, drills, and other implements of destruction wreaking havoc on the walls. No sleeping in these days.
But Apple really wants to help solve that problem. They obviously feel I should be sleeping in more. And for those of you who use your iPhone as an alarm clock, beware that you may be sleeping in, too, very soon. While I don’t know if it will happen in the US, everyone here at the office has reported the same issue: all recurring alarms are offset by one hour after the switch back to normal time (now that Daylight Savings is over here). This is evidently a widespread bug in iOS 4.1. While the alarm clearly shows that it should go off at 9AM, it won’t actually go off until 10AM now.
Of course, I did not know this on Monday. Because you can set the iPhone alarms to only go off on certain days (weekdays in my case), I didn’t know of this issue on Sunday when the clocks were shifted back an hour. It wasn’t until Monday morning when I was woken up by the drills that, after 20 minutes of listening to the noise, I got a funny feeling. Why haven’t I heard an alarm at all by this point? When I checked my phone, I was startled to see the real time. Thankfully, I wasn’t late to work, and I attempted to “fix” the problem by deleting the original alarms and adding them back in (thinking this may re-initialize all the variables used, thus making it go off at the right time). Tuesday morning was the same story–no alarms, but the drills woke me up in time.
So Wednesday morning, I finally got it right: all my recurring alarms are now set an hour early. To wake up at 8:45 AM, the alarm is set for 7:45 AM. Keep this in mind this coming Sunday night as you may fall victim to this same issue on Monday morning!
It’s Sunday and I enjoyed my second opportunity in a row to sleep in a bit. Yes, it’s true that I don’t have to be at work until 10:00 which some of you may think means I sleep in every day. All things being relative, I guess I do. But these last few weeks have not seen me sleeping in comfortable silence until 9:00 due to the construction that’s been taking place here. It’s been going on all month and even displaced me from my apartment last week. But even when the construction is happening elsewhere in the building, it never fails to wake me up. The drills and cutters start at about 7:30 and the super-thick walls that I praised for their insulative qualities work as acoustic super-conductors once the powertools start to cut in. The vibrations find their way up through the floor, through my pillow, and into my head.
It’s weird because I will wake up when the drilling starts and it will bother me for about 30 minutes. My mind must get used to it because I start dozing off again in spite of all the ruckus. Soon, my alarm is going off and I don’t want to wake up!
There is going to be a new factor at play tomorrow that may help my wake-up situation: Daylight Saving Time is now over. Sure, it was over at 2:00 this morning but, being a Sunday in a town where stores aren’t even open, it has gone by fairly unnoticed.
But tomorrow, the drills should be starting an hour later in relation to the Sun, so maybe I’ll actually feel like getting up. But I am dreading the evening at work where there will still be over two hours left to go by the time it’s dark out. That may make those last hours stretch on forever. It’s already dark at 5:30 and the days may still be getting shorter!
As it has in the past, the end of Daylight Savings really signifies the beginning of winter for me. I know winter doesn’t officially begin until December, but this is more of a psychological thing. Adding an hour to the clock creates a much more profound shift to my life but, strangely, the effect wasn’t as pronounced in Southern California. Sure, I would be driving home in complete darkness after the shift, but the air didn’t feel as different. Here in Berlin, as it was in Colorado, it now feels colder. Even from the comfort of my apartment window, it looks colder outside.
Time to break out the sweaters and the hot chocolate.
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